The NOOK's weird death-march - Gene Doucette

The NOOK's weird death-march - Gene Doucette: Brief aside, in which I explain a little bit about self-publishing distribution

There are, in the U.S., five main ebook distribution outlets for a self-published author: Amazon, NOOK, Apple, Kobo and Google Play. Each of these five have distinctive quirks that make them uniquely frustrating in their own special way, which I won’t go into now.

If publishing ‘direct’ with all of these companies, one has to acquaint oneself with five completely distinctive publishing dashboards to upload five unique-to-that-outlet files (because of format requirements and backmatter links, and oh god, I’m sorry I mentioned backmatter, that’s not worth explaining right this moment, forget I said that). Alternatively, one could go to a service like Smashwords or D2D—both companies also sell direct, but aren’t very good at it—and have them submit files to everyone else.

This sounds like a better deal, but of course the aggregator services take a cut of each sale, and there are a few other very good reasons to go direct instead that I won’t go into here other than to say some merchants don’t exactly fall over themselves to push books that aren’t direct.