How to Publish E-books for Nook Readers

Nook

The Barnes & Nobles Nook device is an Android-based e-reader device that incorporates Amazon’s pioneering E-Ink technology. The price of the device ranges from $99 for the Simple Touch reader to $249 for the Nook Color.

One difference between the Nook and the Kindle is the Nook’s “GlowLight” technology. This makes it easy for people who own a Nook to read books in the dark, something that the Kindle is completely incapable of doing.

Publishing on the Nook gives you access to millions of highly active readers. The Nook and the Kindle are often neck in neck in terms of sales. If you’re publishing your book on either the Kindle store or the iBookstore, there’s no reason not to also publish on the Nook bookstore.

Here’s how to publish your eBook to the Nook bookstore.

Step 1: Click Create an Account

Go to: http://pubit.barnesandnoble.com

In the upper right corner, click “Create an account” to begin the account creation and book creation process.

  1-Create-an-Account

Step 2: Creating Your Account

Fill out the PubIt registration form on the next page.

 2-Fill-Out-Registration

Give PubIt your contact information.

 3-Contact-Info

If you have a publisher, enter your publisher’s details.

4-Publisher-Details

Enter your bank account information. This is used to deposit your payments. You need a US-based bank account to use the Barnes & Nobles Nook bookstore.

5-Bank-Account-Information

Give PubIt your Social Security number or your Federal Tax ID number (if you’re a corporation.)

 6-Social-and-Name

Finally, give PubIt a credit card. They do this primarily to verify that you are who you say you are. They also use it as a protection mechanism, if your book refunds happened to exceed the amount of sales you make during a payment period. (This is highly unlikely.)

 7-Credit-Card

Once you hit “Submit,” your PubIt account will be created. You can then begin creating your first book.

Step 3: Enter Your Title and Author Details

Enter your title. Then choose your list price.

Look through the Nook bookstore to see what other comparable books are charging. Unless you have a very good reason to do otherwise, you should try to list your book for about what other people are listing them for.

If you’re using your book as a loss leader to get more people aware of your brand, you can sell your book for a much lower price just to get more people to buy.

Your title needs to stand out among the sea of other books that your book will be swimming in. It should say something so unique that people can’t help but wonder what the description says.

Finally, list your author name and publisher details.

 8-Title-and-Author

Step 4: Upload Your Book

Click “Browse” to find the book on your computer. Then click “Upload & Preview” to upload your book.

 9-Upload

Step 5: Preview Your Book

You’ll be taken to a preview of what your book looks like. You can click the “Next Page” button to see what the other pages in your book look like. Make sure your book’s formatting came out the way you want it to before continuing.

 10-Preview

Step 6: Upload Your Book Cover

Upload your book cover.

Remember when you’re designing your cover that people really do judge a book by its cover. Much of your book’s ability to make sales will depend on the strength of your cover.

Your cover should convey credibility, as well as make a strong promise. It should have good overall design aesthetics as well as be a strong marketing piece.

 11-Upload-Cover-Image

Step 7: Publishing Details

Barnes & Nobles needs a few bits of information before it can publish your book. It needs to know if you have an ISBN number, whether it’s part of a series, whether it’s in print and whether it’s a public domain book.

 12-Publishing-Details

Step 8: Age & Language

What age is your book geared towards and what language is the book written in?

 13-Age-Language

Step 9: Rights & DRM

Let B&N know whether you have worldwide rights, or rights in only the USA or the USA and Canada.

Choose whether you want to DRM encrypt your book. This helps protect your book from being stolen or passed on.

 14-Rights-DRM

Step 10: Categories and Keywords

Choose the categories and keywords you want to use to market your book. You can choose up to five categories.

Try to list your book in the most obvious categories, as well as one or two non-obvious categories. Get your book into categories that your competitors might not necessarily think of, but are shared by your target market.

You can also try to pick a category that you think you can dominate. In other words, pick a category that isn’t too competitive and try to get your book to the top.

Your keywords will help people who’re performing searches to find your book. Use tools like the Google Keyword Tool to identify keywords that people search for on a regular basis.

 15-Categories-Keywords

Step 11: Description & About the Author

Write a compelling description of your book. If your book’s an informational book, try to titillate people by hinting at some of the things they’ll learn in the book. If your book is a non-informational book, try to give people an emotional dose of what they’ll experience once they’re reading your book.

Your “About the Author” section is the perfect place to demonstrate your credibility. Talk about your past experiences that make you uniquely qualified to read this book. Give specific figures (E.g. “helped over 8,000 entrepreneurs raise startup capital”) and drop names wherever possible (E.g. “helped raise capital for Groupon, eBay, Dropbox and more.”)

 16-Description-About-the-Authors

Step 12: Submit!

Once you’ve confirmed that all the information you’ve submitted is correct and complete, click the checkbox and hit “Put on Sale.”

 17-Submit

That’s all there is to submitting a book to the Nook! What comes next is the hard part: Marketing and promotion.

Leverage your social networks, your email list and you website to get the word out about your book. You need to get some attention to your book first, before people will start to come to your book on its own. Once your book gains some momentum however, at some point it’ll be able to swim on its own and become a real money earner for you without you having to constantly promote it.

 

Proper Formatting and Conversion for Nook

 

Formatting for the Nook is all about making your text appear the way it appears on your screen, on the Nook. While the Nook can convert most .DOC files and formatting to the proper format, there are a few things you need to do beforehand to get your document ready.

For the purposes of this guide, we’re going to use a .DOC upload, as that’s the most common format used. You can also upload a as an EPUB document,  .HTML or .TXT.

 

Step 1: Fix Your Spacing

 

If you’re using two return carriages at any point in your text in order to create a new paragraph, that’s going to come out wrong in the Nook. While on screen two returns might give you the look you want, on the Nook it’ll look like too much space.

For example, this is what spacing looks like to a lot of people in Word:

 1-Space-Example

The single spacing doesn’t look like it creates enough space above it for a new paragraph. So people do two return carriages instead. This works in Word, but not on the Nook.

Instead of using double returns, select the text whose spacing you want to change, then click “Paragraph.”

 2-Click-Paragraph

Change the spacing. Usually the field you’ll want to change is the “After” field.

 3-Change-Spacing

Step 2: Change Your Indents

 

Tab indenting doesn’t work on the Nook. If you want to indent the first line of a paragraph, again use the paragraph tool.

Right click, select “Paragraph” as shown in step 1, then change the indent using the “Indentation” section.

 4-Indentation

To indent the whole paragraph, use the left side controls. To indent just the first line, use the “Special” section.

 

Step 3: Insert Section Breaks

 

The Nook converter cannot read Page Breaks. You also can’t start a new page by just pressing return until you get to the next page. In order to have your page breaks be properly formatted for the Nook, you need to instead use a section break. Use this at the end of chapters and when you want to start a new page.

To insert a section break, position your cursor where you want the break to appear. Then go to “Page Layouts,” click on “Breaks” and select “Next Page” under “Section Breaks.”

 5-Section-Breaks

 

Step 4: Lists

 

If you have lists, such as bullets or numerical lists, make sure you’re using Word’s built in list tools. Don’t try to create your own lists by placing numbers then a dot, or any other makeshift method of creating lists.

 6-Lists

 

 

Step 5: Change Your Font

 

Use either Arial, Times New Roman or Courier New.

7-Fonts

 

Step 6: Format Images

 

Your images can be aligned in the middle, the left or the right. Text should be above and below the image. Don’t use formatting that causes words to wrap around the image. By and large, choose the “In line with text” wrapping style (it’s on by default.)

 8-Format-Images

Step 7: Remove Symbols

 

Remove any non-standard symbols from your text. Remove any superscripts and subscripts.

By default, Word converts the “th” and “st” texts that come after a date or a fraction into superscripts. If this is the case with your text, you’ll need to go through all of them and remove them. Having symbols or superscripts can disrupt your book’s formatting.

 9-Remove-Symbols

Above are two examples of Word automatically creating superscripts. To change it, just backspace over them and re-write the text. If Word tries to change something, just press CTRL+Z to undo it.

Once you’ve made all these changes, your .DOC file will be ready for publication on the Nook!

Baby Steps for Getting E-book Sales

creativityWhether or not your ebook will sell in large part comes down to the title, the description and the category.

A stellar title will move thousands of copies; while a title that’s mediocre will fail in selling the exact same ebook. Titles generally aren’t “okay” or “good” – They either sell or they don’t sell. In other words, they’re either great or they don’t work at all.

The same applies to descriptions. A great description should make your eyes pop out with excitement. People who read that description should be eager to read the rest of the ebook.

The category is critical because it helps you connect your ebook with the right audience. Never guess on the category and do your homework first.

Here’s how to come up with a stellar title, a great description and a category that facilitates sales.

 

Getting the Title Right

 

The title is the most important sentence you’ll write in your entire ebook.

Don’t think of writing your title as an action or a task. Instead, think of it as a process. Don’t commit to a title until the very end.

Start writing titles as soon as you begin your ebook. Write them in a separate document. Write a many titles as possible. Write them down as they come to you.

By the time you finish your ebook, you should have a document with at least 30 possible titles in it. Most authors find that as they’re writing their ebook, possible titles will just continually pop into their minds.

Throughout this process, try to involve other people in the title choosing process. Ask other people for suggestions or possible titles. Run your favorite titles by other people and see what they think.

Treat coming up with a title as a long-term brainstorming process. Instead of a normal brainstorming process, where you let ideas flow freely for an hour or so, this process is instead extended over the course of several weeks and months. Just let the titles flow and edit as little as possible.

You can also look through stores like the Kindle ebook store and see what titles catch your eye. What titles are likely to get noticed?

 2-title-search

Once you’ve finished your ebook, that’s when you should finally sit down and make a pick.

The title you choose should have a certain “snap” to it. It should be simple and easy to understand. The title should just have one concept in it, rather than try to convey everything in the ebook. It should have a rhythmic feel to it. It should grab attention and it should tempt people to read the description.

 

Getting the Description Right

 

Much like writing the title, the description writing process should start early on.

Begin by looking at how other authors in your industry wrote their descriptions. Start to collect a swipe file – A collection of descriptions that you can reference to for inspiration.

Come up with a few different ways to approach the description. Write several different descriptions, then ask friends which one is the most compelling. For example, you might have one description that factually describes the ebook and another description that paints a vivid picture with words.

Focus on the first sentence. The job of the first sentence is to capture attention and get people to read the rest of the description. People who read the first sentence should feel hooked and sucked in to reading the rest of the description.

Have testimonials. Try to get testimonials and/or editorial reviews from names that people in your industry would recognize. Just a handful of great testimonials can make all the difference.

Reference your swipe file often. Never steal words, but don’t be afraid to steal ideas. If someone phrased a topic in a certain way or painted a picture in a certain way, don’t be afraid to take that writing style and make it your own. Copy what made other ebooks successful.

 

Picking the Right Category

 

You should pick the category that gives you the highest chance of ranking in the top charts. Of course, the category needs to be relevant to what your ebook is about.

Let’s say you’re releasing a ebook about how to trade commodities. The ebook could go under business, it could go under finance or it could go under economics. Which do you choose?

The answer: Choose the one that gives you the highest chances of breaking the top charts.

Take a look at the other ebooks in the categories you’re considering. What kinds of ebooks are they? Are ebooks like yours succeeding or failing? Naturally, you want to choose the category(s) that have a natural affinity for your kind of ebook.

5-category-searchIn our example, it’s entirely possible that all finance discussions seem to be limited to personal finance. In that case, you might put your ebook under economics. On the flip side, it’s possible that economics is filled with only theoretical ebooks; while finance is filled with ebooks by other traders. In that case, finance would be the better bet.

Sometimes you’ll want to deliberately target categories that seem slow. This tactic works only if you have an extremely strong marketing engine. If you sense that a category is weak in sales, you could try to pop yourself into the top charts by listing your ebook in that category, then sending in a flood of traffic. Even so, the ebook still has to make sense within that category.

Choosing the category can be quite straightforward. Just see what your competitors are doing and do the same. That said, sometimes you’ll want to put your ebook in a different category if your research shows that your audience seems to respond better in those other categories.
These three factors – The title, the description and the category – Make up the bulk of your selling power. Get these three things right, add in a stellar front cover and a strong marketing plan and you’ll be off to the races.