Skip to main content
Tag

B&N

B&N’s strategy with Nook Press: Own the editorial process

By Blog, Industry

This morning, I received Barnes & Noble’s official announcement of Nook Press. There has been a lot of speculation about B&N’s intentions for the Nook and Pubit (its self-publishing platform, akin to Amazon KDP), but the email made it clear that B&N’s main aim is to “own” the editorial process.

The first three bullets list the following features of Nook Press:

  • NEW! One-stop Publishing Solution: Write, edit, format and publish your eBooks in our web-based platform, instantly reaching millions of NOOK customers within 72 hours.
  • NEW! Easy ePub Creation and Editing: Upload your manuscript file and make changes directly in NOOK Press. Editing and previewing in one session saves you time and effort.
  • NEW! Integrated Collaboration: Collaborate with editors, copyeditors, and friends, allowing them to review and comment on your manuscript without ever leaving NOOK Press.

In other words, what B&N wants authors to start doing is having the editorial processes take place inside the Nook platform. This potentially replaces the hodge-podge of processes and tools that authors use now, such as:

  • Writing manuscripts in Word, Pages, Google Docs or Scrivener
  • Collaborating with other authors/editors using Email, Dropbox, Google Drive, and other tools
  • Creating/modifying ePub files using Scrivener, Pages, Sigil, Smashwords, etc.

It’s important to note that no one really owns this space, especially the 800-pound gorilla whose name begins with A and ends with N. If you asked 10 independent authors about their editorial workflows, I suspect you’d get 10 different answers, with a heavy emphasis on Word, email, and Smashwords.

Nook PressStrategically, it’s a savvy move. While Scrivener, Sigil, and a few other professional authoring and publishing tools exist, they are do not incorporate collaborative editing processes and require some technical skills to use. If Nook Press works as advertised and B&N can convince authors to start writing and editing books inside of Nook Press, it could result in A) author “lock in” B) more content for the Nook platform and C) more power for B&N to fight the Amazon juggernaut.

But that’s a big “if”. I only gave it a quick spin, testing the .ePub export function (I wanted to see if it inserted Nook metadata into existing ePub files, and was unable to find any, which is a good thing). However, I am not going to use Nook Press for writing or editing in the near term. I am happy with my current toolset (based on Dropbox, Google Drive, and Scrivener), and am concerned about bugs or other early problems with the tool. In addition, I don’t want to force my copy editor and collaborators to learn a new tool — Google Docs and Word work well enough.