Nook Press Launches in Europe Today
The long anticipated global expansion of B&N’s self-pub platform is finally happening. B&N announced on Tuesday that Nook Press is available in parts of Western Europe, including the UK.
Nook Press is now available to authors in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium. The platform supports all of those countries’ languages, and it offers authors the opportunity to earn up to 65% of the price they set.
B&N has revealed the pricing schedule for the UK, and promises that a similar schedule has been set for the other newly supported countries in Europe. Authors who price their books between £1.50 and £7.99 will receive 65% of the list price for ebooks sold in the UK Nook Store. For books priced outside that window (as low as 75p, as high as £120.00), the royalty drops to 40%.
In comparison, authors who sell their titles via KDP earn a 70% royalty (minus delivery fees) if their books are priced between £1.49 and £7.81, but books priced outside this range will only yield a 35% royalty rate. Unlike KDP, B&N does not tack on additional fees to the selling price nor do they also charge authors delivery costs. Of course, the Nook Store is also a visibly withering platform, but you cannot have everything.
Curiously enough, while I can find details on UK prices in the FAQ on the Nook Press website, there’s no mention of the pricing schedule for the other 30 countries where B&N has been selling ebooks since November 2011. That would imply that B&N doesn’t distribute Nook Press titles to any of those countries, a detail which my source article appears to confirm.
Nook Press is available in 8 countries as of Wednesday morning, and B&N plans to make their self-pub platform available Canada, Australia, and Switzerland in the near future. That will bring the total number of supported countries to 11, which would leave authors in 2/3rds of the countries with local Nook Stores with no option for uploading their titles to Nook Press other than through a 3rd party service like Smashwords.
But even though only a limited number of countries are supported, B&N is promising to promote select titles in the Nook Store. The titles will be chosen by the Luxembourg-based Nook International team, which is lead by Colin Eustace. The works will be selected from any number of genres and topics based on popularity and sales. "We’re excited to promote any content," Eustace said.
The Bookseller
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