Deborah Cooke: Author

Some of you may have heard that B&N changed their publishing portal this week. PubIt, their previous portal for indie-published authors, is being phased out, and a new portal called NookPress has been launched. There’s lots of happy chat from B&N  about all the new functionality available to authors on NookPress, but many writers (like me) seem to be underwhelmed by it all.

The new portal appears to be intended to become a community, in which the creators expect authors to compose their books, have their books critiqued and discussed, then copy-edit, edit, format and publish their books through the same portal. This has some similarities to existing communities like BookCountry and FastPencil. (NookPress was apparently created in conjunction with FastPencil.)

To me, this new portal and its added functionality is creating a lot of open dockets for B&N instead of solving the issues that already existed – never mind keeping the focus on their core business of selling books (print or digital).

For example, I would have liked if they had just made their PubIt interface more robust (and maybe solved its tendency to corrupt book files arbitrarily and without warning). But one of the first things I discovered while exploring the new portal’s features was that ebooks that have already been published through the portal can’t be updated. They must be unpublished, removed, recreated and republished. Not only is this a ton of work that has to be duplicated by the author, but I’m pretty sure this will nix any existing reviews or ratings for the book. Updating an existing book’s file is pretty commonplace stuff – a number of authors I know update the booklists and links in ALL of their published books each time they publish a new title. Not only is this basic functionality unavailable, it’s harder to manage content on NookPress than on PubIt. Taking a step backward in a rapidly evolving environment is just weird. (At this point, authors can update a book file by using the PubIt interface, but there’s no telling how long that portal will remain open and functional.)

The thing is that this perspective – more is more! – is endemic in this brave new world of indie publishing. How many writers are dashing off, opening new dockets by launching new books, new series and new pseudonyms, before they finish what they’ve started? How many authors are publishing like mad before getting the groundwork of digital publishing right – or even the nuts and bolts of writing well? How many of us are afraid to miss an opportunity, so over-extend ourselves instead? We all think we have to do everything, when the reality is that we’d probably be better off to focus on a smaller goal, delegate and decide.

For example, I have far too much on my plate right now. The main reason for this is that I’m trying to finish what I’ve started – but I’m trying to do it more or less at once, while republishing backlist titles, too. (There’s that impatience at work!) So, I have the urban fantasy fallen angel romances to repackage and reformat, Tupperman’s story to revise, edit and publish to complete that series, another Dragon Legion novella to write, format and publish, the Dragon Legion anthology and two more Dragonfire books to write, format and publish, three more medieval romances to complete the True Love Brides series to revise, write, format and publish, and the linked novellas of the expanded Coven of Mercy to write, edit, format and publish. That’s a crazy amount of work, in wide variety of sub-genres – and my list will only stay that short if no other rights revert to me.

The difference is that I have my end goal in mind. My goal is to sell books. That means making my backlist titles available in new editions for readers. It also means completing series that I’ve started, in order to keep the faith with my readers. Only when I do those two things can I move forward, relying upon my audience to follow me. I have a lot of series to finish up because publishers don’t have the same idea of keeping the faith with readers, but that’s okay. I’ll get there. I figure by the end of 2014 (maybe sooner), I’ll be all caught up on everything, with all my series done, all my circles closed and dockets filed. Then what? I’ll have to choose where to focus, and return to a more characteristic writing schedule. This crunch is a fairly short term crisis that I’ll steadily work through.

In contrast, I don’t understand B&N’s end goal. I thought they were in the business of selling books and Nooks. It would seem to me that the most important way to do that would be to build their consumer base for Nook, expand the content available on Nook by improving their portal and services, and ensuring quality on Nook by fixing that buggy PubIt software. NookPress looks as if B&N is aiming for the self-help market for aspiring authors, which is a different niche from the publishing business. It makes some sense for Penguin to have launched Bookcountry, a similar site, because they (as publishers) are always looking for content and content providers. (Their choice can also be argued to make little sense, because they could acquire content the way they always have done, from works submitted to them for consideration – and they could strengthen their appeal to authors by doing a better job of publishing the books that they do acquire. It would make most sense to me for a writers’ group or an organization geared to helping aspiring authors to build a portal like this one, not a bookseller or a publisher.)

So, I’m curious to see where B&N is going with this new portal and why. Once upon a time, B&N did have a publishing arm, through which they mostly republished older books that were out of copyright. Are they intending to become publishers again? We’ll just have to wait and see how B&N’s role in the market shapes up from here.

One thing about the brave new world of publishing – it’s never boring!