The B&N Report
From Author Earnings:
In our first two reports, we concentrated on Amazon’s e-book sales. We analyzed the top 7,000 e-books in three bestselling genres [link]. Then we followed up with a look at all 54,000 ranked bestselling e-books on Amazon in a single day snapshot [link]. We now turn our attention to the next bestselling book and e-book retailer, Barnes & Noble. The methodology is the same. Barnes & Noble’s online store lists overall ranking for their e-books, and as with Amazon, current rank generally correlates with daily sales.1 We determined sales rates based on the sales of our own books and from data gathered from other authors. In all cases, the rates we collected were within 20% of each other. Adjusting rates even beyond this margin of error does not alter the percentages of market share shown in our pie charts — it simply adjusts the overall size of the pie.
Last year, Barnes & Noble reported that 25% of the Nook market was made up of self-published works [link]. We were curious to see if this meant 25% of the bestselling titles were self-published, 25% of the sales came from self-published e-books, or if self-published e-book sales accounted for 25% of the gross dollar market. As always, our primary concern here is where authors are doing better, sale for sale. It doesn’t help authors to say that 70% of the book market is in print if only a small fraction of that money ends up in authors’ pockets [link]. What we want to see is the combined effect of royalty rate, sales volume, and sale price. These three factors combine to give us a true picture of comparative earnings, as shown in our pie charts. Let’s see what our spider gathered as it snared 5,400 of Barnes & Noble’s top genre e-books in its digital web:
Just as we saw in Amazon’s store, indie titles make up a very large percentage of the bestseller lists. More than half, in fact.
Indie titles make up almost a third of Barnes & Noble’s e-book sales as well. The extent to which self-published content dominates Barnes & Noble’s e-book store is even more starkly apparent when the market shares of the Big-5 publishers are shown individually, rather than lumped together:
The Big-5 publishers still rake in the lion’s share of Barnes & Noble publisher dollars, as shown below:
However, publisher revenue is far less meaningful to authors than authorrevenue. And in Barnes & Noble’s e-book store, just as in Amazon’s case, we see that indie authors and small publishers are earning almost as much as all of the Big-5 combined:
. . . .
Far from being an Amazon-only or Amazon-created phenomenon, the market dominance of indie authors can also be seen here at the second-largest e-book retailer, Barnes & Noble. As some have opined, this reflects a much larger consumer-driven economic reality at work. Retailers and industry middlemen no longer dictate to readers what they should be reading. Readers now vote with their wallets, and everywhere we have thus far looked with our spider, readers are choosing self-published works at a higher rate than those by any other publishing entity.
. . . .
Publishing’s print retailers, print providers, and other businesses in the print supply chain clearly have reason to expand and simplify print distribution options for self-published authors. By doing so, they can increase their profitability and ability to serve consumers, while giving consumers the full range of quality content they demand. In fact, looking at the above chart might give Barnes & Noble a reason to reach out to indies for merchandising opportunities, and also to readers in order to promote these works.
. . . .
[A]t Barnes & Noble, just as with Amazon, best-selling indie content is better rated on average than best-selling traditionally published content. Our initial speculation about price correlating to average review score has since been disproven by others, who looked at our data more closely. We may be left with the conclusion that self-published works are outselling every other publisher by dint of readers simply liking them better.
Link to the rest at Author Earnings
PG says, given the generally poor placement of indie books on the Nook Store and its poor search capabilities, it’s interesting that indie book sales patterns for the Nook are so similar to those on Amazon.
The Author Earnings report also raises the widely-circulating, but never confirmed (at least to PG’s knowledge) report that the Nook Store sells top spots on its bestseller lists to Big Publishing’s books.
PG hasn’t commented on the paid bestseller spots before, but, if the reports are true, it reflects one of the dominant reasons why Nook is losing so badly to Amazon.
Customers, particularly online customers, particularly heavy readers, use bestseller lists to help them locate books they will like.
A customer-centric organization would never tamper with bestseller lists because doing so would not improve the customer’s shopping experience and satisfaction. If a customer is less likely to find a book he/she likes, that customer is less likely to buy in the first place, to return as often as he/she would if the store made it easier to locate desirable books or to return at all.
Smart ecommerce companies treat customer visits like gold. They never want to waste a single visit or send a customer away unsatisfied.
However, Barnes & Noble is a creature closely tied to Big Publishing and in Big Publishing, you can work your way onto the New York Times and Barnes & Noble bestseller lists without actually outselling books that aren’t listed. In Big Publishing, what’s best for the customer takes a backseat to generating cash in pay-for-play schemes.
One of the behaviors of traditional publishing that never fails to puzzle PG, regardless of how often he sees it, is that publishers don’t treat authors as exceptionally valuable partners – customers for publishing services, if you will.
Sweet talk often ends as soon as the forever publishing contract is signed. Marketers treat authors like cheap labor with clueless social media exercises. Authors are constantly blamed for poor sales regardless of the failings of the publisher. Royalty reports are a semi-annual insult, not just for the size of the royalty payment, but also for the impenetrable mass of numbers designed to obscure, not enlighten.
On the other hand, Kindle Direct Publishing explicitly regards indie authors as customers for its epublishing platform.
When customer-centric organizations compete with those which aren’t, guess who wins?
Here’s a hint: What would happen if the Seattle Seahawks played the Bayonne High School Bees?
Author Earnings, Big Publishing, Hugh Howey, Passive Guy, Royalties, Self-Publishing
, Amazon will pay Passive Guy a small affiliate commission on any of your purchases. 
More lies!
(Accidentally posted as a reply, sorry.)
The similarity of the overall patterns leads me to be more confident in my personal theory that the majority of books sold through BN.com are bought by people who saw them elsewhere (like Amazon) and bought from BN.com because they have a Nook and/or a BN loyalty card which provides an additional discount.
I know that my wife, who loves her Nook, rarely shops on BN.com: she looks at Amazon, then sees if BN.com has what she wants so she can download it straight to her Nook. (I’ve showed her how to put Amazon ebooks on her Nook, and she has the Kindle app. She likes Nook.) If it’s significantly cheaper on Amazon or not available on BN.com, then she buys at Amazon.
My husband does the same thing.
Also, my sales on Nook suck. I’m pretty much impossible to find unless you know the *exact* name of the book you’re looking for.
Though when I’m searching for exact name, I find books more easily on B&N than Amazon. Amazon throws so many irrelevant results that I’ll look for the author and go to the author page or use an outside search engine to search for a book title and add Amazon to get the Amazon page.
B&N plunks the exact match first, which makes me very happy.
I only started using Amazon more than B&N when I got my new tablet and couldn’t get the Nook app without getting a Google Play account, which I don’t actually want. I prefer Nook to Kindle and always have because I dislike the black reading environment of the Kindle and like the Nook app experience better.
I also browse for books on AMazon and buy them for the Nook. I guess I’d rather support the underdog.
I find the Nook easier to read off as well. I’ve got both a Nook color and a Nook touch. I read more books off the touch, but I use the (rooted) color for PDF files, knitting patterns, and magazines…and for a Kindle app.
My hubby asked me recently why I so rarely use my Nook. I said that it was easier and more fun to browse and find stuff on AMAZON. Which is why, although I bought the NookColor, I now have 2 Kindle Fires (and one older Kindle keyboard). I have a hard time browsing on NOOK. And with B&N in trouble, why risk buying from them? But my NookColor is a lovely little device, and it lets me highlight in different colors.
exactly. I own a Nook as well and I use it to side load older books. I use the kindle app on my phone for browsing and/or reading new stuff. With B&N in trouble, it really doesn’t seem to be worth the risk to try and buy new stuff from them right now.
I agree, I’m going to wait to see what happens before buying a new Nook. I’m finding it easy to have a few apps on my tablet and then shop from whichever store has the best price. The reading experience isn’t that different from one ereader to another.
Good point, Marc.
But is B&N the second biggest retailer of ebooks? Or is Apple? Do they mention the source of that stat?
My own perspective might be biased, since I write contemporary romance, but iTunes was 25% of my sales last year, to 7% on BN.
In the U.S., B&N is number two. Their position elsewhere is basically non-existent. Apple may be number two world wide, but I haven’t found good stats on that.
To all authors: Your personal sales are NOT good stats on which retailer is doing best. The relationship between one title’s (or one author’s titles’) sales to the overall market share of an online retailer is so weak that it can’t be measured.
Are we sure of this? I’ve seen no real data lately that B&N is holding at number two. If anything, I’ve been seeing that Amazon’s market share has increased, and iBooks’ share increased–according to testimony during the DoJ trial–by 100% year over year from 2012 to 2013.
I really admire what Hugh is doing. It’s fantastic. And it’s funny that the biggest criticism against the data is incomplete if only because–while it may well be limited–it highlights how woefully incomplete the previously used data has been.
Maybe not anymore:
“Digital content sales were $57 million for the quarter, a decline of 26.5% compared to a year ago”.
I write niche erotica (and about 20% of my titles are not on Apple due to various bizarre problems, some technical and some having to do, I think, with the covers.) Here is my breakdown from 2013:
Amazon: 81%
B&N: 3%
Smashwords (including Apple:) 16%
Apple is approximately 15% of the Smashwords number, with the rest Smashwords and an insignificant number of cash sales through Sony and Diesel.
I sell direct through Kobo: while Kobo owes me money, I have not yet hit the $100 payment threshold and so they are not included in the above. Likewise CreateSpace: it owes me money, but has never paid me. Kobo and CreateSpace together would not constitute a 1% increase in revenues if they had paid out on the year’s sales.
CreateSpace got rid of the payment threshold a couple of months ago. I had one market (UK, I think), that only had a 0.16 balance, and they did a direct deposit.
I don’t do direct deposits.
But it’s so nice having that money magically appear in the bank account each month!
I’ve had that happen with KDP, but not with Createspace.
For me Create Space took 2 months longer to pay up than Amazon.
B&N is 7% of my sales this month, Amazon 25%, AllRomance 63%. Last month, Amazon was 100%. It varies enough that I’m still gathering data to see where my best sales are over time but B&N is very close to negligible. The amount I sell through Kobo, if it was harder to upload, I wouldn’t even bother.
My 2013 sales percentage breakdown:
Amazon 96.30%
Smashwords 2.31%
B&N 0.62%
Apple 0.31%
Kobo 0.46%
So far this year:
Amazon 99.74%
Smashwords 0.13%
B&N 0.13%
All Time(I sold my first book in Jan, 2008):
Amazon 92.63%
Smashwords 3.85%
B&N 2.07%
Apple 0.71%
Kobo 0.65%
Sony 0.09%
I track EVERYTHING, LOL. I’m a spreadsheet addict.
Have you published at AllRomanceEbooks yet? I make roughly 50% of my erotica pen name’s sales at Amazon and half at ARe. (A few sales on other platforms, but in the ones and threes.)
I have been looking into AllRomanceEbooks. Using them looks complicated. Is it? Any advice?
It’s really not complicated. Just have all your information ready to go and be ready to email asking for a 13-character convention to use instead of an ISBN. Your books go up immediately after hitting publish instead of sitting in moderation and they pay quarterly.
One commenter also mentions that B&N downgrades erotica books by indy writers to keep them out of the top 100 but keeps “50 Shades of Grey” in place.
Haven’t heard that about Amazon, have we? (Seriously?)
Amazon “adult filters” some erotica so that it’s not searchable and won’t appear on also-boughts of non-filtered titles. Lots of discussion about this in the erotic/e-rom circles.
Like PG, I’m astonished that so many indie books sell on B&N when their site is so awful. Maybe readers run into them by accident while searching for the latest James Patterson or Stephen King, because they can’t find those, either.
Actually, if you’re already used to their way of organizing things, they have a very good search* and their free deals have always been heavily weighted indie. I fell in love with an indie book before I even realized that it was indie right around the time DWS was just STARTING to talk about self-publishing being viable.
Christian fiction has also done much better on B&N anecdotally, and that’s where almost half of my other pen name’s sales come from.
*particularly if you know author/title, but honestly, I usually do
B&N’s search returns much better on my name than Amazon’s does, but part of this may just be Amazon having more stuff. However, I’ve noticed that B&N is more precise with author names. This could be good, or bad, depending on your point of view.
As a reader, it was good for me, but I do realize that I’m not necessarily in the majority that I go to retailers to buy books I already know about and don’t go to the retailers just to browse.
“…and their free deals have always been heavily weighted indie.”
That explains why B&N is responsible for 58.2% of the freebies I’ve given away. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to translate into sales of paid titles.
Amazon’s use of free seems a bit more discreet and designed to generate future sales. B&N’s may be more of a “use indies as cannon fodder to boost higher priced trad books” style.
Wow, that’s impressive. I’ve only sold about equal freebies on Apple as I have on B&N. Both small compared to AMZ. Sony was even comparable. On all three sites free giveaways didn’t translate into future sales, unlike AMZ.
I ran some Select promo days back in early 2012, and gave away nearly 3,200 copies over 3 titles. The first time in February, my sales tripled over January’s. That’s not saying a lot, since I only sold 20 copies that January.
In March, my sales after promo days weren’t as nice (double January’s instead of triple), and in April, the free promo days had zero effect on sales, and the worst download numbers.
It was an experiment. [shrug] It garnered some extra sales and a couple of good reviews, but I haven’t used any free promo days since, and only have one book in Select now, to see if people would rather borrow it than buy it.
So far, they’d rather buy it for $5.99 than borrow it.
I can’t help noticing that here, where the Big Five is much closer to equal or in one case even edging out indie/small publishing, Howey takes the step of splitting the Big Five up into individual publishers—something he didn’t do for either of the Amazon reports that were a lot more canted in favor of indie publishing. It comes off as looking like he’s trying to make weaker figures look better
Given the overall weakness of B&N’s self-publishing program and the incentives Amazon offers for exclusivity, it’s not surprising self-pub books are stronger over there. It’s impressive they do as well as they do at B&N.
To me it comes off as “people kept bugging me to break out the Big 5, so there y’go.”
Actually, he presents it both ways… lumped and broken out. Not sure how that is an offense. Perhaps he’ll do the same for the Amazon data sometime.
What strikes me about the big 5 breakout is that a trad published author with any trad publisher other than Penguin Random, looking at their publisher’s small piece of the pie, as opposed to the big 5 lump, might suddenly feel as if the ground just disappeared from under their feet. Snap change from feeling good that are still part of the biggest to uh oh!
People have been asking for this. We presented the data the same as before, and then broke the publishers out by request. We also expanded the search on Amazon to non-fiction and broke those out by request.
Huggers gonna hug.
Hugh, will you please get someone to collect all the naysayers’ comments and then do a FAQ and answer all of them with your data. Then they’ll have nothing left to say and will have to admit what’s pretty clear to the rest of us: Big 5 are goin’ down…
Now I don’t think that’s quite fair. My coverage of your studies has been uniformly positive, by and large. It just seemed odd to me that you chose this time to start breaking out publishers individually, so you could still say the total from self-publishing accounted for more than something.
It seems more than a bit odd to me that you’d choose to mind-read his reasons for breaking out the publishers. Unless you can actually read minds, in which case I apologize.
If he can read minds, he already knew.
But, seriously, implying the breakdown was part of HH hidden agenda, especially in light of the fact that the chart right next to it was the Big 5 as a whole, was a lame objection.
I suppose I’m just a bit puzzled that when the slice of the pie indie publishing is getting is bigger than the aggregated Big Five, it means indie publishing is winning, but when the slice is smaller than the aggregated Big Five, it still means indie publishing is winning. I mean, I agree that indie publishing is doing really well, but I’d kind of like more details.
There didn’t seem to be any examination of why the scores look so different in terms of the percentages from Amazon to B&N. I had been hoping for some examination of the effect that the different approaches Amazon and B&N have to self-publishing have had.
I thought the same way, Chris, so don’t feel bad. I mean, if one is going to break down the Big 5, then to be fair, one has to break down indie to INDIVIDUALS (what is that, thousands, tens of thousands?) But I got his point when he said he was asked to break it down, and then when the 100 top books are taken out of the picture, indies are doing very well by comparison. So, if they are fudging with the bestsellers, more indies might have been in the higher rankings.
Still, I had the same “what?” that you did.
I will also admit that, having read books like How to Lie with Statistics, I’m naturally a bit suspicious in general of any time the way statistics are presented is changed in the middle of things.
No, fair would then be breaking down the Big 5 by individual authors, as well. Is this really where we’re going with this?
Well,dang. You’re right.
I feel better.
I finally made someone feel better!
As regards the Big Five lump . . ., I’m not impressed in the least.
If Lebron James beats me by two baskets in a 1-on-1 matchup, that says something about me.
That’s a good point, it’d be interesting to see some numbers interpreted based on the differences in the way Amazon and B&N present their wares, as it were. But really, I was expecting this to look a lot worse. I mean, B&N’s about as Big Pub as you can get. Hell, they were probably only a couple incriminating emails from being a co-conspirator in the DOJ thing. For indies to be putting up these kinds of numbers in what, in some ways, is a hostile environment, is huge. It looks an awful lot like winning to me, even if they’re technically still behind.
I’m glad you guys are saying that the B&N site is awful. I thought it was just me, just my book. I went searching for it using all the keywords I could think of and still couldn’t find it. Frustrating. Sales at B&N are abysmal at best.
No, it’s dreadful.
For a couple of weeks one of my books was partially conflated with one with a similar title and an author with a similar name (Meg Cabot.) I had to ask for it to be fixed twice (which is a little alarming since I write extremely mature content books and cousin Meg writes fairly popular YA books including “The Princess Diaries.”)
Try buying something on B&N.com with a gift card. Argghhhhh…
I’m sorry you have difficulties, and I believe you. But to be fair, I gave away several BN.com gift cards for Christmas this year and nobody had any trouble (that I know of.)
I had no trouble at all with B&N gift cards applied to my B&N account, thank goodness. However, even with 2 college degrees, a 137 IQ, and various attempts, I could not get my American Express gift card to work on Amazon. But the store’s own, fine.
Now, I did not try the AmEx gift card on B&N. That might have been a nightmare, too.
The key is you must already have an account and add it to the account as a payment method. Good luck with anything else. :mutters unmentionables at various retailers:
I don’t think it’s just the website, either. I ordered a hardcover last fall and received the book in the mail promptly, but it had a bargain book sticker on it (the website charged me full price) and the dust cover was torn in several places. I emailed customer service to resolve it and I got the run around for about three weeks and no resolution of any kind.
Oh my. That’s not good.
They better get the c/s up a notch. I gotta hand it to Amazon. When I have a complaint, things get moving. I get satisfaction. And I would have a COW if I paid full price and got a bargain/damaged book.
I like Amazon’s customer service but Createspace’s makes me want to punch something. They’re AWFUL.
I’ve just been dealing with a problem on my book at CreateSpace and have been having a really good experience with them.
I have had excellent service if they can resolve the issue in a single email. If the issue requires more than one email, service breaks down.
1. You cannot reply to a c/s email and have to open a new ticket.
2. If you respond right away and reference the previous issue, they apparently have no access to that history, because only history included in the email you send at that moment is taken into account.
3. If they tell you that you submitted your email incorrectly, and you copy/paste the whole thread and at the top say something like, here it’s submitted how you asked, they will respond that there is no issue because they only read your message on top.
4. If you tell them, I followed all your instructions about this issue, but it turns out this was CS reviewer error, so when you review this submission please don’t make the same mistake, they will respond that they see your book is in review so obviously there is no issue
5. If you tell them, the book’s out of review now and you screwed it up the same way again, they will finally get around to resolving the issue you told them about several emails ago.
Every 1-email issue they’ve ever handled for me has been splendidly handled. Every multi-email issue has required me including all history, making sure that even if they make it hard to know whether I routed/labeled everything perfectly they know exactly where I’m not sure, and to TELL them to read the entire email before responding. I’m still very, very frustrated with them.
I’m having this issue right now with the Zon. They keep telling me I’m a corporation. Multiple emails close to a month now and still no 1099.
That said, Draft2Digital is superb. One email and the issue is usually cleared up within an hour. I love them.
LOL No, it’s not. Mine was more like Liana’s with CS.
Though I’m glad you got better service with D2D than I did, L.E.
I had an issue with CreateSpace where their cutting machine mis-fired and sliced the proof books I ordered like .5″ into the book. They replaced them immediately with no questions asked.
I also had an issue where I fat-fingered my title (or some other field–can’t remember which now) when creating the new project, which was a non-changeable field. I sent and email to them asking that it be corrected rather than deleting the project and starting over, and viola, it was fixed.
It was definitely larger than I would have expected. The biggest surprise for me was the caveat on bestsellers.
I’m hoping B&N insiders start whistling on that.
Might have been helped, a small bit at least, if B&N had been more proactive with their self-published book. They still only allow non US authors through Smashwords last I looked for example.
B&N may not be the only one that weights top spots towards traditional publishers. I read an account by a writer who was talking back and forth with Kobo about a few issue and questions. Kobo customer service said they also push traditionally published books in their bestseller lists to the detriment of Indies (but from what I recall, they didn’t sell those spots. Just weighted them.). They ended the conversation by saying it works for them, and they see no reason to change.
That’s interesting. Mind you, a customer service rep might not be the best source for corporate strategy. But if his facts are right, it seems like a bad strategy.
Here’s hoping Howie/Data Guy run Kobo’s data too.
Another great Authorearnings report. Thanks Hugh and Data Guy. I especially appreciate the honesty in Hugh’s comments on what the charts show.
This, definitely!
Thanks to HH & DG!
Thanks HH.
I could be wrong, PG, but I thought I caught a glimpse of Jeff Bezos in the upstairs booth calling plays for the Seahawks against the Doyonne High School Bees, I mean Broncos.
Evil geniuses like Bezos want to control everything, Michael.
Great work, Hugh.
1. got nowhere with AllRomance who just keep asking for forms to do with tax exemption, every year, whereas once its done with Amazon and Smashwords, its done. Then AllRe locks us out of our own account so that we can’t update.
2. Had wonderful action from Createspace staff in our time zone (mid-Europe) and I think our staff are located in South Africa. Had no problems ever with Createspace. Sales are rising nicely.
3. Yes, why won’t B&N let non-US entities deal direct?
4. Over the last two and a half years, some months Smashwords sales exceeded Amazon, and usually Smash total equals one third of Amazon sales.
Again, thanks Hugh!
Amazon also sells search result placement and “also boughts” to publishers.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/02/17/140217fa_fact_packer?currentPage=all