Some of you have contacted me, asking about the delay in new book links at Nook. There’s a story behind this (of course!) and today, we’ll talk about it.

Once upon a time, in 2012 or 2013, when I first began to indie-publish, it wasn’t possible for authors outside the US to open an account to publish at Nook. As you know, I’m in Canada, but I wanted to make my books available to Nook readers. My New York agent agreed to make this possible, and we set up the account so I could publish my books there. At the time, I thought I would eventually return to traditional publishing and my relationship with my agent would continue. There also was talk that Nook would eventually open to non-US authors, so I planned to switch over the account when that happened.

Fast forward six years. My agent and I had less and less business to do together and finally, earlier this year, the last of the Dragonfire novels reverted to me and we had no business left to do together. I also had decided not to return to traditional publishing. I like being indie too much. 🙂 Since I’d heard nothing more about Nook opening to other authors, I began to distribute my books to B&N via an aggregator, replacing the Nook editions with Draft2Digital ones. This meant that the product numbers changed, which meant that the links to the product pages changed. It also meant that there wasn’t a specific Nook edition, with links to my other books at Nook inside each book.

You can guess what happened next. Just as the transition was nearly done – with the last of my books coming out of Kindle Unlimited and going into wide distribution again, all with new Nook links – Nook contacted me and asked me to be part of a beta-test for the opening of their portal to Canadian and Australian authors. Ha. Right now, we’re in the middle of that transition, but once it happens, my books will be published directly to Nook again and the old product numbers (and links) will be the good ones again. The books will also have Nook links inside again.

The other good thing is that I’ll also be able to make print editions available directly through Nook, which will offer better pricing on the trade paperbacks to Nook customers than is possible on the print editions coming from Ingrams. This mirrors what I do on Amazon already. The list price of the trade paperback of The Beauty Bride, for example, is $14.99 US at Ingrams. Because Amazon is distributing only to Amazon, the list price on their edition (which is the same but is published only to Amazon) is $9.99 US. B&N has discounted the $14.99 US Ingrams edition to $11.84 US in their online store, but when I publish it directly to B&N through the Nook portal, it will probably be $9.99 US. The upside of Ingrams is that they make books available in a lot of other stores, particularly in international markets. My print books at Indigo, for example, come from Ingrams. The upside of doing the Amazon-only edition and the B&N-only edition is that the consumer gets a better price.

So, if you are a Nook customer, please be a little patient. Good things are in the works!