Self-publishing News: Barnes and Noble Royalty Wobbles

ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway

In this week's Self-Publishing News, ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway takes a look at Barnes and Noble's problems paying royalties and booksellers' challenges. 

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Barnes and Noble Royalties

This is a story which was just emerging when I spoke to Howard for the podcast last week. Barnes and Noble, like other bookstores, are finding lockdown measures during the current crisis tough. While restrictions are bad for all bookstores, though, the impact on Barnes and Noble is felt much wider. That’s because Barnes and Noble aren’t just a bricks and mortar store. They sell ebooks. And many of us indies make our books available through them. We tend to do this through a multichannel distribution platform.

In the past week, Barnes and Noble have written to (at least) two of those channels explaining that they are having problems paying royalties on ebooks. Draft2Digital and Smashwords have both published statements. It now seems that Barnes and Noble will be paying the balance of outstanding royalties swiftly, and those royalties will then pay forward to authors. But this remains an ongoing problem, and if things get worse, payments may get even later. Watch with caution (if you sell many books through Barnes and Noble, at least).

Changes at Patreon

We’ve spoken a lot about the rise of subscription services recently. And, of course, this presents a great opportunity for indies. Many of us have opted not, or not just, to make titles available through subscription platforms like Storytel. We make work directly available to our own personal subscribers in return for a small monthly fee. And most of us who do that do it through Patreon. In March, Patreon welcomed 50,000 new creators, with average earnings up by over 50%. But they have still announced that they are laying off 13% of their workforce as they attempt to get through the crisis. As in so many places, it's a very mixed story.

Bookshop and Amazon: Booksellers' concerns

Amazon are used to having, um, interesting weeks. And this has been no exception. We have been following the stories of campaigns to help independent bookstores during the coronavirus crisis. And this week saw one particularly significant donation – of £250,000 – to a fund to help stores in the UK. The recipient, Book Trade Charity, said originally that the donor was “”committed to independent bookshops as part of a mixed bookselling economy”. It soon emerged that the benefactor was, yes, Amazon. And the Booksellers’ Association took issue with that definition. They would, they said, much rather Amazon showed their support for booksellers by paying tax like the rest of them.

Meanwhile the American Booksellers Association have been getting in on the act of being upset about things that at first sight seem positive. In this case, that’s the Bookshop app. We have featured this before. Bookshop is an app that lets people buy books online and have a cut go to their local bookseller. It’s another great way of supporting bookshops during the crisis. And it is doing very well. So that’s good, surely? Well, it would be. Except as the ABA has pointed out, not every store benefitting is actually a bookstore. It seems that to set up an account on Bookshop to benefit from sales of books you don’t actually have to be a bookshop.

Industry in Change

It's inevitable that things are changing in the book world right now. We've looked at the mixed picture in regard to audio. This week, Publishers' Weekly has a very interesting piece looking at the way print sales have changed. It confirms that people are still buying print but are now ordering online (sometimes through the Bookshop app!). And Mike Shatzkin has a fascinating insight into how, ultimately, this may change the logistics of the industry, in particular the links between print and warehousing and distribution. What is going to be really interesting in the next weeks is how bookshops fare in the places where they are beginning to open up. It seems that in Germany and the USA, there is a long road ahead that we will follow with interest!

Over to You

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