Barnes & Noble corporate is destroying itself
and I believe it's a planned surrender
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[from Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”, 1985 — “My complications had complications.”]
What follows is, as usual, solely from my personal perspective. I claim no insider information. But I’ve seen patterns over the decades, and this situation is triggering a bunch of “I’ve seen this before” alerts.
Traditional publishing (tradpub) relies on publisher name recognition and perceived book quality, i.e. the implication that traditionally published books are inherently better than indie books. Often that’s true, but it’s by no means a rule. To a great extent, tradpub vetting is less about quality than about the topic of the content and its marketability, as well as the marketability of its author. Yes, how photogenic and extroverted you are factors into your marketability and the likelihood your book will be picked up by an agent.
According to the tradpub industry’s data, sales figures in recent years show a trend toward indie books eventually overtaking tradpub.
To what extent is such a sales trend caused by many indies being predatory in terms of quality, formula, target niche, and marketing, resulting in some amount of bar-lowering normalization and/or temporary sales that result in buyer’s remorse? Perhaps somewhat, but not at the national or global scale across years.
To what extent is it because of online bookbuying vs. brick-and-mortar bookbuying? That’s certainly a big factor. For the most part, those who frequent brick-and-mortar bookstores assume the bookstore is carrying tradpub books, so they think they don’t have to worry they might be buying something poorly crafted and/or poorly vetted, despite such an assumption being false.
Let’s be frank and honest — many internet users don’t even make use of dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps, international news sources, and other informational sources at their fingertips, let alone dig into the “Product Details” of a book, finding its publisher, and then going off to research the legitimacy of the publisher and the quality of its offerings. They rely on the book’s blurb, and maybe the review stars on that one vendor site. A tradpub publisher prominently visible in the record or on the book certainly helps, as do post-hoc bandwagon indicators like bestseller lists. These days, savvy online buyers understand that even review ratings can’t be trusted anymore.
But that info isn’t readily available when you’re standing in a bookstore. Discriminating buyers stand in front of bookstore shelves with their cell phone, looking up more info, at least for aesthetic compatibility purposes if not quality. It’s easier to buy online, where you’re already in a position to do such investigating.
All this has the effect of flattening the attraction of books across the tradpub-indie neutral zone. So it’s no surprise that Amazon, with by far the most sales, is to some extent killing both tradpub and brick-and-mortar bookstores. It’s in Amazon’s interest to normalize a world where buyers not only don’t care who published a book, but rely on other buyers to determine a book’s quality. “It’s not our fault you bought something you don’t like here”, says Amazon, “We provided reviews, so it’s on you.”
Certainly that sales trend is also caused by sheer numbers. Self-publishing a book (mechanically, just putting it out there) is easier than getting through the tradpub wall. There’s nothing stopping that tidal wave, although it says nothing about indie quality.
Last year I read a tradpub NYT Bestseller that I thought was formulaic and regressive garbage. I hated it. By comparison, I just recently read two indie books that are doubly out of my preferred type, yet I loved them, and three others that are definitely my preferred type and loved them, too. What were the chances of finding a one in a million tradpub book that was garbage, even accounting for my strict quality requirements (which also apply to the indie books I read)? The NYT Bestseller list serves only to reflect viral awareness and bandwagoning and says nothing about quality, originality, or genuineness.
As a reminder counterpoint, I’ve read a few indie works that were garbage. There’s no way around it, indie garbage exists.
Tradpub is in a situation the music industry found itself in a number of years ago, with big music producers losing sales to indies. In response, tradpub is doing what the music industry did, skewing its interests toward “platinum jingles by sex objects”, thereby squelching creativity and genuineness. To this day I remain deeply grateful that that situation didn’t prevent Cake and Muse, for example, from creating fantastic, intelligent, non-formulaic, non-jingle-based music with creative integrity. But who knows how many amazingly talented musical artists couldn’t make it? Go look up the background of the talented singer/songwriter Anna Nalick. I’m so happy that she abandoned tradmusic and went indie. Her indie works are really good, nothing tradmusic would sell. But she and I face almost the same audience-finding challenges. She had tradmusic success back in the day which probably factors into her ability to keep going indie. I have no such carryover audience, and neither do many other indie musicians or authors struggling with these issues. Yet, sadly, even with her carryover audience, Anna Nalick’s web site looks like it’s a couple of years out of date.
Similarly, the distinct impression I got from tradpub agents when I queried for MSD was that all they really wanted were blatantly (crassly, IMO) representational works and/or the next “Harry Potter”. Platinum jingles.
I totally get wanting representational works. I support that, and my web site has stated as much from day one, but not if it creates a closed-mindedness against other ways to promote a more inclusive, humane future, or against other authors trying to do so.
Compare, for example, Star Trek: Discovery’s very heavy-handed yet superficial representational approach vs. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which does it just as impactfully but with much more finesse, respect, and intelligence. Do we really want Discovery-style, superficial, hamhanded representation in our books, too? Some readers do, sure, and that’s fine, but is there no room for the other thing in genre writing?
Despite the problems with tradpub, there’s still a huge wall between indie authors and the world of assumption enjoyed by tradpub, even if that ‘free ride’ is eroding. To some extent it has to be that way, because tidal waves don’t just contain life-giving water, they contain unpotable salt, sharp garbage, secretions and excretions of all kinds, nasty microbes, chemical toxins, and a lot of smashingly powerful destructive energy.
But while it’s not too hard to self-publish a book, it’s damn near impossible to find an audience for that book. That’s the huge advantage of tradpub and bookstores.
Brick and mortar bookstores have been inherently tied to tradpub forever, and the shift to online sales has hit them hard. Many are becoming more open to allowing indie authors onto their shelves. But they must be careful.
Before Denver’s famous indie bookstore, The Tattered Cover, recently declared bankruptcy, its policy with indie books was 1) they don’t carry them, they only allow sales at meet-a-local-author events, and 2) only if their books have the price printed on the book.
But Indie authors must routinely watch the “middle-man” costs of POD (print-on-demand) sourcing and online sales systems. So indie authors must periodically revise their prices. Eventually, if your books aren’t overly marked up, middleman prices rise enough to switch your royalties into negative or negligible numbers. So for indies, it’s generally a bad idea to burn a price into your book’s cover. Yes, you can change it, but there’s already so much overhead in self-publishing. Rightly so, nobody wants to rebuild bookcovers on any kind of routine basis. To me, The Tattered Cover’s requirement was too restrictive, and as far as I’m concerned it was chosen intentionally as a bureaucracy wall to keep indies out, or at least indies who aren’t independently wealthy.
Of course, they must have some way of keeping out the riffraff. Reputation is hard-gained and instantly lost. I get that. The usual way of keeping out the riffraff is to require the books to be set as returnable at IngramSpark, the standard POD provider for bookstores.
Returnability allows a bookstore to maybe give books a chance for a bit, but then return them and get their money back if they don’t move off the shelves. I get that. But indies who can afford to set their books to returnable because their sales easily compensate are already indies who don’t need to get into a local bookstore.
I can’t afford to set my books as returnable — that’s a recipe for losing a ton of money at this stage of my career, which actually happened to me. Right after MSD’s release, a bunch of physical copies were purchased in Europe and about three months later all were returned. Three months? Those returns cost me over a hundred dollars, and I’ve only barely exceeded that much in royalties to date, despite my lauds from the likes of Kirkus and other legitimate sources.
So, the returnability constraint just prevents indies who haven’t yet found a self-sustaining, word-of-mouth audience from doing so. It’s the old ‘you need experience to get a job, but you can’t get experience without a job’ conundrum. Catch-22.
I’ve come to accept that getting onto bookstore shelves is not my bread and butter, but if I can get onto bookstore shelves without being killed by returns, why wouldn’t I pursue that? Nevertheless, online sales are my bread and butter. I went wide, selling directly via IngramSpark and KDP, and for eBooks using Draft2Digital to get listed on other vendors, the smaller and international ones.
Yet why would I not pursue “meet a local author” events at my local bookstores, even if I don’t expect to get on their store shelves? If a bookstore has a reputation for selling decent books, then that reputation works in my favor as an author hosted by that store.
At my local Barnes & Noble, I had to be a bit “persistent” in order to convince my local store manager to allow me to have a “meet a local author” event. The nominal requirement at B&N is that an indie’s books must be set as returnable (Catch-22). It was only the aforementioned lauds that allowed me to convince my local store manager to give me a go. We’re both gambling, and I appreciate the manager’s taking a chance on me. It was out of my comfort zone as an autistic to be that “persistent” in the face of that bureaucracy wall. This author thing constantly requires me to leave my comfort zone in the pursuit of my audience.
But Barnes & Noble Press, their online equivalent of Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) on Amazon, has been a night-and-day experience compared to KDP. It’s been very easy to publish my books (electronic and POD) on KDP, and it has been pretty easy to solve administrative issues, even if those issues have occasionally been stupid and pointless. (e.g. after publishing my first novel in POD form, KDP put a hold on publishing my the eBook format of that same novel, and nothing convinced them it was mine to publish until I sent them the Library of Congress copyright certificate)
B&N Press, on the other hand, broke my account after I created it and then kept using its broken state to ‘prove’ that I had created the account that way. To be specific, I got an EIN tax ID for my imprint, Grand Unification Monastery, so I would never have to tie my personal SSN to any of these self-publishing systems. I created my B&N Press account using my EIN, just as I have for other vendor systems. But their account later somehow came to believe I created it with my SSN. (No, they don’t have my SSN in their system, they have my EIN in their SSN field. Their own software for generating a W-9 form proves that — it uses my EIN as an access credential, but puts my EIN into the SSN field.)
I iterated with B&N Press customer support a dozen times before they even read the words I was saying. Eventually, they claimed they’d bump up the issue to the appropriate team. Then I waited another couple of months before getting another message that started at square one, suggesting that I could fix the problem by creating a new account with a new email address.
After months of this, today I submitted my ‘final’ customer service request, to delete my vendor account. I personally don’t know anyone who would have persisted this many times attempting to penetrate their customer service wall before calling it quits.
By law of averages, B&N Press is losing other authors, too, i.e. indie authors. Perhaps that’s intentional. Perhaps they simply don’t want to deal with indies, each a different person with potentially different issues or mistakes. It’s too costly.
Let me show you what happened when I tried to find out how to delete my B&N Press vendor account.
First, I searched their help systems. No luck, except for something indicating I had to send a message to customer support.
I did that, and customer support sent me an automatically generated email pointing me to several help articles, none of which say anything different. I believe an AI system failed to understand my email.
After looking at FAQ articles again, I found one that had incorrect information about how to delete my account. Returning to the help topics screen, I tried the “online chat help” system.
Here’s how that went (this is unadulterated):
Go ahead. Take a moment to get a tissue and blow the milk out of your nose.
Is it believable that “delete vendor account” is incomprehensible? Or is it more likely that they’re doing everything in their power to prevent a vendor from deleting their vendor account? (by the way, ‘vendor account’ is B&N’s terminology) Or at least that their AI chat bot system is incredibly unsophisticated? Or both?
This only reinforces my belief that B&N corporate has switched almost entirely to an AI-based customer service system, and has otherwise adopted customer ‘service’ policies specifically intended to NOT assist customers, or at least vendors, but to wear us down until we comply with their bureaucracy, even if their bureaucracy is broken.
What’s my issue with the SSN and EIN? Well, for starters I don’t want to give them my SSN, which is why I didn’t. But even if I did acquiesce, THERE IS NO WAY TO CHANGE MY VENDOR ACCOUNT TO USE MY SSN, OR TO MAKE IT RECOGNIZE THAT THE TAX ID IT HAS IS ACTUALLY MY EIN. It has my EIN in the SSN field and there’s nothing I can do about that, and apparently nothing B&N can do about it. And if I were to submit a paper W-9 with my EIN in the EIN field, they’d reject it because their system is expecting an SSN. If I were to submit a paper W-9 with my SSN in the SSN field, they’d reject it because the tax ID doesn’t match the tax ID they have (which is my EIN).
It’s like something out of the opening sequence in Gilliam’s “Brazil”.
They simply refuse to accept this was their problem, and refuse to fix it. They keep telling me that I would have to re-create an account using a different email address.
Well, sorry, B&N, but I, in turn, refuse to do that. This was flatly your mistake, both in breaking the account and in being unable and unwilling to fix it. Plus, what’s to guarantee the exact same problem won’t happen with a new account?
What this means is that I can’t sell directly through B&N, which would reduce the number of middle-men. Conversely, B&N can still carry my books, buying them at the rather large retailer markdown from IngramSpark and paying me nothing directly. More margin for B&N, less for the creator of the content.
Note that I had a similar administrative issue at FindawayVoices right after they were bought by Spotify. It took a couple of months to penetrate that bureaucracy, too, but eventually human beings got involved and fixed their software to get things right. Any company that wants to stay in business eventually gets to that point and fixes things.
To me, all of this demonstrates that B&N corporate knows their days are numbered and rather than trying to find ever better ways to include and vet indie works. To me it looks like they’ve severely restricted the amount of money they’re spending on their accounting software and admins, as well as customer service, obviously. They’ve calculated that whatever small sales they lose from being unable to successfully set up vendors like me is a pittance compared to their tradpub online sales. I’m sure that’s true today, but it won’t be true forever. But it sure seems like they’ve chosen their path. KDP is killing them on the indie vendor front. They must know this, which is why I’m convinced they’re simply tucking in and riding tradpub until it dies. I predict B&N will be no more in 5-10 years, tops.
What will happen to local brick-and-mortar B&N bookstores, which are already somewhat sustained by their in-built coffee shops? Will B&N not go under but simply become a bookstore in name only? Can their large children’s books section in conjunction with their recently signficantly larger toy sales section sustain the rest of the store? Will B&N become a third-party bookseller online and a brick-and-mortar children’s store with a coffee shop? It’s all so Frankenstein’s monster, which never works. A retail business needs its single, indentifiable hook, and this is doubly true for a retailer with a long reputation of having such a hook. Abandoning that hook is dangerous, to say the least. Has doing so ever actually worked?
If only they’d commit to leading the way in finding a good method for vetting indie authors, breaking the Catch-22. To be clear, what I’m saying is that Amazon’s system is entirely about reacting to viral trending and bandwagoning and absolutely does not guarantee quality. That’s why tradpub and brick-and-mortar bookstores are still hanging on, riding the illusion of quality.
It’s not in Amazon’s interest to provide good ways of discriminating between quality products and garbage. It’s in Amazon’s interest to normalize an online buying environment where they pass the buck on quality to buyer reviews and bestseller lists.
Brick-and-mortar bookstores, on the other hand, have a real interest in vetting their inventory. It’s not an easy problem, don’t get me wrong. I’m not armchairing, claiming it’s easy. This is a topic that involves aesthetics, after all. But in the era of Grammarly and many other objective ways of at least checking writing quality, and an era of big data-trained AI systems, yes, I believe it’s possible to establish at least behind-the-scenes quality metrics on any book, indie or tradpub, that’s being evaluated for purchase by a retailer. They’d just need to make it good enough to be able to decide an indie book is “in the same realm as a tradpub book, quality-wise”. And if they could do that, they could work out similar metrics for marketability, too. They could flatten the field entirely. Of course, traditional publishers don’t want this to happen. Maybe that’s what’s ultimately behind B&N’s course.
Some folks prefer going to their local book store instead of spending hours at a computer looking for good books, trying to navigate Amazon’s B.S. trends-based, buyer reviews-based system. With all those existing brick-and-mortar stores, B&N could satisfy that need for quality vetting if it put resources into the problem instead of just riding the existing anti-riffraff system. People could walk into a B&N and know that a book found on its shelves, indie or tradpub, is at least not garbage, and that would put such a store ahead of online systems like Amazon, where you really can’t know.
I’m not bitterly wishing for B&N’s demise because of these sad customer service failures, I’m merely predicting it. I can easily imagine a meeting some years back wherein B&N executives brought in a bunch of their actuaries, looked at a bunch of data plots, saw trends, and made this protectionist yet ultimately fatal choice in direction. It’s too bad, but it’s very Murrica. They’ll blame online sales, and everyone will believe that simple explanation. And we’ll be stuck with Amazon, trying to guess what’s a good book and what’s not, regardless of whether it’s tradpub or indie.
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EDIT 23 Mar 2025:
I tried to buy an ebook from B&N online. It clearly stated that it could be read online via my B&N digital library, despite my not owning a Nook device or an Apple mobile device (the only devices supported by the Nook app).
I then learned that something called Nook for Web would be required.
I then learned that Nook for Web is only supported by products that have the lower right corner of the book cover depicted as folded up.
So there actually was no way for me to read the ebook online.
I then submitted a refund request and got this:
What the actual fuck? How can an entity like B&N allow that to happen? I was on one of their preferred browsers (Chrome). I submitted the request through their online email request form.
I then opened a chat to notify them about *that* problem. The entity on the other end (a person? a chatbot? I have no idea) actually did process the refund despite ebooks being officially ineligible for refund (also not stated on the product sell page). So there’s that. But they/it showed zero interest in why submitting a request through their system on one of their preferred browsers could end there, and didn’t say anything like “Oh, my, that’s not good. I apologize for that happening. Let me see what I can do for you.”
That’s the very last time I will try to use B&N online for anything. The fact that their Nook app doesn’t work on Windows strongly suggests to me that B&N may be a satellite of Apple now (maybe that’s old news??), and Apple is perfectly fine with alienating those who don’t use Apple devices, as part of a larger strategy to drive people through the convenience pathway toward Apple devices. That sort of thing backfires with me.
Again, I wish it weren’t like this. I want to root for B&N as an alternative to the ‘Zon. But not when it’s such a terrible experience both for authors and non-Apple-based customers. Absolutely terrible!