As an independent author, I started by publishing my books on Amazon. Most of my adult books are in Kindle Unlimited, which means I can’t offer the ebook anywhere else, not even for free in a newsletter. But the physical printed book has no limits.
Most of my children’s books can’t be on Kindle Unlimited because they are also sold in a digital form on Teachers Pay Teachers. So I sell those in paperback and ebook with no restrictions.
So, I published a few paperback books on Barnes and Noble. It is hard to publish an ebook on Barnes and Noble—I could never figure out how to format it to be approved. And I also published a few ebooks on Kobo.
But times change, and so do the rules for these distributors.
Amazon started. They raised the royalties on their printed books. That basically meant that if your paperback wasn’t at least $9.99, your royalty would be almost nothing.
I didn’t have to raise my prices much. All workbooks were already $9.99. And my children’s books aren’t worth $9.99, so I left them as they were… so what if I don’t earn a royalty, as long as kids out there read them. That’s what matters. And I meant it.
Well, today, I got an email from Barnes and Noble. They now say that if the print book isn’t at least $14.99, it will be unpublished automatically.
None of my books is that expensive on Amazon.
That meant that I ran to their website and unpublished everything. And so… I say goodbye to Barnes and Noble.
I wonder if I should unpublish the Kobo ebooks too—or try to publish more. I rarely made any money on Kobo, and even less on Barnes and Noble, so why bother, right?