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Is B&N bullying writers to link to its online store?
September 26, 2009 | 1:28 pm
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By David Rothman
Is Barnes & Noble high-pressuring writers to link their sites to its online store?
Our friends at GalleyCat have the story, following up on SmartBitches, Trashy Books.
Somebody at one publisher is even said to have emailed writers: “I’m not exaggerating when I say they WILL NOT ORDER the book unless their site is listed.” Ouch!
Now here’s a special e-book angle. When happens when interbook linking is common? Will B&N—and Amazon!—seek special favors? And do some very nasty things to avoid disintermediation?
In fairness to B&N: GalleyCat reports: “One editor writes in to say the message she’s seen from B&N hasn’t been quite so stark: ‘What I’ve heard is B&N requesting that if you are linking to Amazon to please link to them as well.’”
How I’m currently handling this for The Solomon Scandals: I avoid displaying any particular store logo and instead offer detailed buying information, with many options. What do you think, gang? Am I doing the right thing?
Related: ‘The Solomon Scandals vs. Dan Brown’s latest, ‘The Lost Symbol’: Same city, different books.
(Thanks to Paul Berinstein of The Writing Show.)
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Comments:
I’m all for giving B&N hell if this is true, but so far, to my knowledge, nobody’s produced any documentation to back this accusation and B&N has aggressively denied it.
I wrote about this today as well. Sadly, something like this doesn’t surprise me. I just hope it doesn’t turn into a rivalry between Amazon and B&N about who has the most control over authors. They are both big enough that they wield a lot of power in the publishing industry.
Do what you want and ignore any pressures. I list both on my website and plan to add The Book Depository soon. B&N’s problem is that linking doesn’t pay. My Amazon links pay about twice a year. I’ve never gotten a penny from my B&N links.
I’ve always thought it prudent to link to all major online retailers AND remind readers that they can buy books locally; see the bottom of this page for an example of how I do it: http://sfwriter.com/exff.htm
@David, if both offer your book, go ahead and list them both. The more outlets, the merrier. Of course, if one is out-performing the other, you can always use that as leverage to get some concessions from the loser…
@Brad, I’m sure it will turn into exactly that… open rivalry between the two “e-book giants” (sort of bypassing Sony, but that’s another matter). But that might be a good thing, especially as B&N will have ePub-capable readers, plus eReader (and therefore more non-dedicated devices), making their books available for more people worldwide. That could push Amazon into widening its scope into other readers and formats. We might even see some healthy price competition.
Steve,
B&N only sell to the USA – so it wouldn’t matter if they sold plain text files, still not going to increase their reach.
They have a U.S. lockdown, too? Oh, I give up… can’t anyone get it done right?
And I was just now actually impressed with the e-book buying process at B&N… at least it didn’t force me to download and use a new reader (though the book was DRM’d to my CC, of course).