B&N’s PubIt To Challenge Amazon’s DTP

Amazon is not the only company dedicated to making the publishing process more straight-forward for authors. Those of you who have been following Amazon Kindle for quite some time already know about Amazon DTP platform. It is an easy to use service that lets authors bring their work to Amazon Kindle store quickly. B&N’s PubIt takes a similar approach. The service, which was launched just recently, is a DIY platform that gives independent authors the chance to distribute their work digitally through B&N.

In order to take advantage of this service, authors will need to open up a B&N account. Putbit! automatically converts uploaded works to ePub (Microsoft Word, TXT, HTML, or RTF conversions are supported). The process is quite similar to how DTP works. B&N only offers 65% royalty (as opposed to Amazon’s 70%) to authors. Those authors who decide to go below $2.99 or above $9.99 will get a much lower share (40%).  It is interesting to note that B&N requires credit card and bank information from authors just in case returns exceed sales (strange but not uncommon).

Amazon and B&N are not the only companies that offer self-publishing services. Apple (through Smashswords) and Sony have their own DIY services too. It’ll be interesting to see what type of quality controls B&N will impose on authors’ works.

Is B&N’s 65% royalty for authors too low?