Formatting for B&N Nook – Ouch! This is painful

Over the past couple days, I’ve been trying to get Dead Dwarves, Dirty Deeds up on Nook.

First, I had to contend with Barnes and Noble hiding the Nook self-publishing system. I couldn’t remember what it was called, but the B&N Nook web pages don’t mention anything about publishing anywhere! At least Amazon puts a link on the Kindle Store pages that says: “Publish on Kindle”. On their Nook pages, B&N provides absolutely no way to find out how to publish on Nook. Ouch! I guess they don’t want more authors to publish.

However, I endeavored to persevere. I searched on Bing for Nook publishing and finally learned that their publishing method is called pubit! So, I go back to www.barnesandnoble.com and look under all the Nook menus, but to no avail. There is no link to pubit! anywhere that I can find.

So, I use the B&N.com search function for pubit. It gives me the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Sigh.

They sure are making this difficult for people to find out what is going on with publishing on Nook.

Finally, I search Bing again and find some article that gives me a link to the pubit! Home page. To save anyone else the headaches this caused me, here is the super secret hidden link that B&N doesn’t want you to find:

http://pubit.barnesandnoble.com/pubit_app/bn?t=pi_reg_home

So, I create an account, which isn’t too hard and bookmark the My Titles page.

The next time I go to the page, it takes me back to the pubit! Home page. However, there is no Sign-in option. Only a Create a pubit! account and Sign-out options. How the heck do I sign back in to the site?

If I click Sign-out it takes me to the Sign in page.

Anyway, now I’ve created an account and figured out how to get back into that account. Next up, create a title.

The process to set up titles is pretty easy: title, cover, author, publisher, categories, description, etc. All of this is easy.

Until you get to formatting your ebook.

B&N uses the .epub system for their ebooks, and if you search their help you can find info on this open source, industry standard for publishing ebooks. Well, it’s actually composed of 3 open standards: OPS, OPF, and OCF. Don’t concern yourself with what these acronyms mean. It’s all garbleydegook.

B&N gives you an 11-page PDF, PubIt! ePub Formatting Guide. https://simg1.imagesbn.com/pimages/pubit/support/pubit_epub_formatting_guide.pdf

Surprisingly, this PDF does not give you any specifics on how to format your ebook. It doesn’t tell you how to do the table of contents, or insert a page break, or center text, or insert line breaks. It doesn’t give any examples of how to duplicate how that Nook page looks.

Instead, it tells you about the file requirements and meta data needed for Nook ebooks, plus SIX pages of basic Latin Unicode characters. What?

This PDF tells you a bunch of annoying things about the annoying .epub format. Basically, it’s about 10 times more difficult to do things for Nook than it is to do the same things for Kindle. The PDF doesn’t tell you the correct names of files, uses unnecessary terms, and is generally a poor instruction guide.

It took me about an hour to figure how to format things the way I wanted in Kindle. It took me about an hour to find instructions on how to format for Nook! More ouch.

Nook really needs to hire some good technical writers, web designers, and marketing folks. They are making it way too hard to publish on Nook.

When I figure out how to format for Nook, I’ll post instructions. I do not expect to be in a good mood at that time. ;)