Submitting to Barnes and Noble Small Press

Barnes and Noble Small Press

So you decide to send to Barnes and Noble Small Press one of your self-published hardcopy paperback books.

A few weeks later you receive an acceptance letter that yes they want to carry your book. Then you read that Barnes and Noble use Lightning Source as their POD and extended distribution.

Well, unlike Amazon’s Create Space where they do all the work on their end, the author has to do all the prep work for submission to Lightning Source.

The reason? Lightning Source is only a printer, they do no editorial work, text, cover set up, or cover design. You have to do it all yourself.

Now that requires the use of some expensive software that most of us authors do not have on our laptops. First off, all PC laptops process both black and white photographs in RGB  instead of CMYK. This is the reason graphic designers use Apple computers.

The expensive software to do desktop publishing to prepare a book for printing is the full version of Photoshop CS for converting photos to either grayscale and saving them in an 8 bit format, Adobe Acrobat for saving the interior of the book or buying Book cover pro which will work with the Lightning Source cover generator.

Now since I am only using the trial version of Adobe Acrobat, my interior file was accepted by Lightning Source. However, I still have contacted a person who has been in publishing for over 20 years who prepares book files and covers. That will cost me about $250.00 to get the whole shebang done.

And another important thing about self-publishing, buy your own ISBN numbers. Those freebies that the self-publishing sites use cannot be used anywhere else. I bought ten ISBN’s from Bowker for the price of two.

Hope this information is helpful.