When Barnes and Noble Acccepts Your Book

Are you a self published author? I got an interesting item for you.

I sent a hard copy paperback copy of my book Squeaky’s Sassy Cat Tales to the Barnes and Noble small press. The hard copy was done through Amazon’s Create Space. I received an acceptance letter stating that they use Lightning Source as their POD printer. Thing is, unlike Create Space who does everything on their end, with Lightning Source, the author has to do all the prep work. Also Lightning Source has the expanded distribution to Barnes and Noble that Create Space does not.

Now, Create Space is a great resource for those who do not have the time, expensive software, and computers to do prep work before submitting. It is great for those authors whose marking platform is public speaking and personal promotion of their books.

Also, Amazon is Barnes and Nobles competitor, so that is why I cannot just send my book over.

This means the word document has to be printed out as a PDF using Adobe Acrobat with embedded fonts, no RGB’s but with CMYK or grayscale. Also the cover has to be done using their template with Photoshop CS, QuarkX or a program I found called Book Cover Pro that can handle the template. Of course, it is best to do this work on a Apple computer instead of a PC, since PC’s cannot entirely erase all the RGB out of photos and documents. Quite a daunting and time consuming process if you don’t have the right stuff.

I finally had to contact a person who is versed in this arena with the correct software and computers to convert my text and cover for uploading. The person charges by the hour.

Luckily, since I bought 10 of my own ISBN’s for the price of two from Bowker, instead of using a Create Space ISBN, my ISBN stays with me. I don’t have to go buy another one.

Hope this is help info.