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An Update to today’s update…

This morning I received the following email:

Dear Bobbi Holmes,
Your NOOK Press account has been reactivated. Over the next 24 to 72 hours your NOOK Books will be back on sale in the NOOK Bookstore.

Please email us using this form with any questions you may have.
Sincerely,
The NOOK Press Team

While I am pleased they reactivated the account, I would have appreciated an explanation as to WHY it was terminated in the first place. I have sent them another email, asking that question. I will be curious to see if they respond.

Interestingly, this morning one of my readers left this comment on my blog:

Bobbi I just texted Barnes and noble and they told me they are still selling your books and have no knowledge of a termination of your books then sent me a link to show them. I’m not sure what’s going on but they apologized for any inconvenience. I told them they were going to lose a lot of customers. Penny

My thanks to Penny, and to all my readers who contacted Barnes & Noble. I do find it odd they claimed not to have knowledge of any termination—the email Nook Press Team sent me this morning tells another story. Plus, over at my account, while it was no longer on hold, all of my titles were in unpublished status. I went through and republished when possible, and hopefully they will be live by tomorrow.

Once again, thanks to all my readers for your support and for contacting Barnes & Noble. You are the best.

Now I have a book to write…

 

Update on NookPress Termination

As of this morning, all of my books have been removed from Barnes & Noble. I am still waiting for an explanation as to why.

I have only received two emails from Barnes & Noble’s Nook Press regarding this matter.

The first email arrived on Monday, telling me my account was on hold. It instructed me to contact them “for information on why your account has been placed on hold and to discuss any necessary next steps to reactivate your account.”

I was clearly led to believe I simply needed to take some steps in order to reactivate the account. But what steps?

After I contact them, I received an email the following day—yesterday. It did not include any steps to rectify any problem—instead, it informed me my account had been terminated. According to this second email, “We have determined that many of your titles available for sale are in violation of our Content Policy.”

At the time all this was happening, I was hearing from other authors who claimed their NookPress accounts were also being closed, and it is all about an erotica purge. They explained, even if a publisher no longer had erotica published, accounts were being closed.

But perhaps it was all a coincidence—for me and them.

I never meant to suggest Nook Press considered Haunting Danielle erotica—yet I did believe the termination had something to do with past erotica content by the publisher, as the other authors claimed.

So, if not erotica, what else is in their updated Content Policy? I took a closer look and discovered it is a violation for the author to include any hyperlinks or contact information in the eBooks. It has always been standard practice to include a link to an author’s newsletter—and even the standard eBook creation software inserts a hyperlink to the publisher’s website.

In the past, it has always been understood to never include links to competitive stores, but the others links were typically accepted. Was it about hyperlinks or past erotica?

Unfortunately, NookPress never gave me those steps they said they would be sending—the steps to put the account in compliance. Instead, they simply terminated. So, I don’t really know if it was about hyperlinks or past erotica.

Either way, I am moving on. I have a new book to write and another to get off to my editor. You can still find my books at Amazon, Kobo, Smashwords and iTunes.

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NookPress closing author accounts?

This morning I received the following email from Barnes & Noble’s NookPress:

Dear Publisher,
We have determined that many of your titles available for sale are in violation of our Content Policy. Accordingly, the offending titles have been removed from sale and your account is being terminated. We will pay out any and all outstanding royalties during the next payment period. If you attempt to publish similar content under a different account, we will terminate that account as well and withhold royalties from those sales.
The NOOK Press Team

Umm…okay…please explain which of my titles currently for sale are in violation of their content policy. I would love for them to answer that question for me. Unfortunately, NookPress doesn’t have a contact phone number, and they keep sending me form letters in response to my email inquiries.

While I have published erotica in the past, I unpublished my erotica TWO YEARS ago. And even if it was still for sale at Barnes & Noble (which it isn’t) I don’t see how they would have violated any of the terms at the time. After all, they did allow erotica back then, and I tend to play by the rules. (I am a bit of a compulsive rule follower.)

The majority of my books on sale at Barnes & Noble are books in the Haunting Danielle series—a very G-rated paranormal cozy mystery series. I have four very light romances under my Anna J. McIntyre pen name, and several nonfiction. Nothing smutty in the bunch, and all with registered Copyrights—so no violations there.

I know it isn’t a phishing email, because when I log into my NookPress account, it has a notice that the account is on hold. It is always possible this is some kind of a glitch. A few months back they sent me an email claiming there was a new payment pending—one they didn’t owe me. A few days later I received an email claiming the payment message had been sent in error. However, I am hearing from other authors that Barnes and Noble has been sending similar emails to erotica authors.

Funny thing, my titles are still live at Barnes & Noble, at least they were a few minutes ago—telling me none of them were the offending ones. (So what exactly have they removed?) While my books are still there, according to the email, my account is about to be terminated.

Ironically, many of my fellow authors have tried talking me into putting my Haunting Danielle books on Amazon Select. To do so means I have to first un-publish from all non-Amazon sites. I have been reluctant to do this—in spite of the extra money the authors claim I can make—because many of my Haunting Danielle fans like to buy their books at Barnes & Noble, and I don’t feel right about making them exclusive to Amazon, in detriment to my fans.

However, even if I wanted to put them on Select right now I can’t. Why? Because NookPress has my account on hold, and I can’t make any changes—not even to un-publish. So, on one side they claim I can no longer sell my books on their site—and on the flip side, they continue to sell my books, not giving me a way to remove them, therefore making them ineligible for Amazon Select.

Annoying….

 

 

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