Daily Shipping to Barnes and Noble
By Mark Coker
Two pieces of exciting news. 1. In the past, we shipped books and metadata updates to Barnes & Noble twice-weekly, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Starting Monday, we initiated daily shipments five days a week to B&N. The shipments are usually delivered in the middle of the night, which means some updates to Premium Catalog-approved books made today will be delivered before the start of the next business day. This means we now ship daily to Apple, B&N and Kobo, which means faster loading of your books, and faster pricing and metadata updates.  Thank you to our friends at B&N for accomodating faster shipments! 2. We’re now reporting FREE download data from Apple. We’ll be loading the data monthly, usually by the end of the first week of each month. We’ve also gone back and retroactively populated your Sales & Payments report with this information for prior months and years.  Many Smashwords authors will be pleasantly surprised by their download data for free books. As we revealed in our 2013 metrics survey, free ebooks at Apple get about 94 times more downloads than books at any price. Multiple Smashwords authors have broken out at Apple simply by pricing a series starter at FREE. If you haven’t tried FREE on your series starter yet, give it a try, if even for a month or two.