If you are viewing this, you are inquiring about why Empire Publishing has applied a separate fee to get onto Barnes & Noble. What you are about to read, you will not hear from another book publisher. The reason is that they want you to assume that the printing of books in done in house. That is not the truth. All publishers that offer distribution through POD (Print on Demand) use one of two printers or both. Don’t let them fool you into believing otherwise. The two nationwide/worldwide networks of printers were Createspace and Ingram. Prior to September 2018, Createspace had expanded distribution that included Barnes & Noble. However, Amazon merged Createspace with its KDP publishing. The merger is yet another attempt at Amazon monopolizing the book publishing industry. The new KDP publishing offers expanded distribution, but regardless of what they claim, it does not include Barnes & Noble.

Overnight, this put publishers in a conundrum. Some already had the pricing in place to accommodate an Ingram only printing and distribution platform. Others, like Empire Publishing that use both printers to offer lower pricing structures on publishing packages either dropped Barnes & Noble as a distribution outlet or substantially raised their prices to guarantee book distribution on Barnes & Noble. Instead of raising the prices at this time, Empire Publishing has chosen to keep the low publishing package prices and offer an add-on for Barnes & Noble distribution (that will also include Amazon).

The cost of this add-on is to cover the strict guidelines in formatting that differ from KDP and fees associated with printing and distribution through Ingram. Empire Publishing’s packages Titanium, Diamond, and Children’s already have the fees included in the package price. Empire Publishing, for the time, has decided to keep the low cost of Bronze, Copper, Silver, Platinum and Gold where they are and allow the author to decide to add-on the Barnes & Noble distribution or not.