Here is my Nook experience. I published all my titles on Nook at the very beginning, I think it was October of 2010. At first they didn't seem to be selling very well. But then lo and behold, after a month or two, (sometime around late December, early January 2011) B&N had discovered they had some sort of reporting glitch, and began crediting sales for preceding months that had been missed. All the way back to October 2010, my sales were suddenly about equal with my sales on Amazon. The Amazon/Nook ratio was about the same until sometime near the middle of last year (2011), when sales of my Nook titles began to take a nosedive, until late in the year, sales were barely a tenth of what they had been. Finally, last December when Amazon rolled out Kindle Select, I decided to abandon B&N and put everything exclusively on Amazon. There seemed to be no point in staying with Nook, since sales were so poor.
Compare to Amazon. I started publishing on Kindle back in late 2007, early 2008, as soon as they opened up the KDP, or DTP as it was called back then. Sales began slow, but quickly picked up. Every year, my sales on Kindle have at least tripled, sometimes more, over the preceding year, and 2012 is starting out to be my best year ever on Kindle.
I am perfectly willing to accept the possibility that people with Nooks simply aren't interested in reading my books. Maybe in that first half year, I tapped out my audience on Nook and so my sales vanished. But I just don't believe it. After Barnes and Noble's initial fiasco with reporting sales, I wasn't sure how trustworthy their reporting was. And then after reading threads where lots of other indie publishers were experiencing the same sales dropoff issue, I decided the sales dropoff had to be due to something Barnes and Noble was doing.I think all the evidence points to something on their end, not on my end.
I don't think they're inaccurately reporting sales. I think the sales dropoff has occurred because they have somehow made indie books less visible in their store. I know before I pulled my titles, when I searched for them, they didn't show up half the time. I would type in my exact pen name, and only a handful of my titles would show up. Or I would type in an exact title, and it wouldn't show up.
I think they've probably done something to supress indie titles in searches, at the behest of the major mainstream publishing companies.
To summarize: I don't think there is a reporting issue. I think there's an issue with a reader's ability to both search directly for indie titles and authors, and to stumble across indie titles.
People don't have trouble finding me or my titles on Amazon. But I think they have do have trouble finding me on B&N, and I think they're having that trouble because B&N deliberately did something to make it difficult, sometime near the middle of last year. Call me a conspiracy theorist if you want, but that's what I believe. I think B&N ran into the Big 6 in a dark alley somewhere, and were threatened into sabotaging the indie publishing revolution.
