Barnes and Noble is apparently overhauling its self-pub system–they’re rebranding it as NookPress and giving it a new UI and everything. So they’re asking all the PubIt! authors to move their accounts over into the new system as part of the NookPress launch.
Which is all very well and good except for the part where it’s apparently buggy as all hell.
I went through the steps to port my account over today, and right off the bat a big glaring UI bug leapt out at me. On the account login screen, when clicking the checkbox to have it remember my login information, I wound up with something that looked like this.
Pretty Sure It’s Not Supposed to Look Like That
But I was willing to live with that as long as I was able to get logged in and get at my data. Which was. Mostly. I had to re-add stuff like my payment information, and the category to which Faerie Blood was assigned–i.e., Fiction -> Fantasy -> Contemporary.
Then I ran into the bigger, even more annoying bug. When I re-entered my category information, I noticed a huge lack of anything obvious to click on to save that data. There was a “Put On Sale” button up at the top, which Dara proposed was supposed to be the new Save button. Except when I clicked on that, it threw up a huge (and uninformative) error that basically said “well, gosh, something’s broken! Damned if we know what!” And, of course, when I tried to click back to the Category dialog, the changes I’d tried to make were gone.
But you know what I do for a day job, people? I test web pages. And I immediately had a nasty suspicion that I knew what was wrong.
When I opened up Winnowill to boot into Windows 7 and fire up IE 9, I discovered I was right. The missing Save and Save & Continue buttons did in fact appear in Windows-based browsers, where they did not in the Mac-based ones.
Seriously not impressed by this. UI wackiness I can handwave, but big glaring functionality problems like that?! How did this get past their QA people? DO they have QA people?! I mean, seriously. Even aside from my annoyance as the writer trying to save her book’s data in this scenario, my professional pride as a QA Engineer is offended by that big a problem having been missed.
The long and short of it is, right now Faerie Blood‘s not available for the Nook. I think I got it successfully updated over in my Windows install, but as of this writing the book’s marked as “processing”. And I don’t know when that processing is going to complete. It may finish in another few minutes. It may not be done until tomorrow.
I apologize for the inconvenience to any Nook owners who try to buy the book and can’t find it. I will be happy to hand-sell any Nook owners the book myself in the meantime, for its current price of $2.99 USD, sent to my Paypal account.
