Amazon will release Ferriss’s book on November 20, amid media coverage that the company probably isn’t thrilled about. Articles in Publishers Weekly, the Wall Street Journal and now the New York Times have focused on low print sales of Amazon NY’s first big title, Penny Marshall’s memoir My Mother Was Nuts, and bricks-and-mortar bookstores’ refusal to carry Amazon titles.

As Amazon attempts to sign big-name authors in the future, it will have to convince them that print distribution isn’t important. The 4-Hour Chef may be sold at few places other than Amazon. Barnes & Noble, the largest bookstore chain in the U.S., won’t stock Amazon titles in its stores, and many independent bookstores refuse to do so as well. And while Amazon is making its New York titles available as ebooks to other retailers through distributor Ingram, few rivals are biting. The ebook edition of My Mother Was Nuts, for example, is for sale at Kobo but not at Google, Barnes & Noble’s Nook store or Apple’s iBookstore.

Ferriss says he is not worried. He is cross-promoting The 4-Hour Chef, which Amazon will release on November 20, within his earlier two Crown titles. He announced on his blog today that the digital editions of The 4-Hour Workweek and 4-Hour Body will be updated with a sample chapter from The 4-Hour Chef, and The 4-Hour Chef will contain excerpts from the two earlier books.

“This is something that I effectively brokered. It made such straightforward business sense to cross-promote between the books,” Ferriss told me. He said it wasn’t hard to get Crown to agree to include the sample chapter of 4-Hour Chef in the earlier titles, though the Crown ebooks won’t include buy links back to Amazon.

Those articles, Ferriss told me, give the impression that he “didn’t know what he was getting into, and was very enthusiastic, and is now having second thoughts — which is completely, 100 percent inaccurate…I remain as enthusiastic and optimistic about this book as I was in the beginning.” People assume that success “means #1 New York Times bestseller,” he said. “I’ve never said that. I would love to have a #1 New York Times [bestseller], but the New York Times list skews heavily toward books that have reporting from multiple retail outlets. And therefore, I’m not pinning all of my hopes on the NYT list, nor did I ever do that. From the very first time that I considered working with Amazon, I had to come to terms with the fact that I might not sell print through retail.” On his blog, he writes, “Fiction: My goal is to have The 4-Hour Chef hit national bestseller lists. Fact: My goal is to have all three of my books on the lists at the same time.”

I asked Ferriss what he thinks about Barnes & Noble’s no-Amazon-books-in-stores policy — after all, the policy is partially having its intended effect at least in terms of media coverage like the articles I linked to above. “I’m not clear on what they are trying to prevent, or hoping to,” he said. “Do I blame them? No. If I were in their shoes, would I do the same thing? Maybe. I’m much more curious about what Barnes & Noble’s ten- to twenty-year plan is, as opposed to why they’re doing this with Amazon.”

When Ferriss originally signed up with Amazon, he expected “blowback” from the traditional publishing industry and retailers, he told me (and the NYT). “I’m very convinced this book will succeed in terms of the sheer number of units moved to readers,” he said. “I think it could sell as many [copies] or more than my previous two books. Am I going to have the same channels of distribution? No, I won’t, necessarily, because there are people who have blacklisted it…I think that no matter how well I do — even if I sell a million Kindle copies, for instance — there will be people in the book trade who call it a failure because they’re using different metrics.”

Photo courtesy of Flickr / Tim Ferriss

Following our story’s publication yesterday, I learned that Barnes & Noble headquarters sent an email to its branches around the country telling them to pull the Amazon titles (which are being published and distributed in print by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt under an imprint called New Harvest). This morning, a Barnes & Noble spokeswoman told me, “Our policy has not changed. We are not carrying Amazon titles.”

Without further clarification from Barnes & Noble (though I’ve asked the company for it), it appears that local Barnes & Noble branches ordered and stocked copies of Penny Marshall’s My Mother Was Nuts and Jessica Valenti’s Why Have Kids?, possibly because the company hadn’t stated its policy clearly enough to the stores and because local branches have always had a fair amount of latitude in choosing the titles they want to stock.

Moby Lives, a blog operated by independent publisher Melville House, first saw My Mother Was Nuts on a display table in a Manhattan Barnes & Noble. I turned up other copies in stores around Manhattan (and they are still there this morning). paidContent readers reported seeing the book in Barnes & Noble stores in Chicago, Indiana and New Hampshire. Melville House executive editor Kelly Burdick found it in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Louisville, Washington DC, and Boston.

Barnes & Noble said in February that it would not stock Amazon Publishing titles in its “store showrooms” and that readers could only buy them online at BN.com. That appeared to be a stricter statement than CEO William Lynch’s comment to Publishers Weekly in August 2011 that “we will not stock physical books in our stores if we are not offered the available digital format.” Amazon is making its New York imprint titles available to other ebook retailers, but (at least so far) Barnes & Noble isn’t selling Nook versions of the books.

Kelly Burdick, the executive editor at independent publisher Melville House, noticed one of Amazon’s lead titles, the Penny Marshall memoir My Mother Was Nuts, in a Barnes & Noble store on Manhattan’s Upper East Side this weekend. Actually, not only was the book in stock, it was displayed on a table at the front of the store.

I used the “Pick Up In Store” feature on BN.com to check for other Amazon Publishing titles in Barnes & Noble’s NYC stores. My Mother Was Nuts is in stock at the five Barnes & Noble stores closest to me. Another Amazon Publishing title, Jessica Valenti’s Why Have Kids?, is in stock at two of five stores near me.

Why did Barnes & Noble capitulate? I’ve asked the company that question, but since I haven’t gotten a response from them yet, a few possibilities:

• Because Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is publishing and distributing the print versions of Amazon New York’s titles, maybe Barnes & Noble’s okay with carrying them. That was my theory back in January, but I figured I was wrong after Carey’s February statement that B&N wouldn’t carry the books in its stores.
• Because Amazon is making its New York ebooks available to other digital bookstores through distributor Ingram, maybe Barnes & Noble went with its earlier statement that it wouldn’t carry the print books in stores unless it also had access to the ebook editions. Oddly, though, Nook editions of Why Have Kids? and My Mother Was Nuts are still unavailable.
• A theory from Publishers Lunch news editor Sarah Weinman:

@laurahazardowen another theory: Valenti and Marshall are local authors; is that the case nation-wide? (Anastas is local too…)

— Sarah Weinman (@sarahw) October 1, 2012

So here’s your homework for today: Visit a Barnes & Noble store near you and see if you can find one of these books there.

The deal, with Ingram’s digital distribution arm CoreSource, will make the ebooks available to Amazon competitors like Barnes & Noble, Apple and Kobo — though, of course, those competitors won’t be required to stock Amazon titles. The idea of Apple selling Amazon’s ebooks is particularly interesting, given the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Apple and book publishers for allegedly colluding to set ebook prices.

“We welcome Amazon Publishing’s New York adult group to the growing list of publishers who use our service,” said Phil Ollila, Ingram Content Group’s chief content officer. Titles from Amazon’s West Coast imprints are not included in the Ingram deal.

Amazon New York is publishing its first list this fall. Feature titles include Timothy Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Chef, Penny Marshall’s My Mother Was Nuts and Jessica Valenti’s Why Have Kids?

Amazon already makes a couple of its ebooks available through other retailers. Barnes & Noble previously stated that it would not carry Amazon Publishing print titles in its physical stores, in part because it was not allowed to sell the digital editions. Now that Barnes & Noble will have access to the ebooks as well, I’ve asked the company if it is going to change its policy.

A quick search through Barnes & Noble and Kobo’s websites this morning did not yet turn up Amazon NY titles. For example, one of the early titles on Amazon NY’s fall list – Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business by Harley Manning and Kerry Boche — is available through Amazon as a print book and an ebook. Outside In is only available as a print book on Barnes & Noble’s site, and it is not available as an ebook on Kobo. I have asked Ingram for a statement and will update this post when I hear back.

Crain’s attributes Amazon’s willingness to pay such a high price to the fact that its imprint is still an untested entity and that some bookstores may refuse to carry Amazon Publishing titles. Strone said the idea that Amazon offered a lot more than other publishers is untrue: “Why would they pay $100,000 more? It was an auction and they won it,” he said to me. He told the Associated Press that Amazon offered a much higher e-book royalty rate than the traditional publishers’ standard 25 percent and said, “It was a decision whether to go with old school or new school.”

Amazon’s entry into trade book publishing, and its high profile hire of Kirshbaum, sent waves through the publishing industry this spring. So far, though, Amazon’s New York imprint (which still does not have a name) has not made any deals that have traditional publishers crying “OH MY GOD I CAN’T BELIEVE THEY GOT [THAT PERSON].” There’s no Oprah memoir, for example. Amazon New York’s first acquisition was Timothy Ferriss’s 4-Hour Chef; in that instance, Ferriss approached Amazon directly and didn’t shop around a proposal. More recently, Amazon New York bought a memoir by exiled Chinese poet Liao Yiwu and a narrative nonfiction title about hacker-activists by Gregg Housh and Barrett Brown.

Now there is Penny Marshall, whose My Mother Was Nuts will be published in Fall 2012. Marshall may be a low-profile celebrity, but in a way, Amazon’s acquisition of her memoir makes a lot of sense: The people most likely to be familiar with Marshall (or to care about her) happen to be the people who are the most avid e-readers. The middle-aged women who buy the most e-books and are most likely to own e-readers. Thirty percent of e-reader owners are over the age of 55. Penny Marshall is 70.

There were “lots of factors” for why Amazon bought the book, Strone said. “That’s certainly one of them, one of many.”