Saberworks,
This is good ammunition! Thanks a ton for posting, and for ordering the book even though it's hard to find. Here's what's going on.
Barnes and Noble ranks their stores by genre. It's all handled in the home office, based on historic sales that given store manages. Individual stores don't order books (usually), the home office does. With a book like Mistborn, they will determine how many copies a given 'type' of store will get.
For instance, with MB2, stores classified as "High SF stores" were put at something like 6 copies. Stores that were mid ranked in SF got 2. All stores that are classified as "Not good sf stores" got 0. (This is different from Mistborn 1, where they decided to go with a 2 copy minimum, even at bad sf stores.) I'm not sure why they decided to go with fewer on this book, particularly since we've ended up selling 75% MORE copies. It might have to do with the way B&N views hardbacks.
The store has the policy, as I understand it, to have 'quick turn around' on hardbacks. They don't want to keep many of them on the shelves because it ties up a lot of money in stock. Paperbacks are cheaper, and they like to stock more of those. So, Mistborn 1 got 'returned' from B&N after only being out for a couple of months. It continued to sell very strongly at Borders and other stores, but at BN, it was gone so quickly, it didn't have time to do a lot of sales.
BN has the philosophy, it seems, of "Sell a lot of hardbacks the first few weeks, then return them before they get stale." That's great for some genres, but in SFF, books tend to need more time to sell. We tend to be a group who buys in paperback, then goes and buys our favorites in hardback. So, for instance, the Elantris hardback can continue to sell good numbers even years after it came out. We're collectors.
Regardless, we now have this problem with MB2 of having trouble getting it into people's hands. The fact that we nearly doubled our first week sales on the book despite this problem is very encouraging to me. However, emails and posts like yours will help us--hopefully--get a second, larger order from BN.
Hope you enjoy the book!
Brandon