Maven – Unable to publish artifacts to Nexus maven repository using Gradle

I am new to Gradle, nexus and Maven and trying to use Gradle 'publish' task to publish maven artifacts from Jenkins to a new nexus repository. The Jenkins job is failing with below error while publishing. I have provided the user name and password for Nexus in the job.

:common-test:publishMavenJavaPublicationToMavenRepositoryCould not find metadata 
com.xx.audit:common-test:1.0.3-SNAPSHOT/maven-metadata.xml in
 remote (https://nexus.xx.com:8443/content/repositories/snapshots)

Upload https://nexus.xx.com:8443/content/repositories/snapshots/yy/audit/common-test/1.0.3-SNAPSHOT/common-test-1.0.3-20151102.120123-1.jar
Could not transfer artifact com.xx.audit:common-test:jar:1.0.3-20151102.120123-1 
from/to remote (https://nexus.xx.com:8443/content/repositories/snapshots):
 Could not write to resource 'yy/audit/common-test/1.0.3-SNAPSHOT/common-test-1.0.3-20151102.120123-1.jar'

Do we need to create folder structure in nexus maven repository before publishing first time? And add the maven-metadata.xml? How are the *.pom.sha, *.pom.md5 are generated.
Please help me on this.

build.gradle configuration:

  apply plugin: "maven-publish"

    //* New Gradle task to jar source
    task sourcesJar(type: Jar, dependsOn: classes) {
        classifier = 'sources'
        from sourceSets.main.allSource
    }

    //* New Gradle task to jar javadoc
    task javadocJar(type: Jar, dependsOn: javadoc) {
        classifier = 'javadoc'
        from javadoc.destinationDir
    }

    publishing {
        publications {
            mavenJava(MavenPublication) {
                from components.java

                artifact sourcesJar {
                    classifier "sources"
                }
            }
        }
    }

    publishing {
        repositories {
            maven {
                credentials {
                    username nexusUsername
                    password nexusPassword
                }   
                if (project.version.endsWith('-SNAPSHOT')) {
                    url nexusSnapshotRepoURL
                } else {
                    url nexusReleaseRepoURL
                }   
            }   
        }
    }