The Canadian company Kobo has dedicated e-readers and
these are my notes from the Cracking Kobo seminar given by Mark Lefebvre on 23
January 2013. The biggest player in the self-publishing market is Amazon, but I
am interested to see Kobo’s growth in the marketplace, and they have some
interesting strategies which may propel them more into the limelight in 2013
and 2014, so I thought it was useful to attend the video seminar. Here are my notes from the session - it's a long post, but I also left out a lot of stuff, and probably really useful stuff, so do check through the links if you're interested, where others have detailed more!
I haven’t self-published anything with Kobo to date,
but have 2 novels published by The Wild Rose Press on Kobo, and also a
collection of short stories (which is free).
Kobo uses the epub format, and their policy is any
ebook, any device, any time.
My self-published collection of short stories went up
on Kobo via Smashwords, which allows self-publishers to distribute their titles
to a variety of different ebook retailers. It is possible to choose which
retailers to distribute to via Smashwords – at the moment I turn Amazon off,
because I upload directly to Amazon using KDP, and now that I have learned more
about Kobo Writing Life, I am keen to try to publish there directly too. Like
Amazon’s KDP, this gives the publisher access to a dashboard where they can
have better control, including live sales data.
Mark’s slides from the presentation are
here, and I found an interesting you tube from Hugh Howey talking about
Kobo Writing Life here.
Here are some of the main points I gleaned from the
seminar – any mistakes are mine!
Kobo uses epub format.
You can buy your own isbn, or use internally generated
‘dummy’ isbns.
70% royalty rate for books priced $1.99-$12.99 – with the
ability to specify different sales prices for different territories. An
interesting point that Mark made was that rather than allow the automatic
readjustment for currencies, setting the price for individual currencies can
earn you a few more pennies in each market…
The rate is 45% for all other price points.
Payment is 45 days after end of period once $100
threshold reached, and this is paid into your bank account in whatever currency
you choose. They also do a twice annual purge (next on Feb 15 2013) to clear
down the books, so if you’ve made below the threshold, you will at least see
the royalties at some stage.
They create an invoice for you, and pay you against
that, and don’t withhold taxes, it is the authors job to make sure that they
are compliant in whatever country they live in.
Flexibility on hybrid files – so if you have sold the
UK rights (for example) but hold the rights to different territories, you can
make the ebook available for sale in just the territories that you hold the
rights to.
The author dashboard has a lot of graphs and sales
crunching info, including a global snapshot of sales.
You can upload in a variety of formats including word,
mobi or epub, and a converter will convert to mobi, although the best way to do
it seems to be to convert your file to epub, check and tweak, and then upload
the final epub version for best results.
You can set a date in the future for publication, so
can have preorders.
You can set the price and change it anytime. Including
FREE.
And a dedicated Kobo Learning Centre is full of information
about how to do things. Here’s
the FAQ’s section.
Kobo is in 190 countries, and has localised rankings
and bestsellers lists. Interestingly, they rank the author, not the books, so
if for example your books Fabulous Romance one, Fabulous Romance two and
Fabulous Romance three are the top three bestsellers on Kobo (dream on!)
instead of taking up the top three spots, you are featured ONCE, which allows
more authors to be featured in the top 20, which is not something that is
likely to be useful for me, but interesting nonetheless. Mark also talked about
a system that will notify you if you’re ranking high in a particular territory.
One point I found most interesting is the partnership
options that Kobo has entered into. I became aware of this when I visited the
UK in December, and kept seeing Kobo e-readers for sale in WH Smith, a major
bookseller in the UK. Here’s
a report about the WH Smith partnership. Here in Ireland, Kindle is
everywhere, but in the UK, I saw Kobo everywhere. This
report states that Kobo doubled its sales in 2012, and continues to
experience rapid growth, and this
report from The Bookseller, states that they achieved 7 fold growth in
sales in December alone.
As well as the UK WH Smith partnership, they have
partnered with the ABA in the US as well as others, In short, their approach to
the marketplace is strong and aggressive. Mark spoke about the possibility of
authors doing promotion in their local stores, promoted by Kobo.
There was talk about Kobo’s facebook, and also about the
ability to have ratings and reviews transfer automatically from Goodreads. I
found this to be a very significant feature, and here is the link about how to
get that to work. Eric Kent Edstrom has written a great tutorial on how to do
this,
which is here. I tried this yesterday for one of my books, but it hasn’t
transferred my goodreads stuff over yet. For a new user of the Kobo Writing
Life platform who has a strong goodreads community interested in their books,
having the reviews port across could be fantastic. Of course, if you have some horrid goodreads
reviews, you might decide against it!
Also of interest? That the people who own Pinterest also
own Kobo… more.
So, in conclusion:
I’m a hybrid author, in that I am self-published and
published by publishers. For self-publishing, I have found Amazon’s kdp select
program (for which I have to be exclusive to Amazon) to be great for driving
sales and increasing my visibility. I’m doing okay, always want to do better,
but at this stage I’m selling hundreds every month. My traditionally published
titles are selling better due to the halo effect from my self-published works.
I like the look and drive of Kobo, and think that their rapid growth is something
to be aware of and to inform myself about. I was impressed by the presentation,
and found much to like in Kobo Writing Life. But looking at my sales reports, I’ve
sold really miserably at Kobo for my traditionally published work. Like, really miserably.
I’d like to try out the Kobo Writing Life
self-publishing platform, but have read much about the difficulties in gaining
traction and getting visibility there – there’s no point in having a platform
to sell if no-one can find me! And right now, leaving the kdp select program
feels like killing a golden goose in a vague hope of attaining visibility
elsewhere, so I’m reticent to try it.
For now.
But the one thing you can be sure of in publishing, is
that things change quickly, and being informed is the best policy for making
future decisions.
I’d be very interested to hear from anyone currently
using Kobo Writing Life – is it working for you?
