So after a month of waiting, Kobo’s publishing platform, Writing Life, is finally up! I just finished uploading all of my titles (except my short stories–I’ll just continue to distribute through Smashwords for now). Genesis Earth is already available, and the others should be up soon.
For those of you who are readers, this means that you’ll be able to find my books on Kobo almost as soon as they go up on Amazon. The formatting will (hopefully) be cleaner, since I’ll have direct control. Prices will generally be the same as on other platforms, but when I change the price on Amazon, I’ll change it simultaneously on Kobo, too–no waiting for weeks on end for the price to drop.
For those of you who are writers, I’ll be sure to keep you updated with thoughts on my experience. So far, it looks pretty good: the royalty rates are better than Amazon (70% for titles priced $1.99 – $12.99, 45% for all other titles), the publishing process is faster, and the upload formats (.epub, .doc, .docx, .mobi, and .odt) are generally more flexible. Downsides include a higher minimum threshold for direct deposit ($100 or every 6 months), fewer category choices, and what appears to be a forced 2:3 aspect ratio for cover art.
Besides that–oh, look, Bringing Stella Home and Journey to Jordan just went up too! Man, that’s fast! And it looks like the aspect ratios went back to 3:4, so I won’t have to redo the covers. That’s a relief! So yeah, I’ll be sure to keep you updated.
Also, in preparing my books for upload to Kobo, I discovered some pretty egregious formatting errors for the Barnes & Noble copies of Bringing Stella Home and Sholpan. I’m not sure what happened–probably it had something to do with an older version of Calibre or Open Office, since I was overseas at the time and only had access to my netbook. So yeah, if you downloaded one of the broken copies, just shoot me an email and I’ll send you the updated epub version, no questions asked.
In general, I need to revamp my publishing process. Currently, it resembles jumping through a ring of fire while juggling half a dozen angry poodles. Open Office, Mobipocket, Notepad, Calibre, KindleGen, DOS prompts, and Kindle for PC–yeah, I’d better get on that. If you have any suggestions for free/open source software that does .mobi and .epub, please let me know.
In other news, I finished my first pass through Stars of Blood and Glory, and should be finished with draft 2.0 by the end of the week. After that, it’s back to Star Home and Star Wanderers.
I published a book with Kobo today and cannot figure out how to make sure the formatting is correct. Their sample button simply sends it to my library and then nothing happens when I go to my library. I can’t sample any of their books like I can on Amazon and B&N. Not sure that making customers jump through hoops like this is going to give them an edge over anyone. Any tips??
Not sure. I formatted my files as .epub beforehand and uploaded them without previewing. I’m pretty sure they’re clean, but if problems pop up, I’ll have to look into that.
I’d suggest asking around on the Kindle Boards.
Uploading without previewing?? Not sure that’s the best business model to follow. The only way you’ll know if there are formatting problems is when no one buys your books. We should be sure each book loads correctly and doesn’t end up looking like some Smashwords meatgrinder hack job. I sent Kobo an email yesterday and have yet to hear back. We’ll see how their customer service stacks up against Amazon’s. I was stoked about KWL but I get the feeling they’re going to be the rinky-dink outlet I feared they would. I’ll keep ya posted if I hear back.
Thanks Joe;)
Kobo is owned by Rikoten and has about nine million customers. They still have some kinks to work out with their self-publishing platform and their search engine, but I wouldn’t go so far to call them a “rinky-dink outlet.”
All of the previewers (especially Nook and Kindle) have problems. I only check them to make sure that I haven’t uploaded the wrong file by mistake. Instead, I make sure to upload a clean copy of whatever file type actually goes out to the customer, in order to minimize problems with conversion and maximize my control over the process. That is (yet another reason) why Smashwords is so frustrating–they won’t let me upload an actual ebook to their site.
People are buying my books across all the outlets (except Diesel, for some reason). I can’t afford to buy all my books plus a nook, a kobo, and a kindle, so really I have to just trust that everything is fine. I do preview the .mobi files on my kindle, but of course kindle doesn’t take .epub so I have to stick with Calibre for that. But I’m changing my publication process so that I create an .epub first, then convert it into .mobi. Hopefully, that will help me to catch any problems that might happen in the .epub version.