SFFMP 125: Kobo’s New Subscription Service and the State of the Industry with Mark Lefebvre
Today, Mark Lefebvre, horror writer and the Director of Self-Publishing and Author Relations at Kobo, joined us for his second time on the show. Previously, we chatted about international sales trends and tips for selling more books at Kobo.
Today, we asked Mark about some of the new developments at Kobo, such as a subscription service for readers (one which indie authors can enroll in) called Kobo Plus. You’re not automatically enrolled. If you’re interested, you need to select to participate in the “rights” section for each book, and Kobo asks that you be willing to leave your book in for a six month period (they’re asking the same thing from traditional publishers), to help them plan for promotions.
We also asked Mark about some of the state-of-industry stuff. For instance, is the ebook market now “saturated,” or is it still growing in the U.S. and in other countries? What percentage of ebooks being sold come from traditional publishing, small press, and indie authors? What can newer authors do to gain traction now that there’s more competition in the marketplace? Is a permafree Book 1 still a good marketing strategy for Kobo? And how might one get more books to sell in the growing international markets?
Among other things, Mark mentioned using the universal link creation service at Books2Read to turn one link into links for all your books so that your international readers and readers in other stores can easily find the one that works for them.
If you want to upload direct to Kobo, or read the Writing Life blog or subscribe to the podcast, you can do so from the main site: Kobo Writing Life.
You can also learn more about Mark and his work on his site.
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How do people not know “who is Jeff and who is Joe”?!? You say each other’s names every time you transition to the next person!
I guess they don’t sound that different to people just listening to the audio. I had a number of listeners give me that feedback though!
For Kobo, I use links of the form https://www.kobobooks.com/search/search.html?q=ISBN13
That redirects to the user’s country. As Mark says, users can click a link to go to their own country, but the fewer links to click, the better, right?
Good point, Russell. And, just so people can see the q=ISBN thing in action, here’s a real-live link (using one of your books)
https://www.kobobooks.com/search/search.html?q=9781507066201
FYI, for those who don’t have proper 978 ISBNs don’t despair, the “Dummy” ISBNs that start with 1234 are visible on your item detail page – just scroll WAY down and you’ll see it. Example from one of the cool hosts for the show with 106 5 star ratings on it….
https://www.kobobooks.com/search/search.html?q=1230000699174
I seem to recall I first discovered that tip from the KWL blog 🙂