Dropping Kobo support

Kobo eReader
Kobo eReader (Photo credit: ndh)

I like supporting various e-readers and their associated services.  It’s, frankly, not usually very difficult.

Sadly, Kobo has decided to make it so.  For no reason I can fathom they do not accept ePub files that even the most exacting alternatives accept without question and that work on their App (I don’t have one of their devices so have no idea), won’t accept a MOBI file that Amazon took no issue with, and does very strange things when fed a raw .doc/.docx file.  Therefore, while Love or Lust will continue to be sold there for the foreseeable future, Ready or Not will not be carried there nor will any future books.

I’m sorry.

If you’re a Kobo user you can get ePub copies from Apple, DriveThru Fiction, and Smashwords.  Nook is also an ePub version, but it can be awkward to get at the file, though not impossible — so Barnes & Noble is another source of the file.  I do not use DRM so the file you get from any of those sources will play happily with your device so long as Kobo continues to support standard ePub format.  My personal recommendation is not-Smashwords as the formatting gets a little weird after the trip through their “meat grinder” which is as horrible as it sounds.

I am actually very sad to be leaving Kobo, and I may return some day if their service to the publisher/author improves.  They are almost as respectful to their content providers as Apple and offer many of the same services.  Only DriveThru Fiction can remotely say the same.  Still I have no intention to spend hours or even days pulling my hair out trying to track down its various imagined code errors.

2 thoughts on “Dropping Kobo support

  1. Oh dear, sorry to hear about your problems. So far I’ve only uploaded one of my e-books to Kobo and had no problem with formatting/acceptance. It was a ‘toe in the water’ exercise before deciding to remove the rest of my books from KDP Select so that I could upload them to Kobo and other distributors. However, even though I chose my best-selling (on Amazon) book for this experiment, once on Kobo it has failed to make the sales I hoped for. Book promotion for Kobo seems much more difficult to fathom than for Amazon. Perhaps it will improve when Kobo allows readers to leave book reviews. In the meantime I stay with KDP Select.

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    1. I do use KDP, though not Select — I take issues with the exclusivity portion of their terms on top of various issues I have with KDP’s terms of service whether Select or Standard.

      Kobo is a very poor sales channel and a terrible basis for how well a book will do outside Amazon as they have an almost non-existent portion of the market. A better judge would be iBooks (Apple) as they have one of (if not The) next highest percentage, similarly Smashwords and Nook.

      I’ve put half a dozen books on Kobo between myself and helping others and it’s a process that has got progressively more difficult. Massive Kudos for the Writing Life interface and all, but the uploader has become insanely picky and this is regardless of several different tools for producing/editing the ePub files. The last upload or two were easy enough, if frustrating and ridiculous, edits but with Ready or Not it was a far more complicated complained and one that was made all the worse by it being a simpler book, formatting wise, than the previous couple of uploads!

      That was simply the final straw. Lower sales numbers than nearly every other of seven channels (even at us$18 my print edition sold more copies than Kobo!), those tiny sales figures still resulting in a respectable sales ranking (last I bothered to look) meaning that poor sales are the norm there, and now headache in the upload process. It was time to give up, for now.

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