Yesterday, KOBO unlocked the doors to their much-anticipated publishing portal, Writing Life. I registered and uploaded five books last night – this morning, they are live for sale and look good. I had been using the Smashwords portal to get to KOBO, but now can upload directly. The first five books are those which hadn’t made it to KOBO yet.
Here are the links:
I’ll shift the whole list over, but wanted to focus on filling the gaps first.
So, about the portal. Here’s the link to learn more from KOBO and sign up. This interface is quite slick. I really liked it. It is evocative of the Amazon KDP interface in terms of functionality, but more stylish. Things I particularly like about it:
• it’s really easy to publish under different names.
• you can upload EPUB files directly, foregoing the pleasure of learning the quirks of yet another conversion engine. (And yes, their conversion engine does have quirks. I tried a .doc file just for fun and the result wasn’t pretty – even though that same file converts quite nicely at SW.)
• it’s fast, at least so far. The server is responsive when you’re creating the metadata for the book and didn’t stall once on me. (I’m sure they had to have gotten slammed last night with new content.) And the books appeared very quickly on their site for sale.
• you can choose a currency for payment. I think this might determine your default currency for pricing, but am not sure.
• they pay by direct deposit.
My only issue was an odd one – the automatic currency converter generated different prices in pounds sterling and euros than the Amazon automatic currency converter. The euros were really different. I’ve been thinking about this and will probably go back in and over-ride the automatic prices to ensure the books are the same price in all markets. That’s pretty minor stuff, all things considered.
This new portal means my content will be available more quickly for KOBO than has been the case. What’s not to love about that?
Deborah Cooke: Author 