World, Writing, Wealth discussion
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Another reason to consider going wide
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Thanks for such an elaborate and comparative input!May just try Kobo, as soon as my exclusivity with Amazon expires
How does one get their box on this site? I can't find anything that tells me about it.
You can go via Smashwords or Draft2Digital, or direct via Kobo Writing Life: https://www.kobo.com/writinglifeI suspect to be part of the subscription service, you may need to go direct, but I'm not sure (I'll investigate a bit later on tonight though).
In fairness, you should probably read some opinions on going wide, not just mine. "Going wide self-publishing" should get you Google hits. For instance, it can take 3-6 months to get traction on sites other than Amazon, according even to authors who are doing well with it. Do your due diligence :)
Thanks for the info, Krazykiwi. I just read about Kobo Plus on another thread but it didn't go into detail about what it was. I also read that if you publish directly to Kobo, they have a promotion service for when you run sales or free promotions. which has worked nicely for some authors.
Some more info: - It's live only in .nl and .be as of yet. There is no local Amazon store there, and the population is highly English literate, so it makes a perfect testbed I guess.
- Currently you have to go direct (via Kobo Writing Life, link is somewhere upthread), but Draft2Digital is definitely adding Kobo Plus as one of it's distribution options. Smashwords is not (yet).
- There is an empty placeholder page for Plus on the US site already, so it's likely only a matter of time before it expands, but there has been no specific info or date given.
Hope that helps answer the questions.
Krazykiwi wrote: "Posting this for info, because I think authors need to know what's going on in the industry, so you can make informed decisions. It's no skin off my nose in teh slightest if you want to be Amazon Exclusive, I understand there are benefits--if they apply to you. But it's dumb to be exclusive just because you don't know what else is out there :)"Totally agree! Thanks so much for your analysis and reporting on the latest market news. It could very well be the next challenge to Amazon dominance. Although Authorearnings.com did once do an Amazon UK report and did an Amazon + other entailers (like Kobo)--but only on the US market--it usually only analyzes US market.
Does kobo have the first- or second-largest market share in the global non-US English market behind Amazon? And if so, then what's the Breakdown? How about including the US?
Another note: just because the total market share is larger on one side or the other doesn't mean that it's true for your genre. As krazykiwi mentioned in another post: Sweden is very big on crime thrillers (or maybe it included mysteries and that genre as well).
Interesting post and nice to see developments that will offer decent options across the board. I'm going wide with my next release in about a month's time, plus I've withdrawn from auto-enrolment on KU with my other three. I'll be pushing them out through Pronoun over the coming weeks.
More info from the authorearnings.com November Amazon.uk report. I'll try to find more recent info from the IPA.A relevant question is whether it would be easier to climb to the top in a smaller market first and then move into the dominant US market.0
"According to the IPA, after the US, the next four countries — China, Germany, Japan, and the UK — in combination comprise another 30% of the global publishing market: China has 10%, Germany 9%, Japan 7%, and the UK roughly 4%. The remainder of the global publishing Top 10 — France with 4%, Italy 3%, Spain 3%, Brazil 2%, and India 2% — between them add up to another 15%. Thus 10 countries make up 75% of global sales of books of all formats, with the US alone just about equal to the the next 4 combined."
(http://authorearnings.com/report/nove...)
Alex G wrote: "Krazykiwi wrote: "Posting this for info, because I think authors need to know what's going on in the industry, so you can make informed decisions. It's no skin off my nose in teh slightest if you w..."Interesting questions Alex, and almost impossible to figure out. For instance, we have three major book chains in Sweden, all three have ebook stores: And all three are fed by the Kobo books, as far as I can tell: One directly, and one by Tolino and the other I'm not sure. In .nl and .be, Kobo is partnered with Bol, who dominate that market. I believe, but can't confirm, that Tolino is definitely number 2 in the German speaking countries, and Kobo now owns a major share in Tolino. And they're bigger than Amazon in Japan, but who knows in the other Asian countries, I don't know where to find the numbers.
Re Swedish peccadilloes, it's the genre "Detective Stories" in a literal translation ("Deckare"), but certainly encompasses everything from Stieg Larsson who I'd put pretty far up on the thriller side, to cozy mysteries. Police procedurals like Beck The Laughing Policeman and Wallander Faceless Killers seem to dominate the popular press, TV and trad pub, if that's helpful.
Gah, following myself up: It's also worth noting, people who live in no-local-Amazon countries (like me) pick a store and you can only change a few times. I have a US account, created when I had a US address. I can buy anything I like from any Amazon store I like except for ebooks, where I will be redirected to the US store where my account is. So I might happily buy gadgets from the UK, and DVD's from Germany depending on who has the best shipping times or prices, but I can only buy kindle books from the US, and that very likely inflates US sales. Everyone I know in NZ still buys Kindle books from the US store, despite there being an Australian one, because they get better prices, and once you change away from the US store, you're likely to get stuck with .AU and not be able to change back.
The net result is, if a book is wide, I'll probably buy local, and if it's Kindle exclusive, I'll buy it from the US store. Considering how many countries don't have a local store, that has to be messing with the stats from places like Author earnings to some degree.
It will be interesting to see whether Smashwords can persuade Kobo to have the books that go through it on this Kobo reading site.As for NZers, I too go through Amazon.com. Don't see what advantage the .au site has. But an interesting thing is that while NZers buy through .com, they do NOT get the price discounts from promotions on KDP select - they pay the full price. I have no idea why, other than Amazon has always treated NZ more an an irritant than an outlet.
So, here's some more info: Kobo Plus uses the Overdrive infrastructure (y'all know Rakuten also owns Overdrive, right? And what Overdrive is - the major provider in the US for e/audio book lending services to libraries, as well as the engine that some trad publishers use for their ebook stores, Harlequin among them.)This is looking more and more like a test drive for something much bigger. It could either go very very wide, or lead to lots of small, regionally divided subscription services. It could also eventually lead to indie access to Overdrive itself, which is potentially huge.
Maybe we are witnessing the emerging of a new powerhouse...
Just fyi, apparently you can still get your book enrolled in Kobo Plus if you distribute to Kobo through D2D.
World, Writing, Wealth
Books mentioned in this topic
The Laughing Policeman (other topics)Faceless Killers (other topics)
The payout scheme is pretty nice:
Pays at 20% of pages (I expect this will be limited in some way to prevent the abuse KU saw)
Payout is: Total list price of all books read during the month are added up. Each author gets a % of the pot based on their own list price * books read. The pot itself is the actual subscriptions paid, rather than some arbitrary number as KU is. Kobo takes 40%, the other 60% is the pot for the authors.
To put some numbers on that:
Say total list price of all books read during the month (if they had been purchased) = $100,000. Subscriptions for the month = $20,000.
Author A has books selling for $5.99, and was read 100 times. Their share = $5.99 * 100 / 100000 = ~0.6% of the pot = $120 or $1.20 per book. But if the subscriptions are also $100,000, 0.6% of that is $600.
And if somehow subscriptions actually outstrip the price of what's read (entirely possible, history shows some very high percentage of users don't remember to use subscriptions to anything every month.), and were say $120,000, you're actually passing a 60% royalty rate.
Compared to KU: Amazon sets a pot of money aside, used to be about $2 million when I was watching it, which I haven't been lately, and they adjust it up and down slightly all the time, but not by much. The payout is divided entirely by books read. You got read 100 times, there were 1 million reads, you get $2 per read. You got read 100 times the next month with the same amount of pot, but there were 2 million reads, you get $1 per read. $1 to $1.20 was pretty typical, when I was taking notice, so I think that's their target for payouts and what they base the pot on.
To consider vs KU (or being Kindle exclusive):
- KU has other benefits for buyers, since it comes with Amazon Prime. On the other hand, all those people with Prime who don't use KU, don't increase the pot the way the Kobo plan is set up.
- It appears to be opt in, but doesn't require any exclusivity
- There's going to be some abuse, KU was hammered with porn shorts when they had a "by page read" setup, and when they changed it to be based on pages in the book, the porn authors just started bundling up 40-60 of the shorts together and flooded KU with those instead. Also, this system incentivizes raising list price, which Kobo will probably have to limit somehow. So expect the fine details to get some tuning.
- Trad publishers are in on this. They theoretically could be on KU too, but very few of them put books on it. At least in the test phase, the trad pubs are giving this a bit of a shot, which is a big incentive to sign up.
- Amazon, as I keep harping about, may have 75% of the US market but it's got very far from that in the rest of the world. And the rest of the world includes a lot of places that have native or near-native English speaking populations. Being Amazon exclusive means you'll never reach those audiences. This is live in the Netherlands and Belgium already and has generated some press attention here in Sweden too, among other places, so it's definitely going to have wider reach than KU does.
- This is really early yet, we don't know how it's going to pan out. Prolific romance readers brought Scribd to it's knees until they had to limit the service and all the trad publishers pulled their books in the genre. They pretty much killed Oyster too. Porn
authorsscammers came very close to breaking KU. Kobo is very big (much bigger than you think, at least it's parent Rakuten is), so they have the financial backing to tweak this until it works like Amazon did, and it probably won't fold the way Oyster did, But it's going to be interesting.Posting this for info, because I think authors need to know what's going on in the industry, so you can make informed decisions. It's no skin off my nose in teh slightest if you want to be Amazon Exclusive, I understand there are benefits--if they apply to you. But it's dumb to be exclusive just because you don't know what else is out there :)