A long and interesting article in Digireado:
Regular readers of this blog will be aware I’m a bit of a Kobo fan. They launched early into the Australian market (May 2010) and were my primary ebook store for this reason.
I had high hopes about the launch of their self-publishing platform – Writing Life. I’ve always been impressed at the depth of knowledge Kobo had about their readers. I feel that Kobo get the publishing industry. I believe they are demonstrating the same care and knowledge when dealing with small publishers or authors starting their indie publishing journey.
There are now many options available to authors who want to self publish and I’ve been comparing them all recently. In one way or another they all seem to have pros and cons. So how does Kobo Writing Life stack up against some alternatives like Smashwords or BookBaby?
Cut to the chase?
My favourite thing about Kobo Writing Life is that authors are able to download their ePUBfile after conversion. I believe strongly that authors and independent publishers should retain ownership of their files and materials. If you pay (and with everyone you will pay one way or another) for a service like conversion then you should own the files. This file can then be used for other retailers, book reviews or to share with friends and family.
Some options give you free conversion and take a cut of the sales. Others may charge for conversions and pass along sales.
I loaded my first book up to Kobo reading life last night.
Pros
I’m a control freak and I like going direct
It was fast (this same book is in the Smashwords premium review process and will likely be there for another week)
It was easy – see the cons for a little minimization of this one
I will get stats galore
Cons
I had to create an epub file. Which is probably just my issue. The word document that had already passed the meatgrinder at Smashwords converted to one line a page through WL. Fortunately I have Scrivener and it did a great job of converting to epub.
So, now I just need B&N and Sony to let me go direct (B&N’s Pubit is only for Americans [in the narrow definition of American] and the last time I checked, Sony needs me to have more books before I can go direct. And then Apple, well, I’m not going to buy a mac just to publish in the ibookstore.
Anyway, I’m happy so far with Kobo Writing Life
I’m looking forward to doing this soon. I wanted to wait and see if there were any bugs they needed to work out, before I jumped in. (remembering the pubit experience) lol.
I had trouble upload ePub files for the first few days, but they seem to have resolved whatever bug was causing it (though it would have been nice of them to reply to my queries about it).
@PA Wilson, the tall whitespace bug is one that continues to plague Calibre (though I haven’t tested the latest release yet) wherein the top and bottom margins of the paragraphs are set to 100%. It’s a very ugly bug, but one of my more recent test uploads to Writing Life did not present this issue despite it having occurred in the past. It seems that perhaps it is fixed.
I concur re: B&N, Sony, and Apple. Definitely not spending the money on a Mac for one single purpose. I’d rather run Linux, anyway.
I am the creator of Kindle Writer software and I am pleased that any books created by the software can now be uploaded to Kobo Writing Life thereby increasing exposure of the books.
Uploading the mobi file created by the software to Kobo Writing Life was very easy, and as you have said you can download the EPUB created too. This means that it may be possible to use this for EPUB ereaders too. That is what I call neat.
KOBO is a tyrant. Don’t trust them with your work. They target controversial writers. They’ll screw around with your material if they don’t like you and they’ll give you the total run a round ever getting anything fixed. They targeted me for my work and played endless games with me trying to get them to fix what they did to my work. No other book-seller behaves the way they do. They’re like the book-industry mafia. They royally screwed up my material and put it online that way and then I couldn’t get them to take it down and fix it. I tried all the other online book-sellers too and no other book-seller gave me any kind of the same problems. Non one behaves like KOBO. They’re evil. I tried to just get my books out of KOBO and close my account, but they won’t stop playing games with me and my books I uploaded. My books showed up in the weirdest places even with other people claiming authorship of my work, and things like that. Beware giving them anything you wrote, because they might just play a sadistic game of “keep-away” with you too trying to get them to stop having fun with your stuff. Once you upload your books, it’s too late to take it back and KOBO cannot be trusted with author’s material. I you have unpopular ideas, watch out. Once they have your work, it is out of your control and they don’t play by the rules. They’re total bullies.