Tag Archives: ereaders

Going Wide: Resources. Killing it on Kobo by Mark Leslie Lefebvre

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Going wide is a struggle. #TheStruggleIsReal has never been truer than when you are trying to put your book in front of readers . . . all over the world.

I’ve documented my recent success failure, and I’ve decided to give this journey a year. I’m going to work at it, try my best, and see if I can’t really find some readers (and in doing so sell some books).

Of course, anyone who has tried and failed will tell you it’s not as easy as uploading your books to Draft2Digital, and watching the royalties roll in. If it were that easy, everyone would be rich and self-help books would be non-existent.

Not everyone has time to sit down and read a book. The free time a writer has could be filled with many things:

  • writing
  • beta reading for a friend or peer
  • reading to give a review
  • reading a book in your genre to keep up to date with what’s going on with the industry around you
  • sleeping

Sleeping wins a lot of the time, and it’s not a surprise that when I recommend a non-fiction book, that people rarely read it. Or they grab it, and it takes them a few months to read the whole thing. In this day and age, people need their information in short chunks like a blog post, or they want to listen to a podcast while they get their 10,000 steps in while walking their dog. 3 in 1!

But reading non-fiction is different. If someone has taken the time to write a book about it . . . then there is enough information about it to write the book!

That means information you need.

I’m lucky. I can read at work. That means I can read more than the average writer.

I’ve read books that that have no relevancy in today’s publishing landscape. I’ve read books where I could use the information that day. Indie authors who help us by writing non-fiction have the upper hand there. It doesn’t take a year for their book to come out. In that year, the industry moves so fast, their information could be close to irrelevant. If you’re self-publishing, reading indie non-fiction is the way to go.

If you are wide, it helps to know how the platforms work. No one has written how Nook works, or Apple Books. Maybe there’s nothing to know. Upload and wait.

That’s fine. Less reading for us.

killing it on koboBut there is a book about Kobo, and if you’re wide, you’re gonna wanna know how this publishing platform works, and how you can make it work to your advantage. (For numbers to prove my point, look at this article from Forbes.) Where Kindle supplies ebooks to the United States, Kobo supplies ebooks to the rest of the world.

Mark Leslie Lefebvre has more than enough experience to write Killing it on Kobo, and if you want to use Kobo as a vital part of your publishing plan, you should pick it up! He was on the ground floor of creating Kobo Writing Life (something he talks about in the book) and explains the various functions of the platform. Like how to gain access to the promotions tab for authors and what to do with it once you have it. He goes into detail about pricing, what Kobo Plus is all about, and how to make your ebook available in the public library system.

If anything, the book is an important navigational tool so you already have some idea of what your dashboard will look like when you choose to publish your book there.

I encourage you to buy the paperback . . . unless you are so handy at maneuvering with your ereader you won’t mind trying to find “that one paragraph that said . . .”

I beat up my paperbacks with highlighting, coffee stains, and dog ears, but they are very useful for marking the sections I think I’ll need the most.

At any rate, Kobo is striving to always be a relevant competition for Amazon’s Kindle, and you can’t ignore the deal they have with Walmart. If you’ve ever been in your local Walmart lately looking at books, you’ll find a complete section of Kobo devices and ebook gift cards!

And did you know that Kobo came out with the first water-resistant ereader? Awesome for the bath-takers in your life. Trust me, I’ve ruined a Kindle and two Nooks!

This isn’t a blog post to convince you to use Kobo to publish your book–as always going wide is a personal choice for you and your business.

Though, no doubt if you enjoy seeing your book everywhere, it’s a little thrilling to see your book being sold on Walmart’s e-book website:

2019-06-10 (2)2019-06-10 (3)

Don’t Run Away is missing because Walmart won’t/can’t “sell” a free book, and Don’t Run Away is permafree on all platforms as hopefully a way to encourage readers to give me a try without risking any money. I tried to find a couple of my other books, but as an unknown, they’re probably on page 60 of the search results, and I don’t have time to look. Searching my name didn’t help (no author pages that I could find), so I can only hope if/when my books become more popular, they will be closer to the front of the search results.

But Mark goes into every detail of the advantages of using Kobo and how you can utilize them to sell your books.

Reading non-fiction is a part of having your business hat on, not your writer’s hat.

I understand selling books is a lot harder than writing them . . . and that’s saying something! But, to keep selling, you have to keep learning!

Killing it on Kobo makes it easy . . . the Kobo part, anyway.

Every couple of weeks, I’ll try to highlight a non-fiction book that is helping me publish books wide.

Killing it on Kobo is a definite must if you are planning on using that platform in an effort to go wide.

You can find Killing it on Kobo here. Or you can click here if you want the paperback.

Follow Mark and his Stark Publishing blog here.

Or you can listen to his podcast. Find out more here.

I hope those links are useful to you.

He is no longer at Kobo Writing Life. He’s moved on to Draft2Digital and writes his own fiction books.

Christine Munroe is head of KWL now and you can follow her here on Twitter.

Kobo Writing Life also has a blog (Kobo Writing Life Blog)  for authors, and a podcast (Kobo Writing Life Podcast) too. Don’t miss out on these opportunities to grow your business!

It doesn’t work to publish your book and walk away. You have to be an active participant. And I don’t mean DMing a Buy My Book message to your Twitter followers like the one I received this morning. He promised he wouldn’t blow up my inbox, and he’s right. He won’t. He can’t since I unfollowed him.

There are better ways to put your book in front of people who actually want to read it.

Start here.

My books are wide! Find them wherever ebooks are sold. 🙂

Don’t Run Away: books2read.com/dont-run-away
Chasing You: books2read.com/Chasing-You
Running Scared: books2read.com/running-scared

Wherever He Goes: books2read.com/whereverhegoes1
All of Nothing: books2read.com/allofnothing1
The Years Between Us: books2read.com/the-years-between-us

Try the Tower City Romance Trilogy Today!

Mid-March progress . . . going wide . . . The Years Between Us . . . series update

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The Years Between Us and E-book Update

The Years Between Us

The tentative front cover for The Years Between Us. Tired of looking at it yet? 

Slowly but surely I’m making progress with The Years Between Us. I’ve been having Word read it to me to catch typos and concentrating to find discrepancies and inconsistencies. I’m trying not to get bogged down in little stupid things, and when I take out a comma then put it back in then take it back out, I can only assume my brain is tired of the story and it’s time to pass it on and publish already. I feel like I have been working on it longer than some of my other books, but only because I’ve dealt with so much while writing and editing it. Had I not had surgery and not had to deal with this crappy weather, I would have had it out long ago. But, in any case, I have a proofer lined up and rarin’ to go, and using Vellum and making a cover in Canva won’t take any time at all once the book is ready to be published. I was thinking of doing a pre-order, but there’s already been enough time between The Years Between Us and All of Nothing, so I’ll just put it up for sale. I don’t have any promos or marketing lined up at the moment. I’m reluctant to do that since all my ebooks are everywhere and nowhere. Going wide is a stupid waiting game that has been made even longer by the fact mistakes were made.

All of Nothing and Wherever He Goes are up on Kobo, and doing a bang up job with no promotion:

2019-03-12 That is as far as I’ve gotten so far. I should put them on Nook and iBooks, and Draft2Digital for the rest. Then I’ll have those two done at least, and do The Years Between Us when it’s released.  It will be a couple months before I can do my trilogy, but it is what it is.

Paperback Updates

Things are moving slowly with paperbacks. Ingram isn’t as hard to work with as everyone says they are, yet they present challenges in their own way.

One of the first things they dinged me for was having a price not match what was on the back cover. I put all my prices above the barcode. I think it looks professional, and I just like to do it. But, Ingram looks, and if your retail price does not match what you put on the cover, they won’t approve your files. So, note to self for future books–remain consistent. That’s a good policy to go by, anyway. You want to look professional, and you want your books to be the same across the board.

Consistency is key.

So after I received that warning, I thought, how do I want to price my books going forward? I redid all my paperback covers (tweaking them in Canva is really easy) and changed the prices on the back. I needed to price my books in a way I’ll remember, and I decided to price books in a series at $9.99, and stand-alones at $12.99. I don’t sell many paperbacks anyway, but I thought if someone were to want to buy them, buying a series shouldn’t break the bank, stand-alones can be priced a bit higher. After printing and distribution costs, Ingram barely pays you anyway, so I didn’t feel the need to worry about cost. I just needed something I could remember so when it comes to pricing books I remained consistent.

That holds true for covers, too. I had lightened up All of Nothing‘s paperback cover for printing reasons, and I uploaded that file to Ingram without changing the one in KDP Print. So, again, my covers looked a bit different. At one point, Ingram DID accept that file for my cover, but I didn’t order the proof. I wanted my books to look the same, no matter where someone ordered it, so I changed the brightness back to the original and resubmitted the cover file.

But after I resubmitted, they emailed me an error:

ingram errror email

Of course, I had no idea what this meant. When I read the GENERAL INTERIOR ISSUE I thought I had formatting issues. But that couldn’t be the case, since I formatted in Vellum, and that program is very very good. Then I saw that I didn’t own the SKU. That SKU is incorrect–the front part of the number is missing. So I had to chat with an Ingram Spark associate. It was quick and easy, but I still have to wait for my issue to be resolved:

ingram chat

I buy my ISBNs from Bowker. There’s no reason why my number should have been rejected. Especially since it had been accepted once before.

She was nice, but running into issues isn’t fun, and I can see where people would be intimidated by working with Ingram. It’s a benefit real people are behind the scenes working on your books and making sure all is well. But there is a certain simpleness when all you’re dealing with is an automated system like KDP Print. The automated system also allows for scammers to publish their books, so you have to take the good with the bad for each company.

Anyway, I want to get All of Nothing figured out and a proof ordered. I’m doing the covers in GIMP working with their template, and I want to make sure it will print well before I do the others. I’m hoping by spring this will all be over, and when I decided to go wide, I had no idea it would take so long or be such a pain in the ass.

Lessons learned so far:

  1. Be consistent. Prices, how your covers look. You want it all the same across the board. Not just for you and your readers, but because in the end, it’s just easier to deal with.
  2. Be patient. In the scheme of things, how much money am I losing not having my books for sale while I’m messing with Ingram? Not many. How many sales am I missing not having my e-books everywhere I want them to be? I don’t know. I’m waiting for my books to be where I want them to before I invest in any more promos. I’m losing sales, I’m losing sales. Once my books are wide I can concentrate on finding a readership on all the platforms. Will I miss KU money? Sure. But while this isn’t a debate on KU vs. Wide, I would never be comfortable trusting one source for all my royalties.  I already do that–it’s called my day job.
  3. Keep looking forward. I’m still working on The Years Between Us, and I’m looking forward to opening Jared and Leah’s file again and filling in some blanks. Besides blog posts, I haven’t written for a while, and I’m starting to get antsy. I did edit for someone, and she’s been going through them. After she makes the changes and does some rewriting, I’ll probably do a second sweep. That’s okay. I adore her, and I don’t mind at all helping her out.

I’m a bit closer to do some tutorials about doing a full paperback cover in Canva. I found a software for recording screen time I think that will work, and I’ve started watching tutorials on how to use it. I’ve been posting a couple covers I’ve made in a FB group dedicated to indie covers, and they’ve all said a tutorial would be helpful. My friend Aila said I should start selling them, but my range is very narrow, and for now I just prefer helping a friend here and there when I can, and practicing to make my own covers better.

losing her breath fake cover

Do you trust me fake cover

Mostly it’s finding a good photo in canstockphoto.com. I have fun, and I’m developing an eye. Now I only wish it were so easy to do my own covers.  Doing my cover for my series is going to give me hives.

What do I want to get done before March?

I’d like to have a proof of All of Nothing ordered through Ingram. I’d like to have The Years Between Us published. But we’ll see. When you are working with other people, you need to be flexible, and like I said, in the scheme of things, waiting isn’t going to make my whole career fall into shambles. I’d like to have Jared and Leah plumped up and maybe an editing pass completed. We’ll just have to see how things go. The weather here seems to be perking up a bit, with highs in the thirties all week. The sunshine will help. I just hope it doesn’t storm again. We’ve had enough snow.

What do you want to get done before March?

Let me know!

 

jared and leah for end of blog posts

 

 

 

Going Wide: The Saga Continues

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going wide is like riding a bike

Can these guys save me? No? I guess they have better things to do! (Photo taken from Pinterest)

 

I didn’t think going wide with my books would be such a pain in the neck. Granted, it was my error, and something I should have checked and double checked, but I didn’t, so here we are. It’s not such a big thing, but it does push back my plans. A lot.

I didn’t pull one of my books out of Select. I thought I had. I thought I had pulled them all out. But I didn’t. And it wouldn’t have been a big deal, but it was the last book in my trilogy. I guess I just checked the wrong book one too many times, and was I surprised when I went to make sure they were all out to see that Running Scared had been automatically renewed for another three months.

That means I can’t go wide with my trilogy until May. Fine. Whatever. I could have still gone wide with the other two books, but that would have looked weird. So I put the other two back in Select and I’m just going to keep a better eye on it this time.

What am I doing, then?

I put All of Nothing and Wherever He Goes on Kobo. That’s the best I can do right now. I don’t have OCD, but I do have a certain way I like to do things, and having bits and pieces of my books all over the place would definitely give me anxiety.

I wanted to try out the Kobo landscape anyway, and uploading books to publish was surprisingly easy. The uploading process was smooth, and the online viewer worked quickly. I admit, I used a Kobo-ready file from Vellum, so that might have helped a lot. But I just put in my info, my bank stuff, uploaded, and there you go. Of course, one nice thing about Kobo is that it is run by actual human beings. Which means my book won’t be ready in the standard 72 hours KDP gives you. Kobo is closed for a holiday on Monday, and I don’t anticipate my books being fully published until next week. While that might irritate some, I think it’s great.

But this also pushed back a giveaway I wanted to do, and I don’t want to spoil it, so I’ll just say I’m disappointed I had to do that. But when The Years Between Us is finally edited, I’ll put it both on Amazon and Kobo.

I’m not very interested in KU. While All of Nothing got a bit of traction from my Freebooksy giveaway, I need to explore more promos that don’t involve giving my book away–at least not to that extreme. I gave away over 6,000 copies. I want those to be sales.

think big start small

Next steps in going wide? Wait. Wait for my trilogy to drop out. Put up The Years Between Us on Amazon (but not KU) and Kobo. Try a new promo. Maybe do a Goodreads giveaway for it since I haven’t done that yet. Otherwise, yeah. Just wait, keep writing my series so I can rapid release that wide and see how sales go.

If you have questions about Kobo, they have a ton of resources.

Look on the Kobo Writing Life Blog for helpful articles and podcast episodes.

Killing it on Kobo by Mark Lefebvere. The creator of Kobo Writing Life, Mark knows the ins and outs of Kobo and how to maximize sales with your books.
Order his book on Amazon.
And Kobo, of course.