Kobo Screech Post

[renegadefolkhero]

After a year saying, "I need to pivot to SFF, and to hell with sales," I'm finally there, and it feels nice. I've wrapped up the remaining mostly-done romance books that needed to be pushed out the door and I'm forbidden from publishing anything this summer. I have ZERO release dates for the rest of 2025. Amazing.

Kobo Screeching

I had a wonderful surprise this week.

Kobo is a bigger platform than Amazon for many wide writers, but despite prioritizing my Kobo listings for several years I never got traction. My promos always flopped miserably, but I pushed Kobo+ to readers anyway because I really want their non-exclusive subscription program to compete with Amazon's exclusive KU subscription program. (I myself am a Kobo+ subscriber.) I was starting to see a little movement, and hoped I'd make $20 this month...

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WE'RE IN LADS. I made more at Kobo in April than I did at Amazon. fistpump

Kobo+ is a mysterious place, and that's not a good thing. The main issue is Kobo+ only reports and pays reads in increments of 300 minutes and the report comes out nearly a month later, so after launch you could wait nearly 2 months to get confirmation of reads.

Amazon reports page reads daily. If you put a book in KU you'll almost immediately know if it's getting reads and you'll see those little bars go up (hopefully). But if you have a book in Kobo+ it's radio silence... potentially for months. If I have a 20-minute short, I wouldn't get payment until a month after 15+ people read the book all the way through. If 12 people read it and it falls into the algo wasteland, guess what? It's less about the money and more about the principle. If Kobo wants to encourage writers to join their program they need to report reads timely, so we're not sitting around twiddling our thumbs wondering if anyone even saw the book.

Some writers say it takes about 2 years to get traction on Kobo, but it always depends what you're writing. Ultimately, I suspect the books best suited to Kobo+ are long, meaty series with good readthrough that make fat box sets. Boxsets reportedly do very well on Kobo+, which makes sense. I write... the opposite of that, lmao. So it's been a slog these past 3 years.

On the plus side, every time I contact Kobo I speak to an Obvious Human Being who Knows What's Up which is really refreshing, and 180 from what authors experience with Amazon which has notoriously bad customer service.