Ebook Sales, Subscriptions, Audiobooks And Book Marketing With Tara Cremin From Kobo Writing Life

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Creative Penn Podcast for Writers
Episode Title: Ebook Sales, Subscriptions, Audiobooks and Book Marketing with Tara Cremin from Kobo Writing Life
Host: Joanna Penn
Release Date: April 14, 2025

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Overview

In Episode 804 of The Creative Penn Podcast for Writers, Joanna Penn engages in a comprehensive discussion with Tara Cremin, Director of Kobo Writing Life. The conversation delves into the evolving landscape of ebook sales, the rise of subscription models, audiobook marketing strategies, and Kobo's approach to generative AI. Additionally, Joanna touches upon the impact of US tariffs on the publishing industry and offers valuable advice for authors navigating these turbulent times.

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Impact of US Tariffs on Publishing

Joanna begins by addressing the potential repercussions of US tariffs on the publishing sector. An article from the Self Publishing Advice blog highlights how increased printing costs, shipping delays, and disrupted global supply chains could affect authors, especially those reliant on Chinese manufacturing for physical books and merchandise.

Notable Quote:
"The situation is volatile and uncertainty never helps." [03:45] – Joanna Penn

Key Points:

• Increased Costs: Tariffs on raw materials like paper and ink could inflate production expenses.
• Supply Chain Disruptions: Delays in shipping and fulfillment may hamper timely delivery of books.
• Strategic Recommendations:
  • Understand Your Supply Chain: Authors should ascertain where their books are printed and shipped from.
  • Diversify Production: Utilize print-on-demand services in North America such as Book Vault, IngramSpark, and Amazon KDP to mitigate dependency on international suppliers.
  • Monitor Profit Margins: Regularly assess pricing and profitability, especially when using services like IngramSpark which may become unprofitable if costs rise.

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Strategies for Authors During Volatile Times

Joanna shares insights from Kathleen Schmidt of Publishing Confidential, emphasizing the importance of authors focusing on controllable aspects of their business amidst chaos.

Notable Quote:
"The most important thing you can do is control the things you can control." [06:15] – Kathleen Schmidt

Key Points:

• Assess Promotional Strategies: Update websites, create engaging content, and connect authentically with audiences.
• Build Community: Foster a sense of belonging among readers, potentially through collaborations with other authors.
• Manage Expectations: Anticipate softer book sales and adjust financial forecasts accordingly.
• Explore Alternative Income Streams: Leverage backlists, run price promotions, and engage in seasonal marketing campaigns to maximize revenue.

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Subscription Models and Author Income

As financial strains push consumers towards subscriptions, Joanna and Tara discuss how authors can adapt to these changing preferences to sustain their income.

Notable Quote:
"Books remain the bread and butter income for most indies." [09:50] – Joanna Penn

Key Points:

• Kobo Plus: A non-exclusive subscription service allowing authors to sell directly on Kobo while remaining available on other platforms.
• Flexibility for Authors: Authors can choose specific countries for Kobo Plus participation or opt-in globally, with no time-bound commitments.
• Revenue Sharing: Kobo Plus compensates authors based on the minutes their books are read, offering a fairer system compared to page reads models.

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Interview with Tara Cremin

Background and Evolution of Kobo Writing Life

Tara Cremin shares her journey with Kobo Writing Life (KWL) since 2012, highlighting the platform's growth and the increasing opportunities available to indie authors.

Notable Quote:
"There are more opportunities now for authors than when I started working in the book business." [19:35] – Tara Cremin

Key Points:

• Growth of Kobo: From simple e-readers to the second-largest manufacturer globally.
• Expansion of Tools: Introduction of features like audiobook publishing, library integrations, and advanced promotional tools.
• Global Presence: KWL is now available in eight languages, catering to a diverse international author base.

Kobo Plus vs. Other Subscription Models

Tara explains how Kobo Plus distinguishes itself by not enforcing exclusivity, allowing authors to maintain their presence across multiple platforms.

Notable Quote:
"We wanted to give authors as much control as possible and really just get authors to try it out." [22:20] – Tara Cremin

Key Points:

• Non-Exclusive Model: Authors can remain on Kobo Plus while selling on platforms like Amazon and Apple.
• Broad Reach: Currently available in 23 countries with plans for further expansion.
• Inclusivity: Supports both ebooks and audiobooks, catering to various reader preferences.

Maximizing Income from Ebooks and Audiobooks

Tara provides actionable strategies for authors to enhance their earnings on Kobo.

Notable Quote:
"Make sure that you're not spending too much time on it because you're balancing all of these other platforms." [25:10] – Tara Cremin

Key Points:

• Quality Formatting: Utilize tools like Vellum or Atticus to create accessible and beautifully designed ebooks.
• Box Sets: Bundle series to offer value without price caps, allowing for higher royalty rates.
• Audiobook Integration: Publish audiobooks on Kobo through Kobo Writing Life by requesting access via email.

Kobo's Stance on Generative AI

Addressing the rising influence of AI, Tara outlines Kobo's policies and ethical considerations regarding AI-generated content.

Notable Quote:
"We discourage the publication of ebooks that are solely generated by AI." [47:15] – Tara Cremin

Key Points:

• Transparency: AI-narrated audiobooks must be clearly labeled to inform listeners.
• Ethical Publishing: Kobo aims to prevent the flood of machine-generated content that could dilute quality and hinder organic discovery.
• Future Innovations: Kobo is exploring AI-driven recommendations and curation without compromising author integrity or using books as training data for large language models (LLMs).

Library Sales and Author Compensation

Tara discusses how authors can benefit financially from library sales through Kobo.

Notable Quote:
"Authors that distribute to Overdrive through Kobo earn 50% of any sale that happens." [41:50] – Tara Cremin

Key Points:

• Opt-In Process: Authors can include their books in library distributions during the publication process.
• Pricing Strategy: Set library prices akin to mass-market paperbacks to account for multiple loans.
• Revenue Sharing: Authors receive 50% of sales from library checkouts, supporting a sustainable income stream.

Traits of Top-Selling Authors on Kobo

Tara identifies common strategies among Kobo's most successful indie authors.

Notable Quote:
"The ones that build their audience and find success on Kobo are really leveraging the promotions with us." [42:40] – Tara Cremin

Key Points:

• Active Promotion Participation: Regularly apply for Kobo's promotional opportunities to increase visibility.
• Consistent Releases: Simultaneously publish ebooks and audiobooks to maximize impact.
• Quality Presentation: Ensure book files are well-formatted and accessible to enhance reader experience.

Kobo Writing Life Podcast

Tara highlights the resources available through Kobo's own podcast, which offers additional support and insights for authors.

Notable Quote:
"We're really trying to earn a space in reading amongst everything else that's going on in the digital world." [49:30] – Tara Cremin

Key Points:

• Content Variety: Features interviews, actionable tips, and highlights from Kobo's backlist.
• Educational Focus: Provides guidance on both the craft and business aspects of writing.
• Accessibility: Available on all major podcast platforms, offering continuous support for authors.

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Conclusion

This episode of The Creative Penn Podcast for Writers serves as a valuable resource for indie authors seeking to navigate the complexities of ebook sales, subscription models, and audiobook marketing. Joanna Penn and Tara Cremin provide insightful strategies and emphasize the importance of quality, transparency, and proactive promotion in building a successful writing career. Additionally, the discussion on generative AI highlights the ethical considerations and future directions within the publishing industry.

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For more detailed insights and actionable tips, listeners are encouraged to refer to the full episode and explore the resources mentioned in the show notes.

Transcript

[Joanna Penn]

Welcome to the Creative Pen Podcast. I'm Joanna Penn, thriller author and creative entrepreneur, bringing you interviews, inspiration and information on writing, craft and creative business. You can find the episode show notes, your free author blueprint and lots [e-mail] and that's Pen with a double N. And here's the show Hello Creatives, I'm Johanna Penn and this is episode number 804 of the podcast and it is Friday the 11th of April 2025. As I record this in today's show, I talk to Tara Cremin, the director of Kobo Writing Life, about ebook sales, subscription models for ebook and audio, how to sell more books on Kobo, and how Kobo is dealing with generative AI. So that's coming up in the interview section in Writing and Publishing Things. Well, this is not a political show, but it is at least partially a business show. The US tariffs may affect publishing and the Self Publishing Advice blog from the alliance of Independent Authors goes into it in an article. The situation is volatile and uncertainty never helps. But even though many tariffs are on hold at the time of recording, the big one isn't, which is of course China. The article says books are currently exempt, but it doesn't stop there being issues from increased printing costs due to various tariffs, shipping delays or duties for books sold into the us potential future tariffs on publishing related materials like ink or paper, and disruption of global supply chains including print. So even if tariffs don't directly impact authors and publishing, they could increase the cost of raw materials like paper and ink or slow down border border cross border fulfillment or affect logistics providers. Particularly at risk are authors who print in or import from China, particularly into the US Publishers relying on global paper and printing supply chains, and of course traditionally published authors whose publishers import from China, which is a lot of them. Of course it is very cheap to print over there compared to Europe or the usa. Authors selling physical books and merchandise to the US readers from abroad or in fact if you are an author in the US and you sell merchandise in any way, a lot of that merchandise is sourced from China. Some of the people who do printing, say in the US might print onto T shirts that were originally bought in China, that kind of thing. So what should we do? Because of course the global supply chains are pretty integrated and we saw some of I guess something similar in the early days of the pandemic. So what should authors do? Well, the first thing is to understand the supply chain of what you sell. So where are your books printed and where are they shipped from and if you work with traditional publishers, what effect will that have on you? And for merchandising, even if it is, as I said, printed in the usa, the base product might be from China, so look into that. Also diversify your production. Print on demand options in North America include Book Vault, IngramSpark and Amazon KDP. They all print in the USA. But of course if costs go up like paper and ink then this will affect profit margins. Particularly keep an eye on IngramSpark as I've found those books can more swiftly become unprofitable and they don't necessarily tell you so go in there into ingramspark especially. You haven't checked it in a while. It is time to have a look and put in some buffer room. Remember and some people have asked me oh do I price the same on all of the stores? No IngramSpark because it goes through bookstores and all that, you have to include a hefty discount at 50% so that is you have to just have different prices on your books. That's fine. I know in Europe there are things where you have to have exactly the same, but that is not true in the usa. So yes, if you haven't checked your prices and profit margins on the print on demand services, definitely have a look and remember to do that. Maybe in three months time, six months time. Like put a reminder in your calendar. Also don't forget other formats. Ebooks and audiobooks are unaffected and those formats remain the bread and butter income for most indies as I discussed today with Tara from Kobo. And if you are in my Kickstarter don't worry, it looks like the fulfillment will be in the 90 day pause range and even if a tariff is applied from the UK it is currently only 10% and so it is not too much. I'll link to the article in the Show Notes but it's at selfpublishingadvice.org tariffs and I actually added more to that because they haven't gone into merchandise, but I actually think that's quite a big deal. So related to this, Kathleen Schmidt over at Publishing Confidential on Confidential, even on Sub Stack has a pep talk for authors during chaosic times. Now she's primarily in book marketing, but the tips are relevant regardless. In a moment of chaos, the most important thing you can do is control the things you can control. You are obviously not going to impact the government and their choices on tariffs. Obviously this will also I should say this will likely affect TikTok as well. Of course the shutdown of TikTok has been postponed multiple times, but it looks like China have now paused the sale, potential sale. So that's going to be in the mix as well. But yes, what can you control as an author? That means assessing your promotional strategy, updating your website, creating content. It means finding ways to connect with your audience authentically. Also, she says, I can't emphasize this enough. Authors should work on building community. Readers want a feel like they're part of something. This is not to say that you, the author, must build a community independently. Are there authors you can partner with? Community is what will get us through. And of course, thank you to my community on Patreon. I'll come back to that in a bit then. Also, she says, don't despair about sales. I fully expect book sales to be soft for a while. Most brands in sectors outside of book publishing are reforecasting with lower sales estimates. There is nothing we can do to force people to spend money on books. This is really interesting that sectors outside of book publishing are re forecasting. So what that means is maybe they said they would make, let's just say 100,000. Now they're reforecasting. They're saying, okay, we now expect to make 80,000. So people are doing that. And many of us have seen, if you've been in many of the Facebook groups or other groups, you will have seen the discussion of lower sales and the impact of ads is not so great. Over the last month or so, I have heard some people say that in election years, book sales are low and particularly with the Trump administration.

[Tara Cremin]

And of course what we're seeing is.

[Joanna Penn]

Even though the election is over, the chaos is not so. And whatever side you are on the political spectrum, it doesn't matter. It's kind of chaotic for everybody. And this also relates to today's interview because when people are stretched financially, they will often use more subscriptions. They might also cancel some subscriptions and maybe get some better deals. I actually went to cancel a subscription yesterday though, this week, you know, starting to tighten the belt as we do. And they offered me like a quarter of the price for the next three months. So I stayed. It was absolutely ridiculous, the deal they offered me. So you can try looking to cancel some of these and see what offers you get. Obviously they you can't do that multiple times, but that was interesting. But yes, lots of people use more subscriptions for ebooks and audiobooks when they are stretched instead of buying things. So if you're wide, you can use Kobo plus, which I talk about with Tara. It is non exclusive so you can sell directs as well as being in Kobo plus for example and also on Amazon and all Apple and everything. For audiobooks you can be on Spotify through findawayvoices.com and many Spotify subscribers like me get audiobooks there as well as on Audible. You can also have your ebooks and audiobooks in libraries through Kobo Draft 2 Digital Findaway Voices. So think about the people who are tightening their belts right now. Where can you still have your books so they can read or listen and you still get paid. Now this is another reason I'm putting all of my backlist now all of my backlist audiobooks onto YouTube so YouTube.com thecreativepen for my books for authors and my fiction and memoir. Yes Pilgrimage is up at jfpen author on YouTube and I can still get paid from the ad revenue but the cost is passed onto the business who is paying to advertise on YouTube rather than the person listening. So it's free for the person listening, unless of course they use YouTube Red or one of those other subscriptions. But yes. So I've been in and I've manually updated where the ads are in between various chapters so hopefully that will work for people. The same with libraries. It's free to read and listen, but I still get paid. So yes you can listen to and in fact on libraries read for free to my ebooks and audiobooks but I still get paid. And that's what we need to start thinking. We need to have that kind of mindset. Another thing you can do is think about other multiple streams of income. What can you improve? Can you add new ones and can you add more value from your backlist? Most publishing companies make the most money from backlist and most indies do too. Bookbub has an article on 8 Ways to get more value from your backlist. Very timely. Their tips include updating your branding, checking covers are still to the genre market, updating sales descriptions and of course ChatGPT and Claude are great at copywriting so you can paste in your old description and get a load of different options. You can mix and match together and of course they do have free options so you can try that. They also BookBub also suggest running price promotions on first in series, doing a giveaway, making a box set, which is again something we talk about in today's interview. Especially good on Kobo you can do full series box set as they don't have the maximum $9.99 cap that Amazon does on ebooks for the 70% royalty so consider publishing in new formats or on new platforms. Are your books on Spotify, for example? Are your books in libraries? Have you actually checked? Increasingly I do get my audiobooks on Spotify. So basically just go through and think about the assets that you have, think about all the different ways we can reach readers and even like we can reach readers with our marketing. But if your book is available on wherever they prefer, they're not going to get it right. Also, the BookBub article says start planning now for seasonal promotions, engage your fans and they have a lot more detail in the article that is on insights.bookbub.com and I'll link to that in the show Notes in personal news, the Death Valley Kickstarter ends tomorrow as this goes out. Thanks to everyone who has backed the campaign. If you'd like to join me for the Thriller Writing webinar, you can still get that for a few days after the campaign closes. The signed hardbacks won't be available after the 15th of April as I have to get the order in, but the webinar will be available. If you want to join, just go to jfpenn.com Death Valley the audiobook with my voice clone is coming along nicely. I'm proofing the chapters and giving feedback to Simon Patrick who's producing it for me and that will be ready once all the funding goes through. And of course it will be out in the usual places in the next few months. Taryn sent a comment. The clone voice is absolutely amazing. I challenge any but a very trained ear to pick the difference. Indeed, I'm really pleased with it. I do. I love it. And although I'm still I still haven't pressed the button on licensing the voice, I kind of think maybe I'll just keep it for myself because then I can do more content myself with it and feel like it's in my control. I'm still going backwards and forwards on that and as I mentioned, I have been loading up and this is not fun work. I've got to say to you. It is not fun to turn your audiobooks into videos mp4s and upload them on YouTube and do the description and do the timestamps and put the ads on like it's proper admin work. But as I just explained, I explained some of the reasons why I'm doing that and next week's interview with Derek Slayton will go into more detail on that. I had a real like epiphany on it listening to Derek. So that's coming next week. But yes non fiction for authors at the Creative Pen on YouTube and JF Pen author on YouTube for fiction, short stories, thrillers, fantasy, etc. Memoirs. I'm also really enjoying the incredible spring weather we've been having here in the uk. Walking lots. And in terms of physical goals, I have to tell you I did my first ever pull up this week without a band. In fact I did it this morning as I record this. I am super proud of myself. Doing a pull up is something I've actually never done and I've been working towards this for a long time. I've been using bands obviously, if you don't know what I mean, like a.

[Tara Cremin]

Big elastic band that kind of helps you.

[Joanna Penn]

But one of my health goals this year is to do a video of me doing a proper pull up. No band while I am 50. So given that it's only April, I'm pretty sure we're going to get there. So yeah, I'm proud of myself. It's so funny isn't it? The things we're proud of. You might just do pull ups like there's no tomorrow, but not me. So yeah, pretty, pretty pleased with that. So thanks for your emails and comments and photos this week. Kay sent a lovely selfie and some graveyard photos. Been away in pretty Derbyshire. I live in the ugly bit that made me laugh. Happens upon this wonderful graveyard which is St. Helen's Darley Dale. My mind is already full of stories and Tyreen sent some very cool photos of gargoyles. Now you might think, oh, gargoyles. Yeah, so what? We've got so many of them here in Europe, but this was in on an apartment block in Tacoma, Washington. They look bronze and very gothic. They actually look super sort of Notre Dame. Encouraging to see them on a modern building that someone kept enough and someone is gothic enough to add them. Also Faith Nelson listening in Maryland, usa. It was so revealing to go behind the scenes with Tom Donnelly. I learned a lot in this episode and thought how lovely if Tom could narrate bedtime stories for adults or romance. Yes, lovely speaking voice and Faith says I never miss your show. Thanks for all you do.

[Tara Cremin]

Thank you Faith.

[Joanna Penn]

And yes, obviously one of my streams of income is this podcast and so I have the corporate sponsors and I have my patrons. So thanks to everyone obviously. Yes. Okay. Please leave a comment on the podcast show [e-mail] or on the YouTube channel or on Spotify. You can also put a comment on X at the Creative Pen. Email me, send me pictures of where you're listening. JoannaTheCreativePenn.com I love to hear from you. It makes this more of a conversation so today's show is sponsored by Atticus and this is super appropriate for today's show since Tara talks about the importance of having a beautiful ebook. Yes, your formatting matters and you'll hear. I get quite surprised about this. I'm like seriously? I thought we were way past this. I thought everyone was doing beautiful ebooks, but clearly not so. Atticus helps you write and format stunning books in both ebook and print. It works across all platforms so you can use it whatever computer you work on. It is safe and secure. You own your data and it's backed up to the cloud so you don't have to worry about losing anything. Atticus has everything in one place so you can streamline your process. You can write your book in the editor with the ability to drag and drop chapters, manage book goals and writing habit, word count and all the usual writing things. Then you can use Atticus to format or import an existing book to format. There are lots of different templates so you can choose the look and feel or use the custom theme builder. Then you can preview your book on a variety of devices so you can see what it will look like. Your export will work with any book market and platform so you can get your book out into the world looking good, which we definitely care about. Happy authors who use it say it is the one app to rule them all and easy to use for new writers. It's a one time payment and you get 30 days money back guarantee you can start writing and formatting your books straight away. Check it out now at Atticus I.O. that's a T T I C U S I.O. this type of corporate sponsorship pays for the hosting, transcription and editing, but my time on the show is sponsored by my [e-mail] TheCreativePen thanks to the seven new patrons who've joined this week. Thanks to everyone who's been supporting for months and years. If you join the community you get access to everything but all my backlist videos, audio on writing, craft, author business tutorials and demos on AI, my patron, only Q&As, my live offer, office hours and the recordings. This week I shared how to use chat or Claude for line edits when working with human editorial comments which people found useful. The Patreon is a monthly subscription, the equivalent of buying me a black coffee a month or a couple of coffees if you're feeling generous. You get access to everything, all the backlist content, Q&As, ETC. If you get value from this show and you want more, come on over and join us at patreon.P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com TheCreativePen Right, let's get into the interview.

[Tara Cremin]

Tara Cremin is the director of Kobo Writing Life, Kobo's independent publishing platform. Welcome back to the show, Tara.

Thanks, Jo. Thanks for having me.

Oh, it is great to have you back on the show. And it's actually been four years, which is crazy.

I can't believe it.

I know. So I thought we'd sort of go back to the beginning, tell us a bit more about you. When did you get into the book business and what are some of the changes you've seen for authors since then?

Sure. So I've been working for Kobo since 2012, which feels like a lifetime. And when I started, the company had created some great but kind of relatively simple E readers. And we're just starting to dip their toe into really expanding what physical devices could do. And then you Fast forward to 2025 and we're the second largest manufacturer of E readers after our friends in Seattle. So part of the work that I do on Kobo Writing Life is I've been working on it basically since day one. Kobo Writing Life was created as a platform then for authors who wanted to publish directly to Kobo readers. So been kind of working on that. And the biggest change on the author side that I can really think of is just the expansion of the tools. I think, I think it's, it's easy to not always think back to 2012 because things move so quickly. I'll be like, oh, that was ages ago. But like you said four years ago, but when you're actually thinking about 2012, authors were uploading like a word dog and publishing their ebook and then that was it. You know, there wasn't a lot of different things available or more opportunities. But now authors can like really easily create accessible and like really beautifully designed epubs. With tools like Vellum, they can publish audiobooks to Kobo. They can reach libraries, join subscription programs and take advantage of all the promotional tools that are available. So I think the biggest change is just, yeah, there's more opportunities now for authors than when I started working in the, in the book business.

Oh, and what about the growth of Kobo for indies? I mean, we've heard before some of the stats around the sort of number of, of self published books on the Kobo platform that's grown as well, hasn't it?

It has. I have some stats for you. When we look at self publishing on Kobo, it makes up about 25% of the units for single copy sales. And then if we think about the subscription reading, it makes up about 60% of English language subscription reading. Is all self published content. Yeah, it's huge.

Wow, that's, that's incredible. So indie authors are important to Kobo? I guess we could say.

Yeah. And it was really, I mean it started with somebody wanting to email a word doc and get it published, which is why Kobo Writing Life was created as a platform. But we've really been able to expand it, add additional, additional features and as Kobo has always taken like a global stance of like the digital book market and I think we realized pretty early that the indie authors were, were really integral to that and something that I guess I don't think we talk about a lot because I'm primarily focused on like the English language side. But we also have a portal that's just for users in Japan that's very self contained in Japanese. But last year we actually localized in traditional and simplified Chinese for our friends in like Taiwan and Hong Kong. So the COPA Writing Life platform is now available in eight languages. So we're really, we know how integral the independent authors are to the global book business. Business.

Of course. Kobo originally was Canadian. Right. And then it was bought by Japanese company.

Yeah. So we're still headquartered in Toronto. We have a global presence where we have offices in Taiwan, in Tokyo, Darmstadt and Dublin. And with a generous sprinkling of people throughout Europe. And we were acquired by Rakuten maybe prior to me joining, but it's 2010, 2011 and we've been sort of their digital whole book area of that ever since then. So having this enormous company backing has been really, really helpful. But we do maintain quite a Canadian centric grassroots focus with the HQ being here in Toronto.

Yeah, absolutely. So one of the changes you mentioned has been the subscription model. And as you mentioned, our friends in Seattle have one that's quite famous that is, is an exclusive program, but Kobo plus is not exclusive. So people can be in that as well as selling their ebooks elsewhere, which I love. But how does Kobo Plus I guess compare to some of the other ones for ebooks and audiobooks? Like what is it for readers and listeners?

Sure. I think it's kind of maybe important to see why people have gone down the subscription route for people that are potentially a little bit hesitant of that. So when we're thinking about like the book business as a whole or like Kobo's history, I think in about 2015 we could see that there was like a whole generation of consumers that were coming that were consuming most of their media by not purchasing it once at a time and they were signing up for subscriptions. And whether this be music or movies or TV shows, I think we knew that books and audiobooks was going to go this way. And as a retailer that was really doing a great job at selling books one at a time. We wanted to reach this subscription consumer without disrupting the business we had built and doing it in a way that benefited us, the publishers, the authors, but also the readers who are looking for this. So we tested this in a contained market. So it was launched back in 2017 in the Netherlands. And this is because we had a really great market share there, a strong willing partner BO who wanted to test this out. And one of the also key factors was that there's some of the biggest, higher, some of the biggest piracy rates in Europe were found in the Netherlands. And we wanted to see if we could convert those users who were already sometimes using Kobo devices. They're reading, they're just not paying for the reading. And we wanted to see if we could make this very easy, self contained platform, could we convert them to paying users. And then what we found from that is that it really didn't cannibalize the a la carte sales. We had new customers signing up and we could kind of see where they were coming from. Some of them are coming over from Kindle Unlimited, some of them coming from piracy, some of them had been maybe just library users that have been moved into this kind of easier one click model. And some of them had never read an ebook before but kind of used it as, as a way to step their toe into the digital reading. And what we found is that publishers and authors, they all earned more as a result of like the new readers. So what we looked at with these findings with, gosh would be almost 10 years now, which is wild. Time doesn't exist anymore. I don't understand. But with the findings from the Netherlands, we've been able to expand Kobo Plus plus and as of this recording we are currently in 23 countries which is including all of our core markets. And there'll be more to come probably shortly after this comes out actually, but I can't quite say where, but 23 countries right now. And like you've mentioned, we're not the only subscription model out there. But what makes Us a little bit different is the focus on the importance of the authors and wanting to give them flexibility while also trying to reach this subscription reader. So it was really important to us that we didn't lock any authors into exclusivity. Our ethos around KWL is really trying to encourage authors to publish widely on as many platforms as they can, to reach as many readers as they can. And we just want to make sure that the Kobo experience of you publishing widely is really easy and that you're not spending too much time on it because you're balancing all of these other platforms. So. So we built this out so authors can pick and choose the country. They can choose all of them if they want, which is what I mean. I would always recommend, if you're a wide author that's publishing globally. I don't know why you wouldn't put your books in, but perhaps you didn't want to hit up your main markets like the US or Canada. You do have the option of excluding those, or you can select all of them. And what's a cool way about selecting all of them is that it actually includes future territories. So as we've been rapidly expanding Kobo plus, you don't have to do anything. Your books are already there when we add to new places. So that's been pretty cool. We're not locking authors into any timed period. You can put your books in and you can take them out if you're not happy with it. I always encourage people to, to leave them in to really try and, and reach that readership. But again, we wanted to. To give authors as much control as possible and really just get authors to try it out. Like try out an older series, maybe try it out in the Netherlands where you haven't really thought about selling books before and eventually get really comfortable adding their catalogue to Kobo Plus. So for us, it was really all about building author trust over time when it comes to subscriptions. And I feel people are more comfortable with it now than before. And I think it's. It's easy to get people comfortable when the revenue is increasing, I think.

[Joanna Penn]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tara Cremin]

So I have. All my books that are on Kobo are in Kobo Plus. I also agree. I think there's a group of readers for whom this. Readers and listeners. Because we should say this, this is. This is audiobooks as well, right?

Yes, yes, it is. Depending on the territory. But primarily they all have ebooks and audiobooks. So from a customer perspective, you can either pay for all, you can read for a month, all you can listen for a month or all. You can read and listen. So those are the options.

Exactly. So this is the thing. I think as authors, we have to think about different groups of readers. So even as we record this, I've got a Kickstarter are happening. And there is an ebook, there is an audiobook which will eventually be on Kobo, but for now they're just on Kickstarter. And then there's a gorgeous hardback with foil and ribbon and all of that kind of thing. Which Kobo doesn't sell beautiful hardbacks. Right.

[Joanna Penn]

I mean, and neither does Amazon.

[Tara Cremin]

Neither does Apple.

[Joanna Penn]

No.

[Tara Cremin]

Yeah. So we. And they're different audiences. It's a completely different audience. Someone who's going to buy that hardback to someone who's going to borrow the audiobook in the Netherlands, right?

Yep. Yeah. I mean, I love seeing what authors are doing with these. Like, that must be so satisfying for you to get that copy of this beautiful book. But yeah, we, we really wanted to just focus on the digital experience, especially when it comes to, like our devices as well, because we make some of the best E reading device. I mean, I would say they are the best, but like we're making the best E readers that are available. We launched our first color E readers last year and the reception to them was just, just tremendous. So our E readers have integration with ebooks and audiobooks. You can connect via Bluetooth to like speakers or headphones. We also have Overdrive cap. Like Overdrive is built into the E Reader so you can access the library from within Kobo. And one of the thing that we've been doing, like, I think we've just launched it maybe last year. You can tell I don't work on the device side. I'm not quite as sharp with my dates. But we, we. It's. It's always been very important for us to have it be like this open platform. Right. So having users be able to, to just use the E Reader to read books and if we can make it easy for them to purchase books with subscriptions and convert them to paying users, that's awesome. But we do have integration with Dropbox, which, because our newer E Readers, you can actually rate notes with the Kobo stylus and you can mark up the files themselves and there's integration within that. And we've recently added Google Drive integration, which is super easy. I know I just used it the day when I was giving a presentation and I had my notes that I was able to convert over and read from my Kobo, which was really helpful. And then actually markup and make changes as I'm going along on the Kobo E reader itself, which is, which is pretty cool.

And of course, if people buy my ebook from the Kickstarter, they can read that on Kobo.

Exactly.

You don't. It doesn't have to be like DRM'd into. That's too technical. It doesn't have to be a specifically Kobo ebook, is what you're saying.

No, no, no. We always just use like the EPUB standard, but we accept. I mean, actually I shouldn't be saying that actually, because you can also add like PDFs and things like that. So. No, it's not a locked system and.

I think that's, that's really good too. So let's get into some of the other things. I mean, I like we mentioned the gorgeous hardbacks that are the current trend in the indie community. I mean they really are like kind of all people are talking about. But you and I were talking about doing this episode because at the end of the day, the bread and butter income for most, most indie authors is still digital.

[Joanna Penn]

It's like we move on to the.

[Tara Cremin]

Sexiest thing in 2012. Ebooks were pretty sexy, right? I mean, they were like, oh, we can do this and we can do this.

[Joanna Penn]

And then it was audio books and.

[Tara Cremin]

Print on demand and all of that. And now it's hard, gorgeous hardbacks. But that's just going back to the sort of bread and butter. So what are your tips for maximizing income from ebook and audiobooks on Kobo? I know that's a massive question, but let's pick a few things. Things.

Yeah, I think it's still really important to make beautiful books, even if it's digital. So I, I would. I mean, because authors are primarily digital first, a lot of publishers are not. You know, they're still really focused on the print. So I think it's really important to think about making a really great digital file, which like I mentioned, it's just easier than ever now. You actually don't even have to think about it that much. The tools just do it for you. And I think it's important to have a file that can be read easily because the last thing we want to do is have some sort of technical glitch that is interrupting somebody's hard won reading time like you. We really just want the person to be always trying to get the next book. So making sure the file itself is beautiful and working perfectly I think is really important. And I think it's important to consider making accessible files so that everyone can read your book. Digital reading opens up a world to people that might have limitations around physical book reading. There are. Are a number of people that can only read digitally, and it just allows for, like, a more inclusive reading experience. So something to be mindful of as well.

Just on that, is there something special we need to do for accessibility for an ebook?

So I have a book recommendation for everyone called Content for Everyone by Jeff Adams and Michele Luccini. We had them on the Cobo Writing Live podcast and it was just a great conversation. So I would say to check out their book book because it has a lot of practical advice for authors on making accessible content. So not even just the ebooks themselves, but also also author websites and newsletters. And it's really full of actionable tips. They are far more versed in this than. Than I would be. To try and reiterate some of their. Some of their stuff.

Yeah, Jeff's been on this show and we talked about it then, but I got the impression that if you. Let's say if you use Vellum or Atticus for your ebook publishing, that does cover the content, at least of an ebook.

Yes. Yes. Perfect. Yep.

Okay, great. So just to be clear that there wasn't anything extra we were missing. Okay.

No, no, no, no. Just to make sure that that is kind of like being done and you're not creating files that are, like, inaccessible.

Which, to me, it means that Kobo is still getting a ton of badly formatted files, which I thought we were way past that.

It's not that it's badly formatted. I think it's. I think you have to consider the millions of books that exist and especially the older catalog. So newer books might be accessible, but the older books that you've created back in 2012 might not be. So a lot of the work we're doing is just an education around, like, making sure that your book files are of, like, the best content or the best quality that they can be. Like before Vellum existed.

Oh, yeah. And I used to use Scrivener back in the day. I know some people still do, but Scrivener, I used to get errors all the time. I love Scrivener for writing, but for listeners, I would say Vellum or Atticus, I think is the sort of best. Best in class these days. Okay. Back on to maximizing income.

So I would say that for Kobo, box sets are super popular. So when you're thinking about selling, like, books one at a time, and authors primarily are Writing in series or that's sort of the trend that we see through Kobo Writing Live. You definitely want to bundle your books. Something to remember is that on Kobo, we don't have a higher price cap, so you can go over $9.99 and still earn 70% on each sale. So with the box sets, again, you want to make sure that you have like an easy to navigate table of content because this is a larger file that readers are browsing through. Through. So you want to make sure that they're able to do that with ease, which I'm sure, again, these tools can kind of easily create this for you, but just something to be mindful of when you're bundling the books together.

Yeah. And I think bringing up box sets is really good because the KWL promotion tab is. Which is great. And I go in every three weeks and I apply for as much as I can get. Although, just so everyone knows, I don't get every promotion. Like, nobody gets every promotion. Right. You just have to apply for a ton of them. And there are always box set promotions going on.

Yeah, we rotate around pretty regularly with them because our readers are just so interested in having box sets. And it's funny because especially if you think about cobocause. I think we think about box sets as like a discounted opportunity to have these books, but that's not really how readers are taking them. They're taking them as like, this is a convenient way to have this one series in this one book. So I'd always recommend pricing them for their value and just making sure that they're available for the reader who doesn't want to like, click on books one by one and just have this bigger box set. And something to keep in mind with the covers is that we. We do accept the 3D box sets with the plain white backgrounds. But if you're thinking about promotions or applying to promotions, we might be a little bit less inclined to accept those just because it makes your cover really small and it makes it harder to read. You know, you already have limited space on a website in terms of a cover. So I really like to think of box set covers. They're almost as an ad for your series and you can kind of use it as an opportunity to encapsulate the theme of your series within your box set cover.

Yeah. And then just on that. Just on Kobo plus, we didn't say so. A lot of authors are used to the pages read idea.

How.

How is that done on Kobo Plus? For reading and listening Listening.

Yeah. So the biggest difference, I guess between Kobo plus and some of the other platforms is that we base our payment out. It's a very similar revenue share model, but it's based on the minutes that your book has been read versus the page reads. And this allows us to treat ebooks and audiobooks the same and it kind of reduces a little bit of the gamification that we've seen on some other platforms. So we're really taking into account the time that somebody is spending on your book.

Yes, because some people were able to game other systems by sort of getting bots or paying people to click through pages and stuff like that, so. Oh, but it's funny, isn't it? I mean, whenever humans can find a way to game a system, they will.

They're very. We're very clever people.

We are. We are very clever people. Okay, so about some other ways of maximizing income.

So I would say with audiobooks that we're talking about. So you can publish audiobooks to Kobo as well through Kobo Writing Life. You may not see the tab right away and actually the same with the promotions tab, but you just have to send the team an email to enable this for you. So if you email writinglifecobo.com you can ask for audiobooks and for promotions. And just as we were talking about the box set covers, there, I think something to keep in mind with audiobooks, we will crop the COVID for you, but if you want to make sure that you're making the best cover, that audiobooks are square and not rectangular. So sometimes we do see kind of like a really squished cover and that would just be something to be a bit mindful of when you are publishing audiobooks to just make sure that you're selling the book. Because we are unfortunately always judging books by their covers, you know.

Yes, absolutely. And I guess one of the things I've noticed with Kobo is that the vast majority of my Kobo income is fiction rather than non fiction. So is there a split like that?

There probably is, but it's. I feel like the non fiction market for us is definitely growing, especially with our new devices that are kind of. We've done a lot of work to try and cater to the non fiction reader and what we call like an immersive reading experience. And you can see this with the kind of the writing within the book itself. There's easy ways to flip back and forth between the pages. We, we basically have the digital version of like a thumb in, in the side of the pages so you don't lose your spot but you can actually flip through the book and then flip back again. So it's definitely growing. But it would be, I think when we see especially on COBRA writing life, it would be fiction that would be primarily what what people are reading right now.

Well and I'll put another sort of ask in for the promotional tab which is mainly fiction focused. I, I find and how I always look for non fiction promotions there. So I think if they were. Because to, to be clear again for people listening, I do think to sell books on Kobo it is good to be part of that promotional, the promotional opportunities you can really get in front of new readers that way. So that would be one of the things I would like to see is more non fiction and memoir promotional opportunities.

Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. I will take this to the team.

Yeah, yeah, take the feedback. Let's talk about libraries because some authors are worried about libraries and they think, I mean obviously authors want libraries to have their ebooks and audiobooks but they're also worried about the money. So if, if an author does go with the library and overdrive, how do they get paid for that?

[Joanna Penn]

That.

[Tara Cremin]

So it's really easy to opt your books in. It's part of like the publication process. So it's in the rights and distribution section. So you just have to set a price in USD and that'll be your library price for the book. And the kind of general rule of thumb is roughly around like the same as a mass market paperback. You just want to make sure that you're not putting the same price as your just straight up digital book because of the loaning factor when it comes to, to, to the library books. And sometimes we have authors that are, they want to appeal to libraries by putting it in at a lower price. And I always kind of remind them that the librarians have two ways of purchasing the books through Kobo Writing Live so they can publish on a one copy, one user which is kind of like when you think of a traditional book that we have this one book and that can be loaned out multiple times. And that's why you want to increase the price because you want to cover the, the loans that are happening with that. But they also have the opportunity to buy your book on a cost per checkout option and that's for a one time loan for 10% of the price. So if your library book is $19.99, they could also just buy your book for a one time loan for $1.99. So that can really appeal to them. We, we have a lot of our, a lot of the library sales that are demand driven. So it's people actually going in and asking for your book. So it's really great to, to be able to offer to a librarian. Like actually you can buy it just this one time time and maybe you'll buy it a few times for the lower price and if it's really popular then you'll buy it for the higher price again or so we see that happening quite a lot. And authors that distribute to Overdrive through kobo, they earn 50% of any sale that happens.

Yes. So just to put people's mind at ease, you can support libraries and get paid. So this is one of the ways you can say to people, you can listen or read my books for free, just ask the librarian to stock them or just go to your library app. I think think that's, that's a good one. But I wanted to come on to like the authors who do really well on kwl. What are the commonalities that you see amongst those sort of top, top selling authors and what do you see working that we can model?

Well, like you've mentioned the promotions tool that we have and I was trying to think about instances of authors that have moved widely in the past couple of years and are finding, finding success on Kobo and they're honestly the ones that have leveraged the promotions. It can take a little while to build the Kobo audience and I just always recommend like applying to the promotions that are relevant to your books and applying regularly. I like to think about it as like the worst case scenario is that you're putting your books in front of the right eyes. You know, it can just be quite competitive because there's a lot of people applying, but it's our merchandising team that are going through them. So. So I definitely would say the ones that are building the audience and finding success on cobore are really leveraging the promotions with us. And then also if that's audio and library promotions that we have too, I think if you're publishing audiobooks, and I know this can be really tricky to balance, but if you can make sure that you're publishing your ebook and your audiobook on the same day and do those same releases, I think that's really important to building sales. And we found authors that have kind of reported that it's a bigger impact for their audio when they do that versus when they release it at a later date or anything. So you can kind of try and Line them up as the one book release.

Well, then that brings me on to something because having obviously done audiobooks for many years, and sometimes I narrate them myself, sometimes I have paid people. But recently, and in fact, my Death Valley audiobook, I haven't told you this, but it's is narrated by my voice clone, my AI voice clone. And today, as we record this, I put a couple of chapters up on the Creative Pen podcast so people can have a listen. And I've already had comments that say, I would not have known this was an AI. It sounds exactly like you. And so this is. And this will be the, I think the first time in however long I've been doing this now, 2007, I've been able to publish ebook and audiobook on the same day.

Oh, wow.

Because as you said, it is incredibly hard to do that because most of us in the past, we've maybe sold the ebook first, made some money, then eventually been able to pay for the audiobook, or we've published it through, you know, before Kobo, when you could put it up there, you put them on another platform. They never went live on the same day. There was a long time we couldn't do preorders orders. So I have, I guess that we're coming on to the AI discussion because AI narrated audiobook, certainly for me, 11 labs, the difference in the amount of work and pain for me as an audiobook narrator is incredible. So I don't know if I'm ever gonna human narrate again. I mean, it literally is fantastic. So let's come on to AI. So what is Kobo's style chance on AI assisted eBooks, AI narrated audiobooks, AI created covers. I know this is a tough question, but we have to cover it.

No, I mean, AI is definitely. It's the biggest thing that is disrupting the book industry at the moment. And when it comes to us at Kobo, we kind of go back to the core principles of what makes a reader's life worse and can we avoid it? And what makes a reader's life better and can we take advantage of it? It. So AI we know will open the floodgates to lots of books being published that are, like, purely machine generated, which really impacts, like, organic discovery, especially for indies, you know, but part of the upside of this is that it becomes a curation problem. And that's something that we're here for. We're here to solve that problem. So with Kobo writing life specifically, we accept AI audiobooks, and we just ask that they're clearly labeled that it's machine read read. And it's really just to temper customer expectation or just have something that's mentioning that it's a machine read audiobook. We do discourage the publication of ebooks that are solely generated by AI and this is just trying to root out the bad actors. We're not trying to root out any authors who are serious about making a career with their works, but we're just trying to discourage the people that are bad actors within this space. So I think from when we think about it from an indie author perspective, I think it's good practice to include disclosure, which I think is something that you do. Joanna, you've been like leading. I think of you as like a leader in the best practices in this space. I don't know if you think of that as well.

Yeah, just on the audiobook. So I have a button, like a yellow button that says digitally narrated. And it's so funny because I see now in the publishing, traditional publishing industry is saying, oh, we need labeling. And I'm like, I've been labeling my books for years. I mean, come on, like before it was required. I tick all the boxes and talk about it. So yeah. And also I don't have an issue with that. I think honesty is really important. And also I feel like all these things make my work better. I'm not doing it to try and scam anyone or be worse. I'm trying to be better. And I do think that we are in a transition period. I think this will be so pervasive of within a year or two that it won't make that much difference. But for now, I guess as you say, it's marking. Marking this. Yeah. So I will be filling in whatever I need to fill in.

Yeah, I think it's good practice. I mean it is a personal decision, you know, and I think it's. You just have to think about the reader. You just don't want to disappoint the person that is buying your book. Like that's what it ultimately comes down for us. And then we also know that, that like it's okay to use AI as a tool, especially with indie authors who you have to balance writing with the entire business of also being your own publisher. So whether you using it as a tool to create you a calendar or spreadsheet that that makes sure that you're hitting all your pre order dates. There's things that can make your life easier because you have to wear so many hats. So we understand that as well. So when I Think about AI, like from a bookselling perspective. I think the interesting opportunity comes in how that we can leverage AI in some of our recommendations like summarizations and curation. So I can't really go into too much detail on what we're working on yet but we're really excited about like better recommendations and curation that really benefit us all. We just want to keep people's attention on long form reading by putting really good stuff in front of them and we can do this without using books as training data inside an LLM. So yeah, we're excited about this and, and any COBRA writing life authors that are listening, you can expect some changes for to the cobalt writing life terms to come and I hope that these aren't seen as anything that's too scary. We're really trying to just support some new initiatives and be really, really clear about what we're asking for. We're not interested in making new content. We don't want to make things from books that authors entrust us with with. What we do want to do is make reading better and keep people reading more and for longer because we're trying to earn a space in reading amongst everything else that's going on in the digital world and we really believe that we can do this.

Yeah, I like that. And it's interesting though because you mentioned there about, and this is obviously important that you're not going to just upload everyone's books to some big LLM and do stuff with it. It. No, you're not going to do that. But it's funny because for many, many years I've said why is the book itself not the metadata? So we've had to come up with categories, keywords, we've had to have genre specific covers. But the thing is if I have a book, say Death valley, it's like 70,000 words, it's a full length thriller and I have to write a sales description which is when Claude writes my sales descriptions now. But it's not long enough. And what you want with some kind of AI curation recommendation engine is the emotional promise of this. The characters in this, the feeling you get by reading this matches these books over here which just will not be surfaced in a normal book recommendation engine. And in fact for the last year or so I've been using ChatGPT as my main book recommendation engine because it can do this much more nuanced search and I found really some quite old books as well have come up. So is that something that I know you're not going to read Everything in. But what do you think about that?

Yeah, no, I think. I think you're spot on in the kind of the way that the book recommendations can be going and can be leveraged. And we just kind of want to make more thoughtful recommendations. And it's interesting that you're saying that it's older books too, because that's something that we see with the subscription with Kobo. Plus, when I look at some of the top bread books, they're often coming from, like, 2017, 2018. So there's ways to resurface things that exist that people want to read. And we can do this in a thoughtful way and an easier way than us having to rely on metadata that's been provided. If I want to be able to find a list of, like, Canadian authors, it's not as easy as potentially it can be. There's instances like that, and it's all about, again, trying to find the right book for the right reader and making. And just keeping them reading. That's what we're focused on. On.

Yeah. And at the end of the day, I mean, we're book people and it kind of. It drives me up the wall when people get. And, like, authors get annoyed with other authors and I'm like, look, can we, you know, let's get upset about how much time people spend gaming or how much time people spend on tv. You know what? We just want everyone to read whatever they read is good. Like, we want people to read books. And I know, obviously that's what Kobo wants as well.

Well, yeah, I. I think I was. Maybe it was like on Threads or a meme or something that I read recently where it was like, like, reading is almost. It's almost radical now in a time where we just want faster content and we're consuming things faster. It's a bit radical to be like, actually, I'm going to sit down for two hours and just be immersed in this world and really think about myself. Like, that's. And. And expand my thoughts on other things. Because. Because I'm not going to be distracted by four things at once, you know, And. And I, I just. Yeah, it must have been some meme that. Ironically, a meme that grabbed my attention from this radical thought process. I know, but. Yeah, but I was just like, that's right. It is, It's. It's. It's something that we don't do. I mean, it's, I guess, comparable to, like, going to the movies and, like, actually sitting there and not being distracted. It's the same sort of thing where it's radical to take that time for yourself, and we want people to be able to do that.

So we're almost out of time, but I just wanted us to mention the Kobo Writing Life podcast. Since this is a podcast, people might enjoy the KWL show, and that has been going for many years now. So what can people find over on there if they want to click over and have a listen?

Sure. We just released episode 366, which is wild. So you can find us anywhere where you listen to podcasts. And we release an episode every. Every week, but we rotate between new interviews. And then we've been resurfacing some of our great content from our backlist with a little thing we're calling the Kobo Rewriting Life podcast. So there'll be a new episode, a Rewriting Life new episode, and so on and so forth. And there's a wealth of really good information. We. We focus on, like, the craft and business of writing. It's a mix of traditional authors and with indies and. Joe, you've been a guest. We'd love to have you back. I think you're going to come on soon for.

[Joanna Penn]

Yeah.

[Tara Cremin]

So at some point.

Yes. Yeah. And I think for anyone that is interested in Kobo, or maybe you're new to what we do, at the end of 2024, we released an interview with Michael Tamlin, who is our CEO, and he is probably a little bit more eloquent than me and explain explaining the things that we've just talked about, but he really gives a great outline of Kobo Kobo writing life. And I just really like being able to spotlight that because. Because it really, I think, informs the fact that Kobo is a book company and we're being led by a book guy. And I think that's something to be celebrated and just kind of shows our overall focus into the reading space.

Well, we should also remind people what Kobo is an acronym for.

Literally, it's the word book.

Because I feel like we forget to say that because we know it, but there might be people listening who didn't know.

I worked there for years before I realized it was. That it was actually an anagram of the word book. I was. I think I was definitely, like, three years in before it hit me, I was like, all right.

Oh, yeah, that. That's what it is. But, yeah, Michael Tamblyn is. I've been at London Book Fair, and I mean, often he is. He's often the very best speaker in publishing. I mean, he really is very entertaining. And very positive about indie authors, which I really appreciate. I've heard him defend indie authors authors to the publishing industry and so I love that and I'm obviously a happy KWL user. So Tara, where can people find, I guess the Kobo Writing Life team if they want to connect?

Yeah, so you can email [e-mail] we're on most of the socials. We haven't quite ventured into TikTok yet, but you can find us on Facebook and Instagram and threads and YouTube. And if you are interested in creating an account or learning more about it, you can, you can go to kobo.com writinglife Brilliant.

Thanks so much for your time Tara. That was great.

Thank you.

[Joanna Penn]

So I hope you found this discussion interesting and I hope it helps you sell more books on Kobo. Just reach out to the team if you have any questions. They are very helpful. So let me know what you think of today's show. Please leave a comment on the podcast Show Notes at the creative pen.com or on the YouTube channel. Comment on X the Creative Pen or email me joannathecreative pen.com and send me pictures of where you're listening or your favorite cemetery or churchyard. Next week I'm talking to Derek Slayton about expanding audiobook revenue with YouTube and podcasting. And it was Derek who inspired me to do more of this when I listened to him on the Brave New Bookshelf podcast, which is excellent. It is about AI, focused on AI, really interesting to hear how people use things. So he really changed my mind on this. So I hope hope he sparks some ideas in you too. Coming up next week. In the meantime, happy writing and I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening today. I hope you found it helpful. You can find the backlist episodes and show [e-mail] podcast and you can get your free author [e-mail] blueprint. If you'd like to connect, you can find me on Facebook and X at the Creative Pen or on Instagram and Facebook @jfpenauthor. Happy writing and I'll see you next time.