Digital Publisher Breaking News

Breaking News. Kobo is now publishing independently. That means there’s another place to which you can upload your digital books. Kobo is also one of the Smashwords.com members so it you want to do one-stop-publishing you can leave it with Smashwords and take less money. Over the next few weeks I will remove every single one of my titles from the Kobo section on Smashwords and uploaded the books and stories onto Kobo itself. I have previously removed Nook and Kindle from Smashwords. The pay is better if you aren’t splitting it with another entity although Smashwords is really good about taking only a small share. At my writer’s breakfast today we discussed the benefits of moving to Kobo. Kobo is a Japanese firm that as put a great deal of money into their new system. What sets it apart from all the other systems is that if you make a mistake you can upload a new version WHILE the original is still being uploaded. That is very different. Aside from not splitting your fee, the other reason to use Kobo itself is that Smashwords is not as reliable as one would like it to be. It sometimes gets the covers wrong, or the blurbs wrong, it fails to upload. Sometimes it doesn’t upload to the distributors it claims to upload to. It’s an ambitious company and I’m sure it will improve but it is not the one-stop magic maker it advertises. I like Smashwords and I make money on Smashwords, and I’m glad I’m working with Smashwords, but I would definitely advise uploading separately to Kindle, Barnes and Noble and Kobo.