Self publishing with Kobo

I decided that my second book I would send to as many online bookstores as possible. To not bother with the KDP Select of Amazon for Good and Geeky Writer Workflow. I have heard on a few of the podcasts, there is not enough benefit in the KDP Select to make it worthwhile having a book exclusive on Amazon. In any case I am quite pleased to be able to try, with it and without it to see how it works. I thought I’d put it onto Kobo next after listening to the guy who works for Kobo on the Rocking Self Publishing Podcast. I got the impression they care about the authors, maybe he was even hinting that they do more so than does Amazon. Kobo is based in Canada, but is available to authors worldwide.

What a palaver getting an account started

I spent ages searching around the site to get an author’s account that would allow me to upload and submit my books. I went around in circles so many times that I started to get dizzy. After filling in the form a couple of times with the messing about of having to wait for an email to arrive and clicking on it to activate the account. It was on my second try when I used Facebook to login rather than using the email and password method, I was able to start moving forward with Kobo. If I wasn’t the persistent sort of fellow that I am, I could have quite easily given up with the process. There was a part in the process where I had an account with Kobo and the only thing I could find to do with submitting books to publish was a help page. You would think that they would have had a link from the help page to the submissions page. I’m really not sure exactly what happened in the end but at some point the link I need it presented itself and I started the process. It seems some of the problem occurred due to using two different browsers during the sign up process. It is built into the security of the software the same browser has to be used when verifying the email address. Got there in the end.

Forms to fill in and files to upload

It was easy to add the book cover design and upload that. On the site it said I could upload a Kindle format file for the book. Seeing as, I had one of these available I gave it a try. It didn’t work and I got an error message. So I went back into Scrivener and I compiled the book again, but this time in the EPUB format. This time it worked perfectly. When I got to the page for putting in the amount of money to sell the book at it took me out of the submission process to the page for my bank details. After the bank details were put in there it didn’t put me back at the page where it had kicked me out. I had to find my book in the submission process again and go back in. Fortunately all of the details I had put in previously had been saved. I was then able to put in the price for the book in Euros and I let it automatically base other countries on price in Euro.

Wait and see

I did have to go back into the details for the book and enter the categories under which I wanted to sell the book. It would have been nice to have a search window to help me find the most suitable categories for a book about writing. You can choose three categories on the Kobo system. When everything was all finished off I got a message to say that it could take up to 72 hours before the book would be available for sale. Quite a lot longer compared to my experience so far using Amazon, where they say it will take 12 hours but usually takes about half of that time. Let’s see if they under promise and over deliver and take less than 72 hours for the book to be online.

Already started on the next book

Yesterday I was able to do some research for the next book and I collated all that into Scrivener. Today I was able to start using my research and get working on the book about using PGP encryption to encrypt emails.