Last week, Joanna Penn’s podcast featured an interview with Mark Lefebvre, director of self-publishing and author relations at Kobo. (Self-published titles now account for 15 percent of all the books that Kobo sells.) From the hour-long conversation, here are the most valuable takeaways for indie authors:
- Kobo’s demographic has more leisure time, and Kobo readers are generally not bargain-basement shoppers. Fifty percent of Kobo readers are over fifty-five years old, and 30 percent are retired.
- Kobo pays a 70 percent royalty for books or sets priced beyond $9.99. Joanna Penn’s box sets sell better on Kobo than her individual titles. She doesn’t make the box sets available on Amazon because of the lower royalty (35 percent) that applies above the $9.99 price point.
- The authors who do well on Kobo keep their books continually selling through Kobo. Lefebvre says that it takes six to nine months to get traction on Kobo, and that some authors never gain momentum because they too often pull their books out (to go exclusive on Amazon).
- Kobo success requires customized pricing for each country or market. Lefebvre says, “You can’t just stick in a US price and roll the dice and see what happens.” For example, you must price low for India because books there are extremely cheap. Kobo now offers pricing in eight currencies and will soon expand to seventeen currencies.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
