Seriously, you should take a look at Kobo for your ebooks. There are a lot of reasons I could list here, but I’ll pick just a couple.
First: It has become more writer-friendly than Amazon over the last few years, mostly because they see where Amazon made some interesting choices and did other things. Amazon pretty much owns the US market, and is huge in Canada, Australia, and Great Britain. After that, not so much. Kobo, on the other hand, is larger in many other markets, because they try to partner with one of the local book-selling chains or companies, and collaborate with them, rather than trying to plow them under.
Here in the US, that takes the form of a new partnership with Walmart where you can get Kobo’s huge library of ebooks, and maybe not contribute to Amazon taking over the whole world.
Second: there are things I can do on Kobo that I can’t do on Amazon. (Well, I could, if I wanted to lost most of the money I might gain.)
When your favorite writer puts a book on Amazon, they must price it between $2.99 US and $9.99 US. If they do, they earn at around 68-69% of the cover (70 minus a processing fee based on file size). If I go below $2.99, or above $9.99, my rate drops to 35%.
For those of you paying attention to the math, I make about 34 cents on those $0.99 novels and novellas you get to read. That does not pay the bills. Same thing happens if I go high.
That’s on my mind today. Because I can, we were able to put the entirety of The Science Officer, Season One together as a single “Collected Novel” or whatever you want to call it. All 8 books. Somewhere around a quarter million words. One low price.
For $19.99 you get Season One in ebook, down from around $22+. Not a lot of savings, but that’s another couple of books you could by. Or a nice Christmas present you could get for your favorite someone who likes science fiction books. Or whatever else.
If you shop at Walmart, there are suddenly a metric crapton of ebooks available now. (Really, six million titles? Wow.)
So rush out and tell your friends about The Science Officer, Season One (because you’ve already read it all, right?) This is something I can’t do anywhere but Kobo right now. And the Kobo folks are awesome, so I’m looking at other things I can do to build my traffic and sales over there.
Folks in Belgium and the Netherlands now have access to Kobo Plus, where they can pay a monthly subscription fee and read as much as they want. It’s like Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, but without the requirements for exclusivity. All of my books (I think) are now available there, with more coming.
Do yourself a favor this holiday season and check out what the rest of the world already knows about and see what kinds of fun you can have on Kobo. You’ll thank me for it.