What are the different ways you can distribute and monetise your ebooks and audiobooks through Kobo Writing Life? How can you market them more effectively and reach more readers? With Tara Cremin.

In the intro, the potential impact of tariffs and what to do about it [Self Publishing Advice]; Pep talk for authors during chaotic times [Publishing Confidential];
8 ways to get more value from your backlist [BookBub]; Death Valley Kickstarter — and writing thrillers webinar.

Write and format stunning books with Atticus. Create professional print books and eBooks easily with the all-in-one book writing software. Try it out at Atticus.io

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Tara Cremin is the Director of Kobo Writing Life, Kobo's independent publishing platform.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• 
  
• Changes in the indie book industry over the past decade
  
  
• How Kobo Plus compares to other subscription models
  
  
• Catering to different audiences by offering different book versions
  
  
• Tips for maximizing income from ebooks and audiobooks on Kobo
  
  
• Applying for promotions to expand your potential audience
  
  
• The payment model for Kobo Plus and library books
  
  
• Kobo's stance on AI-assisted books
  

You can find Tara and the Kobo Writing Life team at Kobo.com/writinglife or email them at writinglife@kobo.com.

Transcript of Interview with Tara Cremin

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

Tara: Thanks, Jo. Thanks for having me.

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

Tara: I can't believe it.

Joanna: I know. So I thought we'd 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?

Tara: Sure. So I've been working for Kobo since 2012, which feels like a lifetime. When I started, the company had created some great, but kind of relatively simple, eReaders. They were just starting to dip their toe into really expanding what physical devices could do.

Then you fast forward to 2025, and we're the second largest manufacturer of eReaders, after our friends in Seattle.

So part of the work that I do on Kobo Writing Life, I've been working on it basically since day one.

Kobo Writing Life was created as a platform for authors who wanted to publish directly to Kobo readers.

So I've been kind of working on that. The biggest change on the author side that I can really think of is just the expansion of the tools. I think 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 it'll be like four years ago.

When you're actually thinking about 2012, authors were uploading a Word doc and publishing their ebook, and then that was it. There wasn't a lot of different things available or more opportunities.

Now, authors can really easily create accessible and like really beautifully designed ePubs with tools like Vellum and Atticus. 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 that there's more opportunities now for authors than when I started working in the book business.

Joanna: Oh, and—

What about the growth of Kobo for indies?

I mean, we've heard before some of the stats around the number of self-published books on the Kobo platform. That's grown as well, hasn't it?

Tara: 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. Then if we think about the subscription reading, it makes up about 60% of English language subscription reading is all self-published content. It's huge.

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

Tara: Yes, and 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. We've really been able to expand it and add additional features.

Kobo has always taken a global stance of the digital book market, and I think we realized pretty early that the indie authors were really integral to that.

Something that I don't think we talk about a lot because I'm primarily focused on the English language side, but we also have a portal that's just for users in Japan that's very self-contained in Japanese.

Last year, we actually localized in traditional and simplified Chinese for our friends in Taiwan and Hong Kong. So the Kobo Writing Life platform is now available in eight languages. So we know how integral the independent authors are to the global book business.

Joanna: Kobo originally was Canadian, right? Then it was bought by a Japanese company.

Tara: Yes, 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.

We were acquired by Rakuten, maybe prior to me joining, 2010, 2011, and we've been sort of their digital 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.

Joanna: Absolutely. So one of the changes you mentioned has been the subscription model. As you mentioned, our friends in Seattle have one that's quite famous that is an exclusive program. Kobo Plus is not exclusive, so people can be in that as well as selling their ebooks elsewhere, which I love.

How does Kobo Plus subscription compare to some of the other subscription models for ebooks and audiobooks?

Like, what is it for readers and listeners?

Tara: Sure, I think it's 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 the book business as a whole, or Kobo's history, I think in about 2015 we could see that there was 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.

Whether this be music or movies or TV shows, I think we knew that books and audiobooks were going to go this way.

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 were looking for this.

So we tested this in a contained market. So it was launched back in 2017 in the Netherlands. This is because we had a really great market share there. A strong, willing partner, Bol, who wanted to test this out.

One of the also key factors was that there's some of the biggest piracy rates in Europe were found in the Netherlands. So 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.

So we wanted to see if we could make this very easy, self-contained platform, could we convert them to paying users? 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 were coming over from Kindle Unlimited, some of them coming from piracy. Some of them had been maybe just library users that had been moved into this kind of easier one click model.

Some of them had never read an ebook before, but used it as a way to step their toe into the digital reading. What we found is that — 

Publishers and authors, they all earned more as a result of the new readers [on subscription].

So what we looked at with these findings was—gosh, it'll be almost 10 years now, which is wild. Time doesn't exist anymore, Joanna—but with the findings from the Netherlands, we've been able to expand Kobo Plus. As of this recording, we are currently in 23 countries, which is including all of our core markets.

There'll be more to come, probably shortly after this comes out, actually, but I can't quite say where. So 23 countries right now.

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.

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 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 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 like excluding those, or you can select all of them.

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 leave them in, to really try to reach that readership.

Again, we wanted 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 catalog to Kobo plus.

So for us, it was really all about building author trust over time when it comes to subscriptions. I feel people are more comfortable with it now than before, and I think it's easy to get people comfortable when the revenue is increasing, I think.

Joanna: So all my books that are on Kobo are in Kobo Plus. I also agree, I think there's a group of readers for whom—readers and listeners, we should say—because this is audiobooks as well, right?

Tara: 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.

Joanna: 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 happening. There is an ebook, there is an audiobook, which will eventually be on Kobo, but for now, they're just on Kickstarter.

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? I mean, and neither does Amazon, neither does Apple.

[The special hardback vs subscription.] 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.

Tara: Yes. I mean, I love seeing what authors are doing with these. That must be so satisfying for you to get that copy of this beautiful book.

So, yes, we really wanted to just focus on the digital experience, especially when it comes to our devices as well. We make some of the best e-reading devices—I mean, I would say they are the best—but like, we're making the best eReaders that are available.

We launched our first color eReaders last year, and the reception to them was just tremendous. So our eReaders have integration with ebooks and audiobooks. You can connect via Bluetooth to speakers or headphones.

We also have Overdrive capabilities, like Overdrive is built into the e reader, so you can access the library from within Kobo.

One of the things that we've been doing, l 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.

It's always been very important for us to have it be this open platform. So having users be able to just use the eReader 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.

With our newer eReaders, you can actually write notes with the Kobo Stylist, and you can mark up the files themselves, and there's integration within that.

We've recently added Google Drive integration, which is super easy. I just used it the other 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.

I was actually able to mark up and make changes as I'm going along on the Kobo eReader itself, which is pretty cool.

Joanna: Of course, if people buy my ebook from the Kickstarter, they can read that on Kobo because it doesn't have to be like DRMed into—that's too technical. It doesn't have to be a specifically Kobo ebook is what you're saying.

Tara: No, no, no. We always just use the ePub standard. Actually, I shouldn't be saying that because you can also add PDFs and things like that. So, no, it's not a locked system.

Joanna: I think that's really good too. So let's get into some of the other things. I mean, like we mentioned, the gorgeous hardbacks that are the current trend in the indie community. I mean, they really are kind of all people are talking about.

You and I were talking about doing this episode because at the end of the day — 

The bread and butter income for most indie authors is still digital.

It's like, we move on to the sexiest thing. In 2012 ebooks were pretty sexy, right? I mean, they were like, “Oh, we can do this, and we can do this.”

Then it was audiobooks and print-on-demand and all of that, and now it's gorgeous hardbacks. So let's just go back in to the sort of bread and butter.

What are your tips for maximizing income from ebooks and audiobooks on Kobo?

I know that's a massive question, but let's pick a few things.

Tara: I think it's still really important to make beautiful books, even if it's digital. I mean because authors are primarily digital first. A lot of publishers are not. 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.

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.

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.

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 a number of people that can only read digitally, and it just allows for a more inclusive reading experience. So something to be mindful of as well.

Joanna: Just on that—

Is there something special we need to do for accessibility for an ebook?

Tara: So I have a book recommendation for everyone called Content For Everyone, by Jeff Adams and Michele Lucchini. We had them on the Kobo Writing Life Podcast, and it was just a great conversation.

I would say to check out their book because it has a lot of practical advice for authors on making accessible content. So not even just the ebooks themselves, but also author websites and newsletters. It's really full of actionable tips. They are far more versed in this than I would be to try and reiterate some of their stuff.

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

Tara: Yes, yes, perfect.

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

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

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

Tara: It's not that it's badly formatted, 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 making sure that your book files are of the best content or the best quality that they can be, like before vellum existed.

Joanna: Oh, yes. 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 is the best in class these days. Okay, back on to maximizing income.

Tara: So I would say that — 

For Kobo, box sets are super popular.

So when you're thinking about selling 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 Life, 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 an easy to navigate table of contents because this is a larger file that readers are browsing 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.

Joanna: Yes. I think bringing up box sets is really good because the KWL promotion tab is great. 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.

There are always box set promotions going on.

Tara: Yes, we rotate around pretty regularly with them because our readers are just so interested in having box sets. It's funny because 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.

Something to keep in mind with the covers is that 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 already have limited space on a website in terms of a cover, so I really like to —

Think of box set covers as they're almost as an ad for your series.

So you can kind of use it as an opportunity to encapsulate the theme of your series within your box set cover.

Joanna: 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 is that done on Kobo Plus for reading and listening?

Tara: The biggest difference, I guess, between Kobo Plus and some of the other platforms is that we base our payment on—well, 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.

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.

Joanna: 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. Oh, but it's funny, isn't it? I mean, whenever humans can find a way to game a system, they will.

Tara: We're very clever people.

Joanna: We are. We are very clever people. Okay, so—

What about some other ways of maximizing income?

Tara: 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.

If you email writinglife@kobo.com you can ask for audiobooks and for promotions.

Just as we were talking about the box set covers there, I think something to keep in mind with audiobooks, we will crop the cover for you. If you want to make sure that you're making the best cover, audiobooks are square and not rectangular, so sometimes we do see kind of like a really squished cover.

That would just be something to be a bit mindful of when you're publishing audiobooks, to just make sure that you're selling the book because we are unfortunately always judging books by their covers.

Joanna: Yes, absolutely. I guess—

One of the things I've noticed with Kobo is that the vast majority of my Kobo income is fiction rather than nonfiction. Is there a split like that?

Tara: There probably is, but I feel like the nonfiction market for us is definitely growing, especially with our new devices. We've done a lot of work to try to cater to the nonfiction reader, and what we call like an immersive reading experience.

You can see this with the writing within the book itself. There's easy ways to flip back and forth between the pages. We basically have the digital version of like a thumb 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 I think what we see, especially on Kobo Writing Life, it would be fiction that would be primarily what people are reading right now.

Joanna: Well, I'll put another sort of ask in for the promotional tab, which is mainly fiction focused, I find. I do always look for nonfiction promotions there. To be clear, again, for people listening, I do think to sell books on Kobo, it is good to be part of 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 nonfiction and memoir promotional opportunities.

Tara: For sure. I will take this to the team.

Joanna: Yes. Take the feedback!

Let's talk about libraries because some authors are worried about libraries. I mean, obviously authors want libraries to have their ebooks and audiobooks, but they're also worried about the money.

If an author goes with the library and Overdrive, how do they get paid for that?

Tara: So it's really easy to opt your books in. It's part of 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. The general rule of thumb is roughly around 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 the library books.

Sometimes we have authors that 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 Life.

So they can publish on a one copy, one user. This 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. So that's why you want to increase the price because you want to cover the loans that are happening with that.

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 have 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 be able to offer to a librarian, like actually, you can buy it just this one time, and maybe you'll buy it a few times for the lower price.

Then if it's really popular, then you'll buy it for the higher price again. So we see that happening quite a lot. Authors that distribute to Overdrive through Kobo, they earn 50% of any sale that happens.

Joanna: 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 that's a good one.

I wanted to come on to the authors who do really well on KWL.

What are the commonalities that you see amongst top selling authors? What do you see working that we can model?

Tara: Well, like you've mentioned, the promotions tool that we have. I was trying to think about instances of authors that have moved widely in the past couple of years and are finding success on Kobo, and they're honestly the ones that have leveraged their promotions.

It can take a little while to build a Kobo audience, and I just always recommend 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. 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 I definitely would say the ones that are building the audience and finding success on Kobo are really leveraging the promotions with us. Then also, 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.

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 try and line them up as the one book release.

Joanna: Well, then that brings me on to something, having obviously done audiobooks for many years. 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 is narrated by my voice clone, my AI voice clone.

Today, as we record this, I put a couple of chapters up on The Creative Penn Podcast, so people can have a listen. I've already had comments that say, “I would not have known this was an AI. It sounds exactly like you.”

This will be, 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.

Tara: Oh, wow.

Joanna: 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.

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.

So, I guess we're coming onto the AI discussion because AI-narrated audiobooks, certainly for me, ElevenLabs, 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 going to human-narrate again. I mean, it literally is fantastic. So let's come on to AI.

What is Kobo's stance on AI-assisted ebooks, AI-narrated audiobooks, AI-created covers?

I know this is a tough question, but we have to cover it.

Tara: AI is definitely the biggest thing that is disrupting the book industry at the moment. 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?

So AI, we know, will open the floodgates to lots of books being published that are like purely machine generated, which really impacts organic discovery, especially for indies. 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. It's really just a 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 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. I think of you as like a leader in the best practices in this space.

Joanna: I do try. Just on the audiobook, so I have a button, like a yellow button, that says “digitally narrated.” It's so funny because I see now in the traditional publishing industry they're 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 ticked all the boxes and talked about it. Also, I don't have an issue with that. I think honesty is really important. Also, I feel like all these things make my work better. I'm not doing it to try to scam anyone or be worse. I'm trying to be better.

I do think, though, we are in a transition period. I think this will be so pervasive within a year or two that it won't make that much difference. For now, I guess, as you say, it's marking this. So I will be filling in whatever I need to fill in.

Tara: Yes, I think it's good practice. I mean, it is a personal decision, and I think 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 to for us.

Then we also know that it's okay to use AI as a tool, especially with indie authors who have to balance writing with the entire business of also being your own publisher.

So whether you're using it as a tool to create you a calendar or spreadsheet that makes sure that you're hitting all your preorder 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 book selling perspective, I think the interesting opportunity comes in how 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 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, yes, we're excited about this.

Any Kobo Writing Life authors that are listening, you can expect some changes for to the Kobo Writing Life terms to come. I hope that things 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. What we do want to do is make reading better and keep people reading more and for longer.

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.

Joanna: Yes, I like that. 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. You're not going to do that.

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.

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—well, in fact, Claude writes my sales descriptions now—but it's not long enough.

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. 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.

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?

Tara: I think you're spot on in the kind of way that the book recommendations can be going and can be leveraged. We just want to make more thoughtful recommendations.

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 read books. They're often coming from like 2017, 2018.

So there's ways to resurface things that exist that people want to read. 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.

It's all about, again, trying to find the right book for the right reader and just keeping them reading. That's what we're focused on.

Joanna: At the end of the day, I mean, we're book people, and it kind of drives me up the wall when authors get annoyed with other authors. I'm like, look, let's get upset about how much time people spend gaming or how much time people to spend on TV.

We just want everyone to read. Whatever they read is good.

We just want people to read books. I know, obviously, that's what Kobo wants as well.

Tara: I think it was like on Threads or a meme or something that I read recently, where it was like, reading is 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 and expand my thoughts on other things because I'm not going to be distracted by four things at once.

It must have been some meme that, ironically, grabbed my attention for this radical thought process.

Joanna: That's ironic.

Tara: I know, but I was just like, that's right. It's something that we don't do. I mean, it's, I guess, comparable to 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.

Joanna: 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.

What can people find over on the KWL Podcast if they want to click over and have a listen?

Tara: We just released episode 366, which is wild. So you can find us anywhere where you listen to podcasts. We release an episode 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. There's a wealth of really good information. We focus on the craft and business of writing. It's a mix of traditional authors and indies. Jo, you've been a guest, and we'd love to have you back. I think you're going to come on soon.

Joanna: Yes, at some point.

Tara: 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 Tamblyn, who is our CEO. He is probably a little bit more eloquent than me in explaining the things that we've just talked about.

He really gives a great outline of Kobo, Kobo Writing Life, and I just really like being able to spotlight that because it really informs the fact that Kobo is a book company, and we're being led by a book guy. I think that's something to be celebrated, and just kind of shows our overall focus into the reading space.

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

Tara: Literally, it's the word ‘book.'

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

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

Joanna: Oh, yes, that's what it is.

Michael Tamblyn is—I've been at London Book Fair—and 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 to the publishing industry. So I love that, and I'm obviously a happy KWL user. So Tara—

Where can people find the Kobo Writing Life team if they want to connect?

Tara: So you can email us at writinglife@kobo.com. 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. If you are interested in creating an account or learning more about it, you can go to Kobo.com/writinglife.

Joanna: Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time, Tara. That was great.

Tara: Thank you.

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