All right! After a depressingly long absence from the world of blogging, I’m going to start back in with a short blog!
So… here we go with a blog about Kobo Promotions!
A lot of authors publish exclusively with Amazon. There are benefits to this (Amazon does it’s best to try to keep you focused on them), but there are many benefits to going “wide”. The concept of going wide with your books is to publish your books everywhere you can, setting up your ebook on sites like Apple, Google Books, Overdrive, Kobo and many other places.
I’ve already posted in the past about setting up your book with Kobo, but today I want to talk about ebook promotions.
One of the benefits of publishing your ebook through Kobo has to do with Kobo’s promotional tools. Kobo has some really great promos that they run and you can easily apply to take part in them. I’ve run a couple so far through them and both experiences have been great.
However, Kobo’s option for promotions is not automatically available to everyone. You have to request it.
When you do set up promotions through Kobo, you get a tab in your Dashboard that’s simply labelled, “Promotions.”
If you would like a detailed explanation of how to do all this, you can check out this blog.
However, you if want the short and simple answer, write to Kobo at this email address:
writinglife@kobo.com
When you email them, ask them to enable your promotions tab. It’s that simple.
I think I had a response within a day or two and the promotion tab showed up on my dashboard within another day or two. It was easy. Just remember to be polite in your email. It’s not that they will get upset if you are rude, it’s just that they are surprisingly friendly people to work with. So… be friendly to them. 🙂
Now, once you get the promotions tab approved, you can scroll through the options under the promotion tab. You get promotions like, “Daily Deal” or “Free Books” and more. Some cost a percentage of your sales (like 10%), others cost a flat fee. Once you find a promotion you like, click on it, select the book you want to submit for it, fill in the prices and away you go! You have to wait a number of days (usually) to be approved or declined, but if you get approved, you’re all set.
Now, here’s something really cool. If you get a “free book” promotion approved, Kobo will put your book in their FREE list for your genre of books (which gives you a lot of exposure) and people will just find it and download it. Pretty great! If, after the promotion is finished, you leave your book on for free, Kobo will actually leave it on the list. 🙂 I did this and I continued to get downloads as my book continued to be on their free list after my promotion was over.
This is not some kind of hack or anything… I found this out from Kobo.
So, if you have your book set up with Kobo, email them right away about the promotions tab! Kobo is a great company to work with!
Enjoy!
Shawn
