Kobo touts global growth, insists e-readers aren’t dead

Toronto-based e-reading company Kobo announced that it doubled its e-reader device sales in 2012; up by “nearly 150 percent” in December and over 12 million registered users. Citing the super-sketchy Taiwanese tech site DigiTimes, Kobo also claimed it has 20 percent of the global e-reader market. Whether or not that’s true (and DigiTimes is forecasting e-ink device share, not the share of ebooks sold), the company is clearly expanding rapidly — to Brazil, Portugal, Italy, Japan, Spain, South Africa and the Netherlands in 2012, with plans for Russia, India and China in 2013.

At Digital Book World, Kobo’s Michael Tamblyn provided some updates on the company’s partnership with independent bookstores in the U.S. As reported by Publishers Lunch (paywall), Tamblyn made

“a clear case that the ‘indie store’ ebook customer is very different than Kobo’s standard US customer to date. ‘They buy more expensive books’ and “have a completely different price tolerance’ than the traditional U.S. book buyer. Half their sales are at $9.99 and above (versus only 30 percent for the average customer), and those customers ‘also buy different books’…Their indie bookstore ebook bestseller list also ‘looks very different–much more like a print bestseller list, and less like an Amazon top 25.’”

Penguin: Embracing POD, as Book Country adds free option

Penguin U.S. will make its books available through On Demand Books’ Espresso Book Machine (PDF), the print-on-demand machine that appears in around 70 bookstores and libraries globally. (Its technology is also integrated into some Kodak Picture Kiosks in retail chains like CVS.) “Penguin is always looking for new ways to bring our writers to readers and On Demand Books gives us another channel to further fulfill that mission,” Penguin EVP, business operations Doug White said in a statement. The Penguin/On Demand release also noted that the Espresso Book Machine’s software will soon allow users not just to create files for printing but to “convert print files to the EPUB format suitable for e-readers.”

Separately, Penguin is changing the self-publishing options that it offers through its community writing site Book Country. When Penguin launched Book Country’s self-publishing arm at the end of 2011, many complained that it was overpriced and greedy, taking too large a share of authors’ ebook royalties. (Simon & Schuster’s self-publishing offering has received similar criticisms.) In response, Book Country has rolled out a redesign and a host of changes to its self-publishing services, and will relaunch the community writing site later this year. Publishers Weekly reported:

Book Country has increased the author royalty to 85% from 70%, added a free tier to Book Country’s self-publishing services and reduced fees for all its tiers. Now Book Country offers self-publishing packages that start at free, $59, $149, $249 and $399 (which includes 100% royalty if sold through the Book Country retail channel) for its top-tier, which was originally $549.

Inkling opens up to Google

iPad publishing platform Inkling is making its titles — just 400 of them so far, with about 1,000 more expected in 2013 — fully indexable through Google Search. It will also sell those books in chunks. “We’re going to bring people in before they ever get to Amazon,” CEO Matt MacInnis told me. It’s a bullish goal — especially because Google hasn’t been a source of book discovery up until now. At Digital Book World this week, Codex Group’s Peter Hildick-Smith presented research showing that while the majority of frequent book buyers visit Google regularly, less than 1 percent discovered the last book they bought through a search engine.

She Writes Press is headed by Brooke Warner, formerly the executive editor of independent publisher Seal Press, and aimed at authors who want to try publishing outside the traditional system, but also want to be part of a “high-quality, curated imprint.” Warner tells me, “We are in our infancy at this stage of the game, but both of us understand publishing and our contacts run deep. We will advocate for our authors just as traditional presses advocate for theirs.”

The company explains how the model works:

Authors pay She Writes Press to edit, print and distribute their work, but are required to undergo a vetting process: manuscripts must be submitted and assessed before publication commences, and if they are deemed not yet ready for publication, recommendations (including editorial feedback) are offered on how to proceed. We are committed to bringing viable projects into the marketplace, and are confident that this process will ensure the quality of our projects and ongoing list.

Authors begin by submitting a book proposal to She Writes Press. The fee for that is $25. The vetting process is done by “professional readers, agents and editors,” Warner told me. “We’re then giving the authors feedback about what track we’re putting them on. Track 1 is good to go, Track 2 is needs a copyedit, and Track 3 is needs a developmental edit. Any Track 2 or 3 author who is open and wanting to take their manuscript to the next level can ultimately qualify to publish on the press. But the work will need to be up to the industry editorial standard.” Factors the vetting team looks at, she says, vary depending on the book’s genre but include “character development, pacing, sequencing, description, ability to draw in the reader, takeaways, structure, narrative voice and story arc.”

When an author’s book is accepted, she signs an agreement and buys the basic “She Publishes” package, which costs $3,900 and includes services like interior design, cover design, ebook production, proofreading, distribution via Ingram and some marketing. Authors can pay extra for services like copyediting and galleys. Each year, She Writes will also choose one to two “passion projects” each year, whose authors get the package for free.

Digital-only publishing is not available. “We are a full-service press that’s committed to e-book offerings, but our primary mission is to publish our authors in print,” the website explains. Authors can choose print-on-demand through Lightning Source, included in the basic package, or can pay extra for a print run.

Once books are published, She Writes Press says it is “committed to helping women establish and build a platform—arguably the most important factor in getting traditionally published—by promoting our authors’ works in a biannual catalog that will be mailed out to reviewers, booksellers, and media; announcing new publications to our existing network; and eventually selling our authors’ books in a She Writes Press online bookstore.”

She Writes Press takes a fee for each sale — 20 percent of each sale on a printed book, and 15 percent of each sale on POD and ebooks. The fee on printed books is for distribution and warehousing, Warner says, and the fee on POD and ebooks is for managing the accounts. “In my experience, the self-publishing biggies, like [Lightning Source], CreateSpace, and Lulu, don’t give authors much hand-holding,” Warner says. “We strive to function like a traditional press in that sense. Authors can contact us with problems and we will make sure their accounts are running smoothly.”

Last year, traditional publisher Penguin added self-publishing services to its community writing site Book Country. Those services range in price from $99 to $549, and like She Writes Press, Penguin takes a cut from each book sold. Penguin faced backlash from some self-published authors who called the initiative overpriced and claimed it took advantage of inexperienced authors who didn’t know how easy it was to self-publish on their own.

She Writes plans to avoid similar criticism by vetting the titles it accepts, though it obviously can’t guarantee their success, and by promoting them once they are published. Self-publishing is easy now, Wicoff admits, but “what’s hard is help you need to make your book the best book it can possibly be, and not feeling alone and without support from experienced people in the process. It’s also pretty much impossible, when you self-publish, to have the credibility that only affiliation with a professionally run press can provide. So we are leveraging the easy part, and providing support for what’s actually hard.”

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

Penguin launched Book Country in April. The site is overseen by Penguin global digital director Molly Barton and has about 4,000 members who have published 561 books. A “small number” of Book Country members have found agents, Penguin says. The rest can now choose “a new kind of self-publishing that offers a more professional product and provides guidance that isn’t currently available from other players,” Penguin CEO David Shanks said in a statement.

Book Country provides users with three self-publishing packages: $99 for a user-formatted e-book; $299 for a user-formatted print and e-book; and $549 for a professionally formatted print and e-book. Those who select the $549 option can choose from six styles created by Penguin’s in-house designers. Each style corresponds to a certain book genre: “The Sensation” for sci-fi/fantasy titles, for example, or “The Riddler” for mysteries and thrillers. Users can make up to 15 free formatting changes before the book is published.

Users can also choose from a variety of options for distributing their book. “Wide distribution” means that the book is sold on Book Country as well as across e-bookstore like Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS), Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Kobo and others. “Basic distribution” is on Book Country only, and users get a discount for selecting that option. Books can also be kept private if users just want to sell them to a select group of people.

There are certain pricing rules: E-books have to be at least $0.99, for example, and print books have to be priced equal to or above the manufacturing cost (Book Country provides guidance once it knows how long the print book will be). An e-book can’t be priced higher than its print equivalent. DRM is available for titles above $2.99; titles below $2.99 are DRM-free.

For books sold on Book Country, users earn a 70 percent royalty if the book is priced above $2.99, and a 30 percent royalty if the book is priced between $0.99 and $2.95. The royalty rate is the same on third-party sites, but there, since third-party sites also charge fees, a user receives the 70 percent royalty minus the third-party fee. For example, an e-book published by Book Country and sold on Amazon for $2.99 gets 70 percent royalty from Amazon: $2.09. The Book Country user then gets 70 percent of the $2.09: $1.47. Users are paid via PayPal every 30 days with a minimum payment of $50. If a user doesn’t reach $50 within three months, he or she gets paid and the cycle restarts.

Shanks told the WSJ that Penguin has invested “a substantial amount of money” in Book Country’s technology, and that while the company may offer some of Book Country’s most successful self-published authors traditional publishing contracts, it won’t refer authors it rejects to Book Country: That “wouldn’t be appropriate,” Barton said.

HarperCollins’ online writing community, Authonomy, recently launched its own digital imprint, which “hand picks” the best works on the site and publishes them as original e-books. But this appears to be the first time a traditional publisher has launched a separate self-publishing operation. It is a smart strategy: While Penguin is unlikely to pick up almost any of the authors publishing on Book Country and offer them traditional contracts (Authonomy has done so a few times), it is keeping these authors close and engaged with its brand and is turning them into an additional revenue stream. And if it is in search of new genre fiction authors, it knows where to look first.