As many of you who follow my blog may know, I use a distributor for my eBooks for many sales channels outside of Amazon. Draft2Digital is my key to getting into stores I know I’d never get into myself (like the Tolino dealers). However, I’ve been hearing a great deal about how much better it is to “go direct” with Kobo in particular. The reasons vary, but I hear that Kobo offers some good promotional opportunities. So, this morning I went ahead and delisted my boxed set from  Draft2Digital. That will be the first book I will take direct to Kobo.

This actually happened by accident. My boxed set (which consists of The Inventor’s Son: The Beginning, The Inventor’s Son, and The Scientist’s Son) is proving to become a really great promotional tool for me at Amazon. With the introduction of Amazon Marketing Services available to any book seller, not just people enrolled in Select, I had an opportunity to see what this set can do. Priced at $3.99, it’s not the bargain price of a Book Bub boxed set, but it’s making me money while getting a number of my books into readers’ hands, and I like where it’s going.

I recently did an author cross-promotion with a group of other Sci-Fi and Fantasy authors which promoted the permafree The Inventor’s Son. What was my follow up sales from Kobo? The boxed set. Even though the book they had downloaded is in the boxed set, they were still getting the prequel thrown in for the price of what The Scientist’s Son would have cost purchased on its own.

Apparently, there’s a boxed set culture at Kobo, more so than at Amazon. And I want to be a part of it. So, the ability to promote my boxed set directly on Kobo could be a big boon to me. I may never delist any of the other books from Draft2Digital, and who knows, I might go back to listing the boxed set with Draft2Digital if this doesn’t work out the way I hope. But I think this is a great thing to play around with and see what happens.

UPDATE: After delisting the boxed set and trying to start the process to upload my book to Kobo, two issues came up that stopped me, and frankly, I should have considered these things sooner. The first issue was the publisher name. Right now, when you go to Kobo and look at my book listings, there is no publisher name. This is because, presumably, Draft2Digital takes care of that field on my behalf. I will probably have a publisher name in the near future, but not just yet, so I didn’t know what to put in that field. They wouldn’t let you leave the field blank, so I just put in something that I know I’m wanting to name my company when I form it. The other thing that stopped me was the ISBN issue. Draft2Digital gives out free ISBN numbers, but they own them. I cannot use that ISBN for any edition other than the one distributed through them. While you don’t necessarily need an ISBN to publish through Kobo, they strongly recommend you get one. In the US, ISBN numbers are pretty costly, and not worth the money unless I was selling a lot of books. Then, I’d have to go direct with everybody I could, and buy my own ISBNs and start from scratch, basically.

My objective for getting Kobo readers for my boxed set hasn’t changed, but my strategy has. I think my best bet might be Facebook ads directed to Kobo readers in countries outside the US. This will be a worthwhile, do-able experiment!

(Don’t worry, I will have the epic AMS ads blog post soon. I’m still testing one or two more things.)