Some business housekeeping news this week.
I recently tried to find my books on Kobo's ebook website, and neither putting in my name, nor entering a title of a book, would bring up any of my books, despite the fact that they are distributed to Kobo from Draft2Digital. Moreover, if I went to the "My Book" page on D2D's site, clicked on a book and then on the Kobo logo below the listing, it would take me to a Kobo page, or should I say an alleged Kobo page, for that book. Now this is probably a Kobo issue, however, I decided to take the opportunity to delist my books with Kobo via D2D in favor of uploading them myself to Kobo.
I debated about listing them at the same price as they are listed at Amazon. Kobo does not report the sale of free books to Draft2 Digital, so I don't know how many I've sold for free on Kobo. It's a case of "if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?" sort of thing. Which is to say, not knowing how many, or if any, books I sell on Kobo, it is easy to give up those unrecorded free sales. I doubt I've sold very many, judging from the number of reviews they received. Once upon a time, I did list my books on Kobo myself, and in that case they did report how many free books you sold. It wasn't many, not worth keeping a separate account, so I went back to distributing them via Smashwords. This time around, I'm thinking that if I don' sell more than a couple free books a month, it wouldn't make a difference if I put a non-free price on from a sales point of view. They might be not only more visible with a price, but more attractive in Kobo's version of Kindle Unlimited lending library, so adding a non-zero price may be a plus
But on further consideration, I decided to see just how many I sell at free, and then make a final decision at the end of the year. If I can't give them away on Kobo, I might as well not sell them.
In another bit of news, I've lowered the prices of my series starting ebooks, which is to say, The Captain of the Lost Star, Sailing to Redoubt, and The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon to $.99, which is typical for a series starter, if not for free. I could try to make them perma-free, but The Captain of the Lost Star is exclusively Amazon at present, though I'm thinking that I will use that six book format for Kobo as well, but I don't think it's worth messing with Amazon at present. I have two free books on Amazon.com and maybe a free book in some of the other stores, so I have free sample books covered already. I'll just let that sleeping dog lay.
And finally I contacted D2D about the three books of mine that had not been converted to Apple audiobooks. I received a very quick response from Tara, who discovered that the problem was likely that the books in question did not have complete tables of contents. I never paid much attention to tables of content before, but now, I guess I better. In any event, I reworked the manuscripts so that their conversion process found all the chapters and reuploaded them. Hopefully this will fix the problem. We'll see. At least I received an explanation as to what may be holding them up.
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