“Nerd ‘Till I Die”

Christine Munroe, “Has the coolest job ever. She leads the KWL business team, helping authors successfully reach millions of Kobo readers around the world.

She has a BA and MA in English Literature from McGill University and worked as a literary agent and international book scout in New York before joining Kobo. Her favourite part of her job is helping independent writers achieve great results and make a living from their writing, as well as working with her fabulous colleagues on the KWL team!

Christine plays several musical instruments and has a terrible tendency to buy guitars on a whim. She had a scholarship lined up to do a degree in jazz (baritone sax) but went the English major route instead. Her favourite genre is literary fiction.” (https://kobowritinglife.com/who-we-are-the-peple-behind-kwl/)

Note: The above bio has Canadian spelling, eh.

Show Highlights

• Christine calls herself a “Nerd ‘Till I Die.”
• she runs the global self-pub platform for Rakuten Kobo
• Kobo is the number one digital bookseller in France, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. It also has a strong foothold in Canada. We talk about how that happened in a world dominated by Amazon.
• We talk about how Kobo is different from Amazon: 1. It sells only books and 2. Rather than trying to dominate the market, Kobo seeks to collaborate with existing businesses.
• What Kobo’s relationship with Wallmart  means for readers and writers
• Kobo Plus is a subscription service (similar to KU) which has started in The Netherlands with a partnership with Bol
• Writers can get their books into libraries through Overdrive, available through Kobo.
• In 2012 Rakuten took over Kobo, moving it from a start-up company to an international business with an expanded reach
• We talked about a quote I took from Mark Leslie Lefebrvre’s book, Killing it on Kobo, “Unlike Amazon with an operation meant to compete with and dominate the market, Kobo seeks out collaborative bookselling operations leveraging their strengths in digital ebook and audiobook sales with their partner’s strengths in selling physical books. This collaborative approach is quite Canadian, eh?”
• The culture of Kobo is distinct. It’s run by people who love books. The selling is done in a collaborative model.
• We talked about the Promotion Tab on writer’s dashboards, and she said if you don’t have one, ask for it. ( It took me five minutes to get mine.)
• We talked about writing down goals.
• We also talked about the emergence of audio
• We talked about Kobo’s weekly podcast, Kobo Writing Life. They interview authors, people within the publishing business and Kobo people.

Contacts

If you want help with Kobo, send an email to [email protected]

They actually have people in charge of “author care!”

Killing it on Kobo

My review of Mark Leslie Levebvre’s book, Killing it on Kobo, will go live on my author blog on Thurs. Feb. 21st. I condensed my eight pages of notes down to one page. If you want to know more about Kobo, check it out.