Episode 124 - The Rise of Subscription Models with Tara Cremin
March 15, 2022
Tara Cremin of Kobo Writing Life discusses SUBSCRIPTION MODELS, including Kobo Plus. She talks about the rise of subscription models ... what sets subscription readers apart ... how authors get paid in subscription models, and why Kobo chose minutes read as the measure of reader engagement ... and Kobo's “globally local” approach. She also discusses how authors can reach libraries through Kobo.
Do any of those topics pique your interest? Check out my new YouTube playlist, 2 Minutes of Indy, where you can find a brief video clip from the interview on each of those topics!
Do any of those topics pique your interest? Check out my new YouTube playlist, 2 Minutes of Indy, where you can find a brief video clip from the interview on each of those topics!
Tara Cremin is the Director of Kobo Writing Life, Kobo’s independent publishing platform. As a subject matter expert in all aspects of indie publishing, her aim is to make KWL the greatest and most user-friendly self-publishing platform available, and she’s and always looking for ways for indies to reach a new audience of readers. Tara hosts KWL’s monthly live events with author and industry experts and you can sometimes hear her as a guest host on the Kobo Writing Life Podcast.
"It's a different type of audience. The type of person that goes to this content is somebody that's wanting to consume things in mass, wants it to be really easy, maybe doesn't want to make too many decisions around what they want to read. They want it to be put in front of them." —Tara Cremin
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[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Tara Cremin. Hey Tara, how are you doing?
[00:00:05] Tara: I'm good, thank you for having me.
[00:00:07] Matty: I am pleased to have you back. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Tara Cremin is the director of Kobo Writing Life, Kobo's independent publishing platform. As a subject matter expert in all aspects of indy publishing, her aim is to make KWL the greatest and most user-friendly self-publishing platform available. And she's always looking for ways for indies to reach new audiences of readers. Tara hosts KWL's monthly live events with author and industry experts, and you can sometimes see her as the guest host on the Kobo Writing Life podcast. And Tara was a previous guest on Episode 31, EBOOK PRICING.
[00:00:41] So I had invited her back to talk about THE RISE OF SUBSCRIPTION MODELS and subscription models in general, and then Kobo Plus in particular. And so I just thought I'd start right out, Tara, asking you, (The Rise of Subscription Models) can you give a brief overview of what subscription models are and what the rise of subscription models means for indy authors?
[00:01:02] Tara: Sure. So a subscription model is just a kind of a different means to consuming media. So whether or not it's your Netflix, that you pay a monthly fee and then you can watch whatever you'd like. It could be your groceries that get delivered to you every week. It could be some local radio station that you send money to, or it's your Spotify. So there's lots of different things. So on the author side, it can be something that you pay a monthly fee for, and then it's all you can read or all you can listen to.
[00:01:32] So with Kobo, we have the sort of all you can read option, and then also a subscription model for audiobooks, and sometimes these are combined. But so what it means for indy is that it's just basically a different way for a customer to consume your work. It's primarily, I think, a different type of audience. The type of person that goes to this content is just somebody that's wanting to consume things in mass, wants it to be really easy. Maybe doesn't want to make too many decisions around what they want to read, they want it to be put in front of them. So there's that sort of aspect of it, of it being a good means to break into a new market of this type of audience.
[00:02:09] And then also, I think what's really important to indies, is just to understand the payment structure to it, because it's a bit more complicated than, you're selling a book and you're earning X amount in royalty, so there's a bit more nuance to it there.
[00:02:21] Matty: (Author Payments for Subscription Models) What are the different approaches different platforms are taking to reimbursing authors for their effort in the subscription model?
[00:02:28] Tara: It definitely varies, it varies from place to place. A lot of them are revenue share models, which is what Kobo uses as well. So just to speak specifically to the Kobo model, it’s a revenue share pool, so basically all of your subscribers, they pay their monthly fee, and that all goes into one area which is called a pool or a pond of money. What Kobo does is actually, we calculate the minutes that books are being read and we pay out on a per minute threshold. So all of the revenue from the subscribers is in this one area, and then we divide that by all of the minutes that were read. And that's going to give you your value per minute. That can vary month to month because the subscribers can vary, and also the consumption of minutes of the books varies as well. But it doesn't vary really that much.
[00:03:13] And so then that gets multiplied by the royalty range, which is 60% for Kobo. And that's how you're getting paid out. Other areas, sort of page reads, the same sort of principle, but it's with the number of pages that are being read. I know, we used to have a threshold, so there are different options. Sometimes it's just a straight up, that your books are being read, this is the amount that you'll get per read sort of thing. We found with the minute model, it seemed to be the most fair. It didn't allow a lot of gaming of the system. I'm trying to find a nicer way to say that, but you know ...
[00:03:45] Matty: It's pretty nice, compared to the alternatives.
[00:03:50] Tara: Yeah, so I think sometimes you can find this online that if it's a page read, there's a lot of different ways that people work around it. It's sending links to just automatically go to the back of your book, even though the book isn't actually being read. We really wanted to just reward the readers and the authors, when the books are physically being read by the customers.
[00:04:07] Matty: (Payment by Minutes Read) I don't know that I had ever heard about minutes read before I read a little background on Kobo Plus in order to prepare for this. And it's interesting, because I can easily imagine how per-page platforms, and setting aside the gamers for a moment, people who are legitimately reading it, it's easy for me as a non-techie person to understand how the retailer would track or the platform would track pages read. But minutes read seems harder to understand. What happens if somebody puts down their e-reader and goes and makes a cup of tea, or is the author getting credit for time that the e-reader is just sitting dormant?
[00:04:46] Tara: Yeah, we do take into account idle time so that isn't calculated, but what's really interesting is that page reads seems to be, we equate it so much with a physical book because we all know what books are, they have pages, we turn the page. But when it's a digital product, pages don't actually mean anything. You increase your font, pages increase. You decrease it, the pages decrease again. The number of pages that your book has is completely customizable and changeable. So in essence, a page read is not really a denomination that's accurate. It is a theory in essence, rather than it being like an actual physical page read.
[00:05:24] So I think with the minute read, we found that it was easier to track that because you can gauge the activity. So we do have lots of parameters around it, we're taking out idle time, we're synching it also, we're tracking this when you're reading offline, so you don't have to be connected to Wi-Fi, but then when you are connected or you sync your device again, we take into account the page reads after the fact.
[00:05:44] And it also allowed us to treat ebooks and audiobooks in the same way and have the same payout model for both. So that was one of the real key incentives of moving to this sort of model, was to be able to treat them both the same.
[00:05:56] Matty: And are audiobooks included in the Kobo Plus subscription pool?
[00:06:01] Tara: It varies geo to geo. So because (Kobo's "Globally Local" View) Kobo likes to take a really, what we call, a globally local view of bookselling, where we sell all over the world, but we have people on the ground in a lot of key areas. We don't treat each model exactly the same. So there are audiobooks and ebooks combined in some areas, but not in others. It was a key factor into how we've rolled it out. I know, last year we rolled out five new geos, which was a lot in one year. But we've actually had this program since 2017.
[00:06:30] So it began in Belgium and the Netherlands, and it was created in conjunction with our retail partner there, who was Bol.com. And the reason that we wanted to create it in this area, is because there was really high rates of piracy. So that's one thing that's interesting with an e-reader, is that even if you're not purchasing through Kobo, we still do have some insights into what's being read, that we can see, like when books are being sideloaded, and is one of the factors of we like to keep our Kobos open format so that you can put these different types of books on them. So we noticed that there's a strong readership in this area, but they're not necessarily the readers that are paying each time they want to read a book. So what can we do to sort of to try and engage these people and get them into our ecosystem? A little bit into the ecosystem in the fact that they have a device, but how do we get them into the browsing and the purchasing?
[00:07:20] And one problem is also, how do we recommend stuff to somebody that hasn't really purchased yet? So it was all of these reasons why that we partnered with Bol and created the program there, and having this aspect to allow readers to, like I mentioned, not really think about the book that they want, they just kind of want to consume books, at a kind of, I was going to say not an aggressive rate but a pretty rapid rate, aggressive reading.
[00:07:47] So it was really successful, it really took off and it allowed us to increase the customers that we had there. So that was the basis as to why it was those two regions at the beginning.
[00:07:58] And then in 2020, I believe, what is time? Either 2020 or 2021, we launched in Canada, in our home turf, which was a really big deal for us because it was, our big area. We've been here for like 12 years now, and we did it on our own. We did it just with kobo.com to just have subscriptions there. And that's been really doing very well since we've launched.
[00:08:22] But then just to show you the different nuances into how we're rolling out this program, is that when we launched it in Portugal, we developed it there in partnership with a publisher who very specifically wanted their books to be available on a subscription form, but they didn't really have the means to develop it themselves, or wanted to be able to use our knowledge of how this has worked in different areas. So we partnered with them, so that was that with Leya, the publisher in Portugal. And we're able to bring our whole catalog there and bring their catalog to the readers.
[00:08:52] And since then, we had five other areas last year, so we are now available in, I guess four actually, sorry, France, Italy, Australia, and New Zealand are the areas that we rolled it out to there, with different partners in each place, but each launch being very individual to those countries where we're launching it.
[00:09:13] Matty: There were a couple of things I wanted to loop back on that you said about the reader behavior, and I'm going to throw out two things and maybe they're connected, maybe they're not, but one was the idea that (Subscription Readers) what I'm gathering is that the people who like subscription models like to have material presented to them, they don't like to have to go looking for it. And then you would also mention that there are certain genres that seemed to be more popular among subscription readers. Are those two things connected? What are you seeing the behaviors there in terms of reader behavior that would benefit authors to understand?
[00:09:44] Tara: I think so. I think maybe partially connected, it’s very hard to have one lens over the readership, just as I mentioned because it is nuanced in each different area. But what we do find is that I do think that genre fiction does very well in subscription models. And I do believe, maybe for that reason, that they don't necessarily want to seek out specific books. People that read genre fiction are more inclined to read a book that's very similar in the same vein. Sure, they will definitely follow an author, but they like the genre as a whole, so would probably go through that genre. So we're definitely seeing that being popular, but also with all different types of readers coming to Kobo Plus too. One question that we did get when we moved to minutes is, the idea that people read at different speeds. There's that sort of, people assume that romance readers read very quickly, because the books are shorter or things like that and how that affects minutes being paid.
[00:10:36] But we did a lot of research into it when we switched over to the minute model, and for lack of a better term, it all comes out in the wash. There was no distinctive genre that had an impact that was anything that was really notable to how the minutes pay out.
[00:10:51] Tara: But so in essence, you have faster readers, you have slower readers and it's a balance between them, as we're seeing that through the data that we do have.
[00:10:58] Matty: For Kobo, you can opt into the subscription part, correct?
[00:11:04] Tara: Yes, and it's non-exclusive, I should've said that off the bat. A big feature for the author side of things, is that we're not asking you to be exclusive. It's against the ethos of Kobo Writing Life. We always want to give the authors as much control about where your books are being published and the readers that you're reaching. So it's non-exclusive, you can remove your books at any time. We always encourage you to keep your books in to help them gain traction in the programs. But we also built it out with the option that you can select the area, so you don't have to put your book into Kobo Plus everywhere, especially as we're expanding into more and more territories. Maybe you want to just try out Canada, but you don't want to put it in in Australia. We've given you the option to be able to do that, so you can select the geos.
[00:11:46] It was something that was feedback that we got from authors, as we've been tweaking the program, is just to give them as much control as possible. I would recommend, if you're a wide author, you're publishing widely, you have worldwide rights for your books, I would just opt it into all areas because I think it's a great way of reaching new readers. But I can see how some people like to have the kind of, the control to be able to pick and choose where they do put it, but I would encourage people to definitely try it out.
[00:12:13] Matty: What are you hearing from the people who are asking for that kind of control, of reasons that they are choosing not to make it available in certain markets?
[00:12:21] Tara: I think there was a bit of a hesitation over front list versus backlist content, wanting to potentially maybe earn more. But I think as the program is being rolled out, what we're seeing is it really adding in the revenue to those areas. So for example, we can say Canada, for sales that are going on in Canada, it's exponentially increasing the revenue that authors are getting through there. So whether it's front list or backlist, I really wouldn't make the differentiation.
[00:12:47] One thing that's very popular on Kobo Plus are box sets. So with Kobo, because we don't have a higher price cap, our box sets are very popular on Kobo full-stop to our customers. So you can price your book over $9.99 and still receive your 70% royalties. So, what we found is that people really like reading the box that says Kobo Plus, because to the subscriber, it's a great bargain. You're getting all of this content, you are also getting paid for it, but so I think some authors might not want to put their box set in because they'll earn more if they have it out at a higher price point.
[00:13:19] I think those are some of the decisions that I've heard indirectly and directly from authors as to why they want to choose. But to be totally honest, the majority of people just put them into all areas. We like to make these tools available, and if they're not used, that's also still fine. So, we’re seeing most people tend to opt in for all of them.
[00:13:40] Matty: And if someone has opted in, as you're saying for all of them, and they're looking at their sales information and they're seeing that some people are purchasing individual books and some people are subscribing, is there any way to assess that? It feels very apples and oranges, but can an author look at that data and look back and say, oh yeah, going into the subscription model was a good idea, or I should rethink that?
[00:14:06] Tara: So right now we have a separate monthly sales report that is just your subscription data. So you can find this in the payment information section of your account. So you can download your monthly report that has your ebook and audio book sales, and then you have your subscription one separate. It does tell you the different regions that are being read and everything, so you have those details.
[00:14:25] So there is a way that you can maybe compare, you can see this growing. One thing that we don't have right now is on our sales dashboard. That's something that the team is working on, and we hope to have that in the very near future. So it can be a little difficult if you go to your sales dashboard and you're seeing a certain amount.
[00:14:40] Sometimes we have authors reach out to us saying, you paid me too much. We're like, no, it's your subscription earnings, it's adding to your overall revenue. I would say if you really wanted some in-depth look, you could email the team. We have reports on our side that we can pull, or otherwise I would just go into your sales reports and download those.
[00:14:57] Matty: And I just have to put in a plug for Kobo Writing Life because, how many representatives of retail or distribution platforms would say, just email us and we can help you understand your sales reports? I just think that's great and very representative of my own experience with the support folks at KWL.
[00:15:13] Oh, no, that's good to hear. Yeah. If I understood what you said earlier correctly about one of the drivers of subscription availability was the fact that people were pirating books. Are you seeing what impact that has, like how many of those people actually become customers of the subscription model?
[00:15:34] Tara: That scenario is unique to the Netherlands, which is an interesting way because we have this data on a global scale. There are countries that have higher rates of piracy than others. So that was quite specific there. We didn't really see the same rate, say for example, in Canada. But with the growth of Kobo Plus in the Netherlands, I think it's safe to say that we have kind of converted those people to paying customers or at least, done our best efforts to. So yeah, I think that it's different in country to country.
[00:16:05] Matty: It is interesting because piracy is one of those things that I just taught myself not to worry about, because the amount of time I as an individual indy the author would sink into that was nonproductive. All the sources I was seeing, but it is interesting when you may be assessing a situation where readers are pirating books, not because they can't afford them, but because they're not available in any other way.
[00:16:30] Tara: Yeah, I mean that is one of the reasons why we didn't want this to be an exclusive program as well, but I feel like that sometimes does lead to higher rates of piracy, if there is a way that you just absolutely cannot get this.
[00:16:43] I think just from my own experience, say, as well with streaming content, if, for example, you used to pirate the movies that are coming out. But now you don't, because people are willing to like, if it's easier and I'm going to pay five bucks for this, I will pay for it if it's easy, I can stream it, I can cast it, and everything. So it really is about making it easy for the customer. And I think by doing that, piracy sort of defaults in itself.
[00:17:08] I like the point of view that you're taking on it though. I find that with indy authors, they go one of two ways of just like it's okay, it's inevitable, you're putting work on the internet, piracy will happen. Or no, I'm going to try and go after every single one. There doesn't seem to be much of a middle ground. But I think that yeah, whatever we can do to try and convert those people into customers and yeah, making the experience as easy as possible is what we focus on.
[00:17:34] Matty: Yeah, and I've taken the approach that I, myself, I'm not going to do anything about it, but I am going to throw my support behind organizations like the Alliance of Independent Authors who are better positioned than I as an individual, to combat that and just trust that they're out there working for me, and it's better for me to support them and then spend my time on other things.
[00:17:54] Tara: Exactly, and even something as simple as sometimes making your books available to libraries, that can be a really good way to just let readers know that there is an easy means that they can read a book for free, but you are still getting paid for it. So yeah, there are different things that you can do that I think are probably more valuable in all their efforts, than an individual author trying to, it quickly becomes whack-a-mole on the internet. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:18:20] Matty: So this is a little bit off topic, but (Reaching Libraries through Kobo) can you talk about what KWL does in terms of helping authors get into libraries?
[00:18:27] Tara: Yeah, so we've partnered with Overdrive, they're a former sister company of ours. So we have library distribution, it's right within your book when you're creating it. It's actually in the same section for Kobo Plus. So it's in the Rights and Distribution area. So all you need to do is enter your library price, in USD, and then we distribute to the library system.
[00:18:46] So there are two ways that a librarian can purchase your book. There's the one copy, one user, which is basically the model that is the most similar to a physical book being loaned out multiple times. For this reason, your library price would be higher than your normal ebook price, because it can be loaned multiple times. You want to increase the value with the price. So there's that option for a librarian to purchase.
[00:19:11] But there's also another option for a librarian to buy your book for a one-time use and they can buy it at 10% of the price that you're setting. I know some authors, they don't want to price their books higher because they want it to appeal to librarians. They're like, oh, I'm going to give them a bargain and make sure they buy it. But just keep in mind that they do have that option of doing that one-time purchase for 10%.
[00:19:30] And that's a really good way of encouraging librarians to take a chance, perhaps on an author that they hadn't heard of before. A lot of our sales through Overdrive are demand-driven, meaning that customers have gone to the libraries and specifically asked for authors. Which I think is really encouraging, because that's the view that I have in my mind of libraries is, people being in person, talking about books and recommending it, and it's really encouraging to me that is actually happening on the digital scale.
[00:19:56] So yeah, I would definitely opt your book into Overdrive if you haven't and through Kobo Writing Life, you earn 50% on each sale. And I think Overdrive just reported 16% increase on sales in 2021, so libraries are buzzing. I definitely think it's a great way to really reach another, again, a different type of reader. That's the reader that I categorize as the borrower versus the subscriber versus your traditional ebook reader. Definitely overlap, but people that are going to the library might not be the people that are also subscribing to Kobo Plus. So it's good to put your books in each option, so you're hitting up all these different types of reader.
[00:20:33] Matty: Yeah. I have my ebooks, my ebooks sell except for the first in series, which are less. They sell for $5.99 in the US, and I price them at $29.99 for libraries. And I think that's higher than most indies, but not as high as the traditional folks are pricing.
[00:20:51] And I also do individual outreach to libraries via email. So I found that the combination of those things, pricing it quite high to make it worth my while to spend the time to do the outreach, and then doing the outreach has been pretty successful for me.
[00:21:04] Tara: Oh, that's nice. That's a great way to build relationships with the librarians that you're talking to as well. Yeah, I love that.
[00:21:09] Matty: Yeah, I can tell from the sales that I'm making some sales, but every once in a while, I also get a librarian who replies and asks if I'll do a virtual appearance at their library, which is cool. Checking off a couple of boxes there.
[00:21:21] And, since we're talking about libraries, I will just refer to our mutual friend, Mark Leslie Lefebvre, was on in Episode 20 WORKING WITH LIBRARIES AND BOOKSTORES, so if it's something that people want to explore more, they can go back to episode 20 and get that perspective from Mark.
[00:21:36] So are there any other considerations that authors should factor in when they're working with a platform like Kobo, and there's the subscription versus non-subscription considerations, and then there are the market considerations. So they're like the two dimensions that people would be considering. Are there any other market-specific trends similar to the fact that box sets seem to be very popular in Canada?
[00:22:02] Tara: I think not to say trends, but there's a misconception that subscriptions eat into, or kind of cannibalize any à la carte sales. And I just want to address that that's not what we're seeing overall, when we're looking at the markets in each individual place. So just if there's any hesitation around it, because you're worried about that, I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about it, I would just test out the subscription model.
[00:22:25] It's very early days, for our subscriptions, and I'm really curious to see what happens in Australia, New Zealand, just without being bigger in English speaking territories about the trends there. I think romance always does very well on Kobo and has been doing very well in the subscription model. Yeah, I don't have a great answer yet, but maybe I can come back and talk about trends that I've seen, just because we're only a couple of months into our newest one. So it's a bit early to tell on genre trends.
[00:22:50] Matty: I think that Australia, maybe New Zealand too, I don't know, but I noticed this with Australia that all the advice is that you can price higher in Australia. And I'm not sure to what extent, and for both ebooks and print books. I feel like I understand about print books being higher, I can imagine there could be a higher cost of production, so maybe you'd want to do that. But ebook seems odd, and it seems beyond just a conversion, that there is a market tolerance, a different market tolerance in Australia than there is in the US let's say. That they just expect to be paying more, regardless of what format they're receiving their books in. Or does that play out in what you're seeing?
[00:23:33] Tara: I think so, but I think overall, for independently priced books, it's always been increasing. So if anyone had the kind of idea that, if you're an indy, all those books are $1.99, like it's actually not true. I think it was just in the recent HOT SHEET that Jane Friedman shared, that it's really climbing, into the pricing that we're seeing with indy. And I think that's evident as well in Australia. And as we see, publishers declining in their pricing, because they still do price very high. We will eventually meet in the middle. But I do think, yes, there are countries that are a bit more used to paying more for things. Canada, we're sadly one of those, one of those countries where we are used to things being a bit more expensive than in the States.
[00:24:16] So one great thing about Kobo is that if you're on kobo.com, you'll see a little flag at the top of the screen and that defaults to where you are. But if you click on this flag, you can go through and browse all of our stores around the world that we have merchandised facing stores. So you can browse in Australia and compare the pricing and see what people are doing. And I always think that's a great way to get a feel for a different area. And if you're not too sure about what to do with your pricing, to try and see what comparable books are being priced at there. And you can compare them into the American pricing versus Europe and things like that.
[00:24:51] Matty: Yeah, there's another episode I can recommend, which is Episode 31, EBOOK PRICING with Tara Cremin. We talked a little bit about this before, but I figured it's always worth revisiting. And another thing I'll just drop out here. I think I had spoken with Orna Ross when she was on for the series of THE SEVEN PROCESSES OF PUBLISHING and, in the one where we talked about pricing. I can't remember if this made it into the episode or if it was just offline, but the idea that if there was a table that gave, by country, by market and format, and genre and well knownness of author. I think those would be the axes that you would need in this. That would say, generally, in Australia, if you are a top name thriller writer, you can get this. If you're like a mid-list thriller writer, you can get this. If you're just entering into the market, you can get this and it's oddly hard to find. I've never found anything like that, that divides the data that way. Have you ever encountered anything like that?
[00:25:50] Tara: No, because I think it's so changeable. Overall, indies probably price the same. You're meant to price the same with each retailer, but I'm sure there are differences there, like maybe sometimes you don't have control over the price in certain retailers. It's very hard to have one source. I think also, because a lot of the sales data for books in general doesn't count ebooks a lot of the time, so I think that also makes it really difficult to get a good gauge on trends, per genre, per pricing, because there isn't as thorough an investigation going with ebooks as there are like, the print stat numbers. which is unfortunate because it's 2021 now, 2022. Oh man, what is time? It's 2022.
[00:26:32] Matty: It's an elastic spectrum.
[00:26:34] Tara: Oh, I know. But yeah, you'd think that we'd be at the stage where we were counting these things, but we're still not quite there yet. So I hope to see that soon that we get an overall look at the market with this sort of information, I'd be super interested in that.
[00:26:47] Matty: Well, it does seem as if the danger, and I think this is playing out in certain areas, I think each person, as you were saying has their preferred mode. people who were used to, I don’t know what the equivalent would be, looking at TV Guide for what they were going to watch, and now they're streaming stuff on Netflix. Eventually, people move into other modes, and if people are moving from purchasing individually books to a subscription model, then you can imagine a scenario where ebook numbers go down and then suddenly, the industry is saying, oh my God, ebooks are dead, look, nobody's buying them anymore.
[00:27:20] Tara: I mean, the industry has been saying, they've been saying ebooks are dead for years and that isn't the case at all. So yeah, I definitely think, as people overlap, it'll ebb and flow. I don't think being a subscriber means that you're going to subscribe forever. You might decide to do it for a year and then go to paying full price and back and forth. Or there is still a huge chunk of people that haven't read digitally, that are still using print books. We've definitely seen an acceleration since the people staying at home in the pandemic, of the adoption of digital reading.
[00:27:50] But we always knew at Kobo that this was a long game. People are going to be slow to take on this different type of technology. But we're seeing it really increase and accelerate, and I think it'll only continue, and people will bounce back and forth, but I don't think that will affect things negatively overall. I think it'll just increase and grow.
[00:28:11] Matty: What are the changes that you're making? Have you made any tweaks to Kobo Plus recently, are there changes you see coming up or news you want to share about the direction?
[00:28:21] Tara: Yeah, just those launches. It was a lot I think, within a short space of time to launch in those other areas. We spent a lot of effort growing the catalog in those places, to make sure that the customers have the greatest reading experience that they can. So our focus will be continuing to grow those catalogs.
[00:28:37] On the Kobo Writing Life side, I mentioned that we're hoping to add it to the Sales Dashboard soon, so we can give a live view of your Kobo Plus reads and stats. That's something I'm really excited about rolling out to authors. I think that's probably the biggest update that I really want to focus on.
[00:28:52] And also, we don't have a way to bulk your books in right now, but if you email our team, we can definitely do that for you. But that's another area that we'd like to explore, just making it as easy as possible for an author to go, yeah, just put all of my books in and not have to think about it. Yeah, those are probably the main areas of focus this year.
[00:29:10] Matty: Great.
[00:29:11] I like to end every episode with a question to pose to listeners, that they can go to the website to leave a comment or on YouTube to leave a comment. So I guess the question here would be, what do people think about subscription models, both as readers and as authors, and to what extent they're making use of those things in either of those modes? Any other questions that you think we should pose to the listeners?
[00:29:37] Just have you tried it and what's your experience? I think that's always good to know. I know that people definitely change their experience. We had some hesitation when we launched Canada and now, we're over a year, two years later and people have completely changed their mind because they see their revenue increasing. Yeah, that's a good question to the readers, what has your experience been?
[00:29:57] Great, well Tara, thank you so much. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
[00:30:05] Tara: Sure, you can go and create an account if you don't have one already, at kobo.com/WritingLife. And if you'd like to email the team for any questions, you can email [email protected]. If you'd specifically like something to go to me, just in the email, put my name, it gets auto assigned to me, so I'll definitely see that. And you can find us on any of the social media platforms, and I'd also encourage you if you're interested in podcasts, to listen to the Kobo Writing Life podcast also, where we have episodes on the regular going up.
[00:30:33] Matty: Great, I will second that is a very useful podcast.
[00:30:37] Tara: Thanks.
[00:30:39] Matty: Thank you, Tara.
[00:00:05] Tara: I'm good, thank you for having me.
[00:00:07] Matty: I am pleased to have you back. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Tara Cremin is the director of Kobo Writing Life, Kobo's independent publishing platform. As a subject matter expert in all aspects of indy publishing, her aim is to make KWL the greatest and most user-friendly self-publishing platform available. And she's always looking for ways for indies to reach new audiences of readers. Tara hosts KWL's monthly live events with author and industry experts, and you can sometimes see her as the guest host on the Kobo Writing Life podcast. And Tara was a previous guest on Episode 31, EBOOK PRICING.
[00:00:41] So I had invited her back to talk about THE RISE OF SUBSCRIPTION MODELS and subscription models in general, and then Kobo Plus in particular. And so I just thought I'd start right out, Tara, asking you, (The Rise of Subscription Models) can you give a brief overview of what subscription models are and what the rise of subscription models means for indy authors?
[00:01:02] Tara: Sure. So a subscription model is just a kind of a different means to consuming media. So whether or not it's your Netflix, that you pay a monthly fee and then you can watch whatever you'd like. It could be your groceries that get delivered to you every week. It could be some local radio station that you send money to, or it's your Spotify. So there's lots of different things. So on the author side, it can be something that you pay a monthly fee for, and then it's all you can read or all you can listen to.
[00:01:32] So with Kobo, we have the sort of all you can read option, and then also a subscription model for audiobooks, and sometimes these are combined. But so what it means for indy is that it's just basically a different way for a customer to consume your work. It's primarily, I think, a different type of audience. The type of person that goes to this content is just somebody that's wanting to consume things in mass, wants it to be really easy. Maybe doesn't want to make too many decisions around what they want to read, they want it to be put in front of them. So there's that sort of aspect of it, of it being a good means to break into a new market of this type of audience.
[00:02:09] And then also, I think what's really important to indies, is just to understand the payment structure to it, because it's a bit more complicated than, you're selling a book and you're earning X amount in royalty, so there's a bit more nuance to it there.
[00:02:21] Matty: (Author Payments for Subscription Models) What are the different approaches different platforms are taking to reimbursing authors for their effort in the subscription model?
[00:02:28] Tara: It definitely varies, it varies from place to place. A lot of them are revenue share models, which is what Kobo uses as well. So just to speak specifically to the Kobo model, it’s a revenue share pool, so basically all of your subscribers, they pay their monthly fee, and that all goes into one area which is called a pool or a pond of money. What Kobo does is actually, we calculate the minutes that books are being read and we pay out on a per minute threshold. So all of the revenue from the subscribers is in this one area, and then we divide that by all of the minutes that were read. And that's going to give you your value per minute. That can vary month to month because the subscribers can vary, and also the consumption of minutes of the books varies as well. But it doesn't vary really that much.
[00:03:13] And so then that gets multiplied by the royalty range, which is 60% for Kobo. And that's how you're getting paid out. Other areas, sort of page reads, the same sort of principle, but it's with the number of pages that are being read. I know, we used to have a threshold, so there are different options. Sometimes it's just a straight up, that your books are being read, this is the amount that you'll get per read sort of thing. We found with the minute model, it seemed to be the most fair. It didn't allow a lot of gaming of the system. I'm trying to find a nicer way to say that, but you know ...
[00:03:45] Matty: It's pretty nice, compared to the alternatives.
[00:03:50] Tara: Yeah, so I think sometimes you can find this online that if it's a page read, there's a lot of different ways that people work around it. It's sending links to just automatically go to the back of your book, even though the book isn't actually being read. We really wanted to just reward the readers and the authors, when the books are physically being read by the customers.
[00:04:07] Matty: (Payment by Minutes Read) I don't know that I had ever heard about minutes read before I read a little background on Kobo Plus in order to prepare for this. And it's interesting, because I can easily imagine how per-page platforms, and setting aside the gamers for a moment, people who are legitimately reading it, it's easy for me as a non-techie person to understand how the retailer would track or the platform would track pages read. But minutes read seems harder to understand. What happens if somebody puts down their e-reader and goes and makes a cup of tea, or is the author getting credit for time that the e-reader is just sitting dormant?
[00:04:46] Tara: Yeah, we do take into account idle time so that isn't calculated, but what's really interesting is that page reads seems to be, we equate it so much with a physical book because we all know what books are, they have pages, we turn the page. But when it's a digital product, pages don't actually mean anything. You increase your font, pages increase. You decrease it, the pages decrease again. The number of pages that your book has is completely customizable and changeable. So in essence, a page read is not really a denomination that's accurate. It is a theory in essence, rather than it being like an actual physical page read.
[00:05:24] So I think with the minute read, we found that it was easier to track that because you can gauge the activity. So we do have lots of parameters around it, we're taking out idle time, we're synching it also, we're tracking this when you're reading offline, so you don't have to be connected to Wi-Fi, but then when you are connected or you sync your device again, we take into account the page reads after the fact.
[00:05:44] And it also allowed us to treat ebooks and audiobooks in the same way and have the same payout model for both. So that was one of the real key incentives of moving to this sort of model, was to be able to treat them both the same.
[00:05:56] Matty: And are audiobooks included in the Kobo Plus subscription pool?
[00:06:01] Tara: It varies geo to geo. So because (Kobo's "Globally Local" View) Kobo likes to take a really, what we call, a globally local view of bookselling, where we sell all over the world, but we have people on the ground in a lot of key areas. We don't treat each model exactly the same. So there are audiobooks and ebooks combined in some areas, but not in others. It was a key factor into how we've rolled it out. I know, last year we rolled out five new geos, which was a lot in one year. But we've actually had this program since 2017.
[00:06:30] So it began in Belgium and the Netherlands, and it was created in conjunction with our retail partner there, who was Bol.com. And the reason that we wanted to create it in this area, is because there was really high rates of piracy. So that's one thing that's interesting with an e-reader, is that even if you're not purchasing through Kobo, we still do have some insights into what's being read, that we can see, like when books are being sideloaded, and is one of the factors of we like to keep our Kobos open format so that you can put these different types of books on them. So we noticed that there's a strong readership in this area, but they're not necessarily the readers that are paying each time they want to read a book. So what can we do to sort of to try and engage these people and get them into our ecosystem? A little bit into the ecosystem in the fact that they have a device, but how do we get them into the browsing and the purchasing?
[00:07:20] And one problem is also, how do we recommend stuff to somebody that hasn't really purchased yet? So it was all of these reasons why that we partnered with Bol and created the program there, and having this aspect to allow readers to, like I mentioned, not really think about the book that they want, they just kind of want to consume books, at a kind of, I was going to say not an aggressive rate but a pretty rapid rate, aggressive reading.
[00:07:47] So it was really successful, it really took off and it allowed us to increase the customers that we had there. So that was the basis as to why it was those two regions at the beginning.
[00:07:58] And then in 2020, I believe, what is time? Either 2020 or 2021, we launched in Canada, in our home turf, which was a really big deal for us because it was, our big area. We've been here for like 12 years now, and we did it on our own. We did it just with kobo.com to just have subscriptions there. And that's been really doing very well since we've launched.
[00:08:22] But then just to show you the different nuances into how we're rolling out this program, is that when we launched it in Portugal, we developed it there in partnership with a publisher who very specifically wanted their books to be available on a subscription form, but they didn't really have the means to develop it themselves, or wanted to be able to use our knowledge of how this has worked in different areas. So we partnered with them, so that was that with Leya, the publisher in Portugal. And we're able to bring our whole catalog there and bring their catalog to the readers.
[00:08:52] And since then, we had five other areas last year, so we are now available in, I guess four actually, sorry, France, Italy, Australia, and New Zealand are the areas that we rolled it out to there, with different partners in each place, but each launch being very individual to those countries where we're launching it.
[00:09:13] Matty: There were a couple of things I wanted to loop back on that you said about the reader behavior, and I'm going to throw out two things and maybe they're connected, maybe they're not, but one was the idea that (Subscription Readers) what I'm gathering is that the people who like subscription models like to have material presented to them, they don't like to have to go looking for it. And then you would also mention that there are certain genres that seemed to be more popular among subscription readers. Are those two things connected? What are you seeing the behaviors there in terms of reader behavior that would benefit authors to understand?
[00:09:44] Tara: I think so. I think maybe partially connected, it’s very hard to have one lens over the readership, just as I mentioned because it is nuanced in each different area. But what we do find is that I do think that genre fiction does very well in subscription models. And I do believe, maybe for that reason, that they don't necessarily want to seek out specific books. People that read genre fiction are more inclined to read a book that's very similar in the same vein. Sure, they will definitely follow an author, but they like the genre as a whole, so would probably go through that genre. So we're definitely seeing that being popular, but also with all different types of readers coming to Kobo Plus too. One question that we did get when we moved to minutes is, the idea that people read at different speeds. There's that sort of, people assume that romance readers read very quickly, because the books are shorter or things like that and how that affects minutes being paid.
[00:10:36] But we did a lot of research into it when we switched over to the minute model, and for lack of a better term, it all comes out in the wash. There was no distinctive genre that had an impact that was anything that was really notable to how the minutes pay out.
[00:10:51] Tara: But so in essence, you have faster readers, you have slower readers and it's a balance between them, as we're seeing that through the data that we do have.
[00:10:58] Matty: For Kobo, you can opt into the subscription part, correct?
[00:11:04] Tara: Yes, and it's non-exclusive, I should've said that off the bat. A big feature for the author side of things, is that we're not asking you to be exclusive. It's against the ethos of Kobo Writing Life. We always want to give the authors as much control about where your books are being published and the readers that you're reaching. So it's non-exclusive, you can remove your books at any time. We always encourage you to keep your books in to help them gain traction in the programs. But we also built it out with the option that you can select the area, so you don't have to put your book into Kobo Plus everywhere, especially as we're expanding into more and more territories. Maybe you want to just try out Canada, but you don't want to put it in in Australia. We've given you the option to be able to do that, so you can select the geos.
[00:11:46] It was something that was feedback that we got from authors, as we've been tweaking the program, is just to give them as much control as possible. I would recommend, if you're a wide author, you're publishing widely, you have worldwide rights for your books, I would just opt it into all areas because I think it's a great way of reaching new readers. But I can see how some people like to have the kind of, the control to be able to pick and choose where they do put it, but I would encourage people to definitely try it out.
[00:12:13] Matty: What are you hearing from the people who are asking for that kind of control, of reasons that they are choosing not to make it available in certain markets?
[00:12:21] Tara: I think there was a bit of a hesitation over front list versus backlist content, wanting to potentially maybe earn more. But I think as the program is being rolled out, what we're seeing is it really adding in the revenue to those areas. So for example, we can say Canada, for sales that are going on in Canada, it's exponentially increasing the revenue that authors are getting through there. So whether it's front list or backlist, I really wouldn't make the differentiation.
[00:12:47] One thing that's very popular on Kobo Plus are box sets. So with Kobo, because we don't have a higher price cap, our box sets are very popular on Kobo full-stop to our customers. So you can price your book over $9.99 and still receive your 70% royalties. So, what we found is that people really like reading the box that says Kobo Plus, because to the subscriber, it's a great bargain. You're getting all of this content, you are also getting paid for it, but so I think some authors might not want to put their box set in because they'll earn more if they have it out at a higher price point.
[00:13:19] I think those are some of the decisions that I've heard indirectly and directly from authors as to why they want to choose. But to be totally honest, the majority of people just put them into all areas. We like to make these tools available, and if they're not used, that's also still fine. So, we’re seeing most people tend to opt in for all of them.
[00:13:40] Matty: And if someone has opted in, as you're saying for all of them, and they're looking at their sales information and they're seeing that some people are purchasing individual books and some people are subscribing, is there any way to assess that? It feels very apples and oranges, but can an author look at that data and look back and say, oh yeah, going into the subscription model was a good idea, or I should rethink that?
[00:14:06] Tara: So right now we have a separate monthly sales report that is just your subscription data. So you can find this in the payment information section of your account. So you can download your monthly report that has your ebook and audio book sales, and then you have your subscription one separate. It does tell you the different regions that are being read and everything, so you have those details.
[00:14:25] So there is a way that you can maybe compare, you can see this growing. One thing that we don't have right now is on our sales dashboard. That's something that the team is working on, and we hope to have that in the very near future. So it can be a little difficult if you go to your sales dashboard and you're seeing a certain amount.
[00:14:40] Sometimes we have authors reach out to us saying, you paid me too much. We're like, no, it's your subscription earnings, it's adding to your overall revenue. I would say if you really wanted some in-depth look, you could email the team. We have reports on our side that we can pull, or otherwise I would just go into your sales reports and download those.
[00:14:57] Matty: And I just have to put in a plug for Kobo Writing Life because, how many representatives of retail or distribution platforms would say, just email us and we can help you understand your sales reports? I just think that's great and very representative of my own experience with the support folks at KWL.
[00:15:13] Oh, no, that's good to hear. Yeah. If I understood what you said earlier correctly about one of the drivers of subscription availability was the fact that people were pirating books. Are you seeing what impact that has, like how many of those people actually become customers of the subscription model?
[00:15:34] Tara: That scenario is unique to the Netherlands, which is an interesting way because we have this data on a global scale. There are countries that have higher rates of piracy than others. So that was quite specific there. We didn't really see the same rate, say for example, in Canada. But with the growth of Kobo Plus in the Netherlands, I think it's safe to say that we have kind of converted those people to paying customers or at least, done our best efforts to. So yeah, I think that it's different in country to country.
[00:16:05] Matty: It is interesting because piracy is one of those things that I just taught myself not to worry about, because the amount of time I as an individual indy the author would sink into that was nonproductive. All the sources I was seeing, but it is interesting when you may be assessing a situation where readers are pirating books, not because they can't afford them, but because they're not available in any other way.
[00:16:30] Tara: Yeah, I mean that is one of the reasons why we didn't want this to be an exclusive program as well, but I feel like that sometimes does lead to higher rates of piracy, if there is a way that you just absolutely cannot get this.
[00:16:43] I think just from my own experience, say, as well with streaming content, if, for example, you used to pirate the movies that are coming out. But now you don't, because people are willing to like, if it's easier and I'm going to pay five bucks for this, I will pay for it if it's easy, I can stream it, I can cast it, and everything. So it really is about making it easy for the customer. And I think by doing that, piracy sort of defaults in itself.
[00:17:08] I like the point of view that you're taking on it though. I find that with indy authors, they go one of two ways of just like it's okay, it's inevitable, you're putting work on the internet, piracy will happen. Or no, I'm going to try and go after every single one. There doesn't seem to be much of a middle ground. But I think that yeah, whatever we can do to try and convert those people into customers and yeah, making the experience as easy as possible is what we focus on.
[00:17:34] Matty: Yeah, and I've taken the approach that I, myself, I'm not going to do anything about it, but I am going to throw my support behind organizations like the Alliance of Independent Authors who are better positioned than I as an individual, to combat that and just trust that they're out there working for me, and it's better for me to support them and then spend my time on other things.
[00:17:54] Tara: Exactly, and even something as simple as sometimes making your books available to libraries, that can be a really good way to just let readers know that there is an easy means that they can read a book for free, but you are still getting paid for it. So yeah, there are different things that you can do that I think are probably more valuable in all their efforts, than an individual author trying to, it quickly becomes whack-a-mole on the internet. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:18:20] Matty: So this is a little bit off topic, but (Reaching Libraries through Kobo) can you talk about what KWL does in terms of helping authors get into libraries?
[00:18:27] Tara: Yeah, so we've partnered with Overdrive, they're a former sister company of ours. So we have library distribution, it's right within your book when you're creating it. It's actually in the same section for Kobo Plus. So it's in the Rights and Distribution area. So all you need to do is enter your library price, in USD, and then we distribute to the library system.
[00:18:46] So there are two ways that a librarian can purchase your book. There's the one copy, one user, which is basically the model that is the most similar to a physical book being loaned out multiple times. For this reason, your library price would be higher than your normal ebook price, because it can be loaned multiple times. You want to increase the value with the price. So there's that option for a librarian to purchase.
[00:19:11] But there's also another option for a librarian to buy your book for a one-time use and they can buy it at 10% of the price that you're setting. I know some authors, they don't want to price their books higher because they want it to appeal to librarians. They're like, oh, I'm going to give them a bargain and make sure they buy it. But just keep in mind that they do have that option of doing that one-time purchase for 10%.
[00:19:30] And that's a really good way of encouraging librarians to take a chance, perhaps on an author that they hadn't heard of before. A lot of our sales through Overdrive are demand-driven, meaning that customers have gone to the libraries and specifically asked for authors. Which I think is really encouraging, because that's the view that I have in my mind of libraries is, people being in person, talking about books and recommending it, and it's really encouraging to me that is actually happening on the digital scale.
[00:19:56] So yeah, I would definitely opt your book into Overdrive if you haven't and through Kobo Writing Life, you earn 50% on each sale. And I think Overdrive just reported 16% increase on sales in 2021, so libraries are buzzing. I definitely think it's a great way to really reach another, again, a different type of reader. That's the reader that I categorize as the borrower versus the subscriber versus your traditional ebook reader. Definitely overlap, but people that are going to the library might not be the people that are also subscribing to Kobo Plus. So it's good to put your books in each option, so you're hitting up all these different types of reader.
[00:20:33] Matty: Yeah. I have my ebooks, my ebooks sell except for the first in series, which are less. They sell for $5.99 in the US, and I price them at $29.99 for libraries. And I think that's higher than most indies, but not as high as the traditional folks are pricing.
[00:20:51] And I also do individual outreach to libraries via email. So I found that the combination of those things, pricing it quite high to make it worth my while to spend the time to do the outreach, and then doing the outreach has been pretty successful for me.
[00:21:04] Tara: Oh, that's nice. That's a great way to build relationships with the librarians that you're talking to as well. Yeah, I love that.
[00:21:09] Matty: Yeah, I can tell from the sales that I'm making some sales, but every once in a while, I also get a librarian who replies and asks if I'll do a virtual appearance at their library, which is cool. Checking off a couple of boxes there.
[00:21:21] And, since we're talking about libraries, I will just refer to our mutual friend, Mark Leslie Lefebvre, was on in Episode 20 WORKING WITH LIBRARIES AND BOOKSTORES, so if it's something that people want to explore more, they can go back to episode 20 and get that perspective from Mark.
[00:21:36] So are there any other considerations that authors should factor in when they're working with a platform like Kobo, and there's the subscription versus non-subscription considerations, and then there are the market considerations. So they're like the two dimensions that people would be considering. Are there any other market-specific trends similar to the fact that box sets seem to be very popular in Canada?
[00:22:02] Tara: I think not to say trends, but there's a misconception that subscriptions eat into, or kind of cannibalize any à la carte sales. And I just want to address that that's not what we're seeing overall, when we're looking at the markets in each individual place. So just if there's any hesitation around it, because you're worried about that, I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about it, I would just test out the subscription model.
[00:22:25] It's very early days, for our subscriptions, and I'm really curious to see what happens in Australia, New Zealand, just without being bigger in English speaking territories about the trends there. I think romance always does very well on Kobo and has been doing very well in the subscription model. Yeah, I don't have a great answer yet, but maybe I can come back and talk about trends that I've seen, just because we're only a couple of months into our newest one. So it's a bit early to tell on genre trends.
[00:22:50] Matty: I think that Australia, maybe New Zealand too, I don't know, but I noticed this with Australia that all the advice is that you can price higher in Australia. And I'm not sure to what extent, and for both ebooks and print books. I feel like I understand about print books being higher, I can imagine there could be a higher cost of production, so maybe you'd want to do that. But ebook seems odd, and it seems beyond just a conversion, that there is a market tolerance, a different market tolerance in Australia than there is in the US let's say. That they just expect to be paying more, regardless of what format they're receiving their books in. Or does that play out in what you're seeing?
[00:23:33] Tara: I think so, but I think overall, for independently priced books, it's always been increasing. So if anyone had the kind of idea that, if you're an indy, all those books are $1.99, like it's actually not true. I think it was just in the recent HOT SHEET that Jane Friedman shared, that it's really climbing, into the pricing that we're seeing with indy. And I think that's evident as well in Australia. And as we see, publishers declining in their pricing, because they still do price very high. We will eventually meet in the middle. But I do think, yes, there are countries that are a bit more used to paying more for things. Canada, we're sadly one of those, one of those countries where we are used to things being a bit more expensive than in the States.
[00:24:16] So one great thing about Kobo is that if you're on kobo.com, you'll see a little flag at the top of the screen and that defaults to where you are. But if you click on this flag, you can go through and browse all of our stores around the world that we have merchandised facing stores. So you can browse in Australia and compare the pricing and see what people are doing. And I always think that's a great way to get a feel for a different area. And if you're not too sure about what to do with your pricing, to try and see what comparable books are being priced at there. And you can compare them into the American pricing versus Europe and things like that.
[00:24:51] Matty: Yeah, there's another episode I can recommend, which is Episode 31, EBOOK PRICING with Tara Cremin. We talked a little bit about this before, but I figured it's always worth revisiting. And another thing I'll just drop out here. I think I had spoken with Orna Ross when she was on for the series of THE SEVEN PROCESSES OF PUBLISHING and, in the one where we talked about pricing. I can't remember if this made it into the episode or if it was just offline, but the idea that if there was a table that gave, by country, by market and format, and genre and well knownness of author. I think those would be the axes that you would need in this. That would say, generally, in Australia, if you are a top name thriller writer, you can get this. If you're like a mid-list thriller writer, you can get this. If you're just entering into the market, you can get this and it's oddly hard to find. I've never found anything like that, that divides the data that way. Have you ever encountered anything like that?
[00:25:50] Tara: No, because I think it's so changeable. Overall, indies probably price the same. You're meant to price the same with each retailer, but I'm sure there are differences there, like maybe sometimes you don't have control over the price in certain retailers. It's very hard to have one source. I think also, because a lot of the sales data for books in general doesn't count ebooks a lot of the time, so I think that also makes it really difficult to get a good gauge on trends, per genre, per pricing, because there isn't as thorough an investigation going with ebooks as there are like, the print stat numbers. which is unfortunate because it's 2021 now, 2022. Oh man, what is time? It's 2022.
[00:26:32] Matty: It's an elastic spectrum.
[00:26:34] Tara: Oh, I know. But yeah, you'd think that we'd be at the stage where we were counting these things, but we're still not quite there yet. So I hope to see that soon that we get an overall look at the market with this sort of information, I'd be super interested in that.
[00:26:47] Matty: Well, it does seem as if the danger, and I think this is playing out in certain areas, I think each person, as you were saying has their preferred mode. people who were used to, I don’t know what the equivalent would be, looking at TV Guide for what they were going to watch, and now they're streaming stuff on Netflix. Eventually, people move into other modes, and if people are moving from purchasing individually books to a subscription model, then you can imagine a scenario where ebook numbers go down and then suddenly, the industry is saying, oh my God, ebooks are dead, look, nobody's buying them anymore.
[00:27:20] Tara: I mean, the industry has been saying, they've been saying ebooks are dead for years and that isn't the case at all. So yeah, I definitely think, as people overlap, it'll ebb and flow. I don't think being a subscriber means that you're going to subscribe forever. You might decide to do it for a year and then go to paying full price and back and forth. Or there is still a huge chunk of people that haven't read digitally, that are still using print books. We've definitely seen an acceleration since the people staying at home in the pandemic, of the adoption of digital reading.
[00:27:50] But we always knew at Kobo that this was a long game. People are going to be slow to take on this different type of technology. But we're seeing it really increase and accelerate, and I think it'll only continue, and people will bounce back and forth, but I don't think that will affect things negatively overall. I think it'll just increase and grow.
[00:28:11] Matty: What are the changes that you're making? Have you made any tweaks to Kobo Plus recently, are there changes you see coming up or news you want to share about the direction?
[00:28:21] Tara: Yeah, just those launches. It was a lot I think, within a short space of time to launch in those other areas. We spent a lot of effort growing the catalog in those places, to make sure that the customers have the greatest reading experience that they can. So our focus will be continuing to grow those catalogs.
[00:28:37] On the Kobo Writing Life side, I mentioned that we're hoping to add it to the Sales Dashboard soon, so we can give a live view of your Kobo Plus reads and stats. That's something I'm really excited about rolling out to authors. I think that's probably the biggest update that I really want to focus on.
[00:28:52] And also, we don't have a way to bulk your books in right now, but if you email our team, we can definitely do that for you. But that's another area that we'd like to explore, just making it as easy as possible for an author to go, yeah, just put all of my books in and not have to think about it. Yeah, those are probably the main areas of focus this year.
[00:29:10] Matty: Great.
[00:29:11] I like to end every episode with a question to pose to listeners, that they can go to the website to leave a comment or on YouTube to leave a comment. So I guess the question here would be, what do people think about subscription models, both as readers and as authors, and to what extent they're making use of those things in either of those modes? Any other questions that you think we should pose to the listeners?
[00:29:37] Just have you tried it and what's your experience? I think that's always good to know. I know that people definitely change their experience. We had some hesitation when we launched Canada and now, we're over a year, two years later and people have completely changed their mind because they see their revenue increasing. Yeah, that's a good question to the readers, what has your experience been?
[00:29:57] Great, well Tara, thank you so much. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
[00:30:05] Tara: Sure, you can go and create an account if you don't have one already, at kobo.com/WritingLife. And if you'd like to email the team for any questions, you can email [email protected]. If you'd specifically like something to go to me, just in the email, put my name, it gets auto assigned to me, so I'll definitely see that. And you can find us on any of the social media platforms, and I'd also encourage you if you're interested in podcasts, to listen to the Kobo Writing Life podcast also, where we have episodes on the regular going up.
[00:30:33] Matty: Great, I will second that is a very useful podcast.
[00:30:37] Tara: Thanks.
[00:30:39] Matty: Thank you, Tara.
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