Wednesday, August 15, 2012

First Weeks At Kobo

Has anyone done well?
Not that I've heard.
It seemed like such a good idea.
Here are a couple of the less good parts I've experienced:

They don't have their own review system, instead they pull reviews from Goodreads.  If you want to read all the reviews you have to sign up to Goodreads.
I hate being forced to do X if I want to do Y.  Sure way for me to exit out of the site.
There's been quite a lot of activity at Goodreads of late.  Google it if you'd like to become an expert on it.

Who at Kobo monitors the Goodreads reviews? Amazon monitors the reviews on their site.  From my contact with Kobo tech support, this is beyond their capabilities now.  Maybe later?  And too bad for you if you lose sales because of it.  Sorry.

Kobo can't figure out how to get the stats on free downloads. 
I've started to pull books out of free that I had intended for perma-free.  What's the point when I don't know if they're being downloaded.  Next step is to start pulling books from Kobo itself.  Yeah, true, I am considering it.

The search function, well...I looked for Summer Horse and it turned up in Adult fiction and I mean the porn stuff.
I wrote to tech support and they defended themselves.  They were spinning faster than a Waring Blender to assure me I was wrong.  They said it in a really nice way tho!

Those insta-changes are not instant at all.  They are in fact no faster than Amazon and given Amazon's new speed in making changes, Kobo is probably slower.  It's not necessarily 1 thing wrong, it's that the site is clunky and doesn't work as it should across the board.

So low marks to Kobo on some fairly important points.

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