Welcome to Kobo Writing Life audiobooks! We are very excited to be providing the ability for our authors to upload their audiobooks directly through the Kobo Writing Life dashboard. It is a quick and easy process we have outlined below.
To upload your audiobook you will first need to:
- Log into your Kobo Writing Life account here: https://www.kobo.com/writinglife
- Select Audiobooks on your dashboard.
- Click “Create new Audiobook”.
Once on the audiobook uploading page, you can start inputting your audiobook information. You will first be asked to describe your audiobook. This includes the following:
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- Title: The name of the audiobook you are uploading. Please enter your title exactly as you would like it to appear in our store.
- Subtitle: The sub-title for the audiobook you are uploading. Please enter your sub-title exactly as you would like it to appear in our store. This should be the official subtitle of your book and should appear on your audiobook’s cover image.
- Series Name: If your book is part of a series, please include that information here. Including series information for your audiobook will link all books in a series together on our store.
- Series Number: Enter the book number from your series here. This will only populate when a series name has been entered.
- Contributors: Please include both the author and narrator of your audiobook here. You can do this by selecting “Add another contributor” once you have inputted the first contributor of your title.
- Synopsis: A brief description of your audiobook as it should appear on your product page in the Kobo Store.
- Publisher Name: The name of the audiobook’s publisher. If you are a self-published author, you can enter your name. If you are an individual doing business as a publisher, you can enter your publisher’s name here.
- Imprint: The trade name under which your audiobook is published. Publishers may have different imprints to reflect their content types.
- Publication Date: This is the date the content was original published. Please be advised: this is not the date the book will be released to customers on our store. This date is visible on the bottom of a book’s product page. If not date is supplied, the date this title is published will be used.
- Release Date: This is a required field. This is the date the title will be available for purchase and customers will be able to download this audiobook to their library.
- Audio ISBN: Kobo’s term for the 13-digit ISBN (International Standard Book Number) assigned specifically to the audiobook being submitted. Please note that this must be a unique ISBN – you can’t use the same ISBN that you have for the print version of your book. If no ISBN is provided, we will assign your audiobook a Kobo specific ISBN. The ISBN will be displayed with metadata at the bottom of the book page and if used in a kobo.com search it will directly link to the book page. E.g https://www.kobo.com/search?Query=9781551994963 Please note, ISBNs on our platform cannot contain dashes.
- Language: Please select the language of your audiobook. Displayed at the bottom of the book page, also used on kobo.com for filtering search results by language.
- Is this content abridged or unabridged? Please specify the format of your audiobook. An abridged audiobook is shortened to only include the main details of the story. Unabridged means the entire story is included with nothing cut out.
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- You will then be required to enter the categories for your title. These categories will determine how your audiobook is labelled and categorized in the Kobo Store. We recommend selecting three categories for each book to ensure that customers who are browsing through our store have a better chance of finding your titles.
- Next, you will need to upload your cover image. We accept cover images in .png, .jpg and .jpeg file formats. We recommend the minimum size of cover images be at least 600px by 600px. Covers for audiobooks should be square however, if they are not, they will be automatically adjusted. Please note: cover images cannot exceed 5 MB in size.
- Now you are ready to upload your audio files! You can drop files directly from your computer into the Upload Audio Files section or select the folder on your desktop that contains your audiobook files. We only accept audio files in .mp3 and m4a formats. An individual file cannot exceed 200 MB in size and all files combined cannot exceed 2 GB in size. Please wait for your audio files to be completely uploaded before moving to the next step. You will know when files have been successfully uploaded when the "Listen to confirm content" prompt appears .
- Once your files have been completely uploaded, you can then start to make your Table of Contents. The Table of Contents organizes your audiobook to make sure it is in reading order and what customers use to navigate the audiobook when downloaded to their app. You can move the files up and down to ensure they are in the correct order and provide the chapter title for the file. You can add the Chapter title under the “Name of Content” section. You can also listen to the file to confirm you have given the file the correct Chapter Heading. Please note: What you list in the "Name of content" section will appear in the Table of Contents customers use to navigate your audiobook on our apps. See below for an example:
8. You will then be asked to provide the geographic rights for the title. Please select the countries you own the rights to sell your title in.
9. The final step is to set the price for your title. Please input the price of your title in all the available currencies. Audiobooks pricing is slightly more complicated than eBooks. The royalty percentage thresholds are as follows:
- 35% royalties for audiobooks priced $2.99 or lower
- 45% royalties for audiobooks priced over $2.99
This are also special rules that apply for audiobook subscription customers: *If a customer redeems a free trial token for your audiobook, the royalty amount will be 0. If they redeem using a paid token, the royalty amount will be 32%. Otherwise, the royalty amount will be the values displayed below.
Once all steps have been completed you can then select publish! If you have missed any steps, you will receive an error message. Otherwise, your audiobook is in good hands and has been sent for processing. It will soon be available on the Kobo store in 24-72 hours.