Self-Publishing Opening Up for Children’s Book Authors

While GalleyCat shared the great news this week that a children’s book author has cracked the self-published bestsellers list, many children’s authors are still feeling the sting of frustration that comes from being left out of the digital self-publishing revolution, at least in the ways that novelists and non-fiction book authors have been embraced. For many content creators of graphics-intensive or illustration-rich titles, the original e-readers and several self-publishing platforms still don’t meet their needs. Michael Tamblyn, chief content officer at Kobo, spoke to GoodEReader about what is in store in the near future for these authors and their works. While Kobo doesn’t have a launch timeline in store yet, with its recent acquisition of Aquafadas and the current growth of its Writing Life self-publishing platform, the book retailer is certainly moving forward in the direction of enabling authors of every genre to control their content and make it available to a larger digital audience, without the expense currently incurred from hiring an app book developer, creating full-color print-on-demand titles, and more. “What we love about the Aquafadas‘ tools is that they provide things as fundamental as plug-ins for InDesign,” explained Tamblyn. “Taking that idea that as a content creator–children’s book author or graphic novel author–you know you’re going to want to put your title in as many places as possible, you’re not going to want to bind yourself exclusively to one particular retailer, why not use a tool that allows you to support all of them equally? Since we’ve always been a huge supporter of open standards, we’ve always felt that authors should try and seek the widest audience possible.” In addition to a more concentrated focus on providing tools for authors whose work relies on heavy graphics capability, Kobo is also looking forward to an increased marketplace for children’s ebook discovery. “The other area that we’re going to spending a lot of focus on in the next couple of months is looking at children’s book discovery and being very conscious of the fact that people don’t browse for children’s books the same way that they browse for books in the adult trade. They have a different set of decision criteria when they’re trying to buy a book for their child.” Tamblyn went on to explain that so much of the growth that the children’s ebook market has experienced recently has had to do with more titles becoming available and more publishers making a focused effort to release their juvenile titles to digital devices, a factor in children’s discovery that can only be improved when the self-publishing market catches up for children’s authors. Self-Publishing Opening Up for Children’s Book Authors is a post from: E-Reader News

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