Kobo Writing Life

Publishing terms

Formats

EPUB, DOC / DOCX, ODT, MOBI, Audiobook

Distribution

Kobo store, Partner retailers, Kobo Plus subscription, OverDrive library

Territories

Worldwide — Kobo states over 190 countries, with per-territory opt-outs

Exclusivity

Not requiredKobo states plainly that it does not require exclusivity and does not take copyright in independently published work. The one thing it asks is a routing rule rather than a rights restriction: send the book to Kobo through Kobo Writing Life and not through a second distributor as well, so the store does not end up with duplicate listings.

ISBN

Free ISBN supplied: NoAccepts your own ISBN: YesKobo does not issue an ISBN. Supply none and it assigns its own internal identifier, which is enough to sell in the Kobo store but is not accepted by the partner retailers Kobo distributes to — Indigo, FNAC and the rest. So an ISBN is optional for Kobo itself and effectively required for the partner channel. The identifier is also the primary key for the title: it cannot be changed after upload, so correcting an ISBN means creating a fresh listing and delisting the original.

Royalties

• 70% of list priceEbook royalty at or above the price threshold70% of the list price the customer pays, excluding tax, when the book is priced at or above a per-currency threshold: $2.99 USD, £1.99 GBP, €1.99 EUR, $2.99 CAD, $2.99 AUD and the equivalents Kobo lists for its other markets. There is no upper cap, so a box set priced above $9.99 still earns 70% — the comparison Kobo itself draws with Amazon’s band.
• 45% of list priceEbook royalty below the price thresholdApplies to original works priced under the per-currency threshold above.
• 20% of list priceEbook royalty on public-domain worksAny title that is part of the public domain, at any price.
• 45% of list priceAudiobook royalty on single sales at or above the thresholdThe same per-currency thresholds as ebooks. The terms also set a ceiling on the audiobook list price — under $28 USD, £20 GBP, €25 EUR and the stated equivalents.
• 35% of list priceAudiobook royalty on single sales below the threshold
• 32% of list priceAudiobook royalty on subscription token purchases
• 60%Kobo Plus subscription readingNot a share of any list price. Kobo divides that month’s Kobo Plus subscription revenue by the total minutes all subscribers read, which gives a value per minute that moves every month, and pays 60% of that value for each minute spent in your book. Reported in blocks of 300 minutes.
• 50%OverDrive library sales50% of the library price when a library buys the title outright. A library can instead pay 10% of that price under the cost-per-checkout model, which lends the book once — usually in answer to a specific reader request.

Fees

• Account, upload and distribution — freeKobo states it charges no fee to distribute ebooks and converts the manuscript to EPUB free of charge. Uploads accept DOC, DOCX, ODT, EPUB and MOBI up to 100 MB.
• Promotion participation (typical percentage option) — 10%Optional, and priced two ways depending on the promotion: a flat fee paid up front, or an additional percentage of what you earn during the sale — most commonly 10%, occasionally 0%. On the percentage option nothing is owed if nothing sells. A discount given through a promo code is funded by the publisher and lands as a reduced rate on the following month’s statement.

Payment schedule

Monthly, within 45 days of the end of each month, once accrued earnings reach the payment threshold — stated as $50 CAD in the terms and as $50 in the help centre. Ebook, audiobook, Kobo Plus, library and partner-store earnings in every territory pool together to reach it.

Rights & privacy

Manuscript upload

Required

Cloud storage

Yes

Account required

Yes

AI features

Built into the service

AI training on your work

Explicitly excluded by the termsThe only record in this index where the question is settled in the contract rather than left to silence: Kobo agrees that works will not be used to train generative AI technologies. The same clause is candid about what Kobo may still do with AI — read, analyse and process the work to categorise and tag it, judge whether it is suitable for sale, generate keywords, promotional copy and targeted advertising from it, and produce recaps and accessibility features for readers who have bought it. That is a real set of permissions, and it is a different thing from training a model on the text. Kobo is one of the few platforms to draw that line in writing.

Content licence

A non-exclusive licence to make available, copy, distribute, transmit and sell the work through the Kobo reading service, sublicensable to the third-party booksellers, retailers and distributors Kobo sells through. The author keeps copyright, and Kobo says so plainly. Either side can end the arrangement — the publisher on ten days’ written notice — after which Kobo stops selling the work, but copies already bought stay readable and Kobo keeps archival copies for as long as it judges it still owes those buyers access.

Deletion

A Writing Life account is deactivated within 24 hours of a request, outstanding earnings are paid out, and the author keeps all rights. Deactivation alone does not erase personal data — Kobo says so — because it has to keep past buyers’ access working; full erasure takes an explicit deletion request, after which data is deleted or irreversibly anonymised except where a legal obligation or a claim requires keeping it. Whether the uploaded manuscript files are destroyed at that point is not stated.

Export

Strong on rights, thinner on data. Nothing is locked in: the licence is non-exclusive, the author keeps copyright, and the same book can be published anywhere else at any time. The privacy policy grants a portability right over personal information in a usable electronic format. What is not offered is a documented way to export the catalogue itself — uploaded files, metadata and full sales history — in bulk.

Policy reviewed 4 September 2026