Navigating Indieworld Discussing All Things Indie discussion

Just a heads up when publishing books on KWL in languages other than English: they will NOT show up on English-language searches in the US on the Kobo Website when using the author's name or the book's title as keywords. Unlike on Amazon or B&N, on Kobo, foreign-language books will only be shown on searches conducted for a specific language.

I have pointed out to the people at Kobo that, at least in the United States, they are giving up their foreign-language market, to a large extent, to Amazon and B&N, both of which will show all books written by an author, regardless of language. Consider the following statistics regarding languages spoken in this country:

• English only – 229.7 million.
• Spanish – 40.5 million.
• Chinese (including Mandarin and Cantonese) – 3.4 million.
• Tagalog (including Filipino) – 1.7 million.
• Vietnamese – 1.5 million.
• Arabic – 1.2 million.
• French – 1.2 million.
• Korean – 1.1 million.

BTW, Italian – 0.58 million (#14)

I only determined this "flaw" on Kobo after publishing three foreign-language versions of Pepe Builds a Nest (Spanish, French, and Italian) over the weekend and repeatedly being frustrated at not being able to find them on an English-language search. . . even though my dashboard showed them as "published."

Whether or not Kobo will address this issue, at least for their US market, is unknown.