Recently Walmart and Rakuten Kobo announced that Walmart will start selling ebooks both on its website and in their stores, alongside its physical book offering. And while Walmart will only offer around 40 ebook titles in-store, their website will offer millions of ebooks for a new crowd of readers to discover.
The exciting news for authors who use Draft2Digital to distribute to Kobo is that they are already included in the Walmart.com storefront!
And if you aren’t already distributing to Kobo, it’s as simple as checking a box on the Publish tab of your book.
Walmart rivals Amazon in its reach and customer base worldwide, so this is a tremendous opportunity for D2D authors to improve their odds of discoverability with a growing and eager audience. There’s never been a better time to distribute wide!
Alongside the digital offering, Walmart will carry a range of Kobo eReaders in-store, starting with the Kobo Aura. This means that a new wave of readers will have a device that links them directly to Kobo’s large catalog of ebooks and authors, many of whom distribute to Kobo from Draft2Digital. As the holiday season approaches, we expect there will be a lot of new Kobo eReaders emerging from colorful wrapping paper, so start thinking of your promotional pricing strategy now!
In addition to eBooks, Walmart.com is offering a subscription-based audiobook service that listeners can join for only $9.99 per month. Thanks to our partnership with Findaway Voices, D2D authors have a unique opportunity to join an emerging audiobook distribution service on the ground floor!
If you haven’t already, you should go to your My Books page right now and add Kobo as one of your distribution channels. That’s all it takes to make your books available for sale on Walmart.com—one of the largest retailers on the planet.
Happy publishing!