On October 7, we hosted our first-ever Viber Author Chat, featuring bestselling author J.F. Penn. In case you missed it, here’s a recap!.

You might be wondering, what’s Viber? It’s a free app for your smartphone or desktop that lets users send free messages and make free calls to other Viber users, on any device and network, in any country. It’s also our sister company; like Kobo, Viber is owned by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten.

Viber features public chat rooms, so we launched our own: the Kobo Book Club. At the moment, we have 64k followers, and Kobo staff share thoughts, photos, and links to our favourite eBooks (you can follow us here!). We decided to try turning it into a true book club, and invited Joanna Penn to chat with us for an hour about her book, DESECRATION.

Joanna was excited to be our first-ever guest author. She said, “It’s always great to connect with readers and social media chat sessions can
be a great way to do this. These type of chats almost replace the book tours of old, but these can be done from anywhere in the world. For an investment of an hour, it’s a great marketing opportunity.”

We loved getting the chance to learn more about DESECRATION, and diving into the business side of writing. Joanna hosts the popular Creative Penn Podcast and writes nonfiction books about how to write, market, and publish books. You can find out more about that here.

We look forward to hosting more Viber Author Chats in the near future – stay tuned! Who would you like to see us interview? Have you used Viber as an author marketing tool?

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J.F. Penn is a NYT and USA Today Bestselling thriller author, whose novels include the Arkane series and the London Psychic series. She also writes nonfiction books under the name Joanna Penn on the business of writing, and hosts the Creative Penn Podcast. You can find her on Twitter and Facebook.