Kobo rejected 45% of self-published books last year, mostly over AI
A self-publishing platform exists to say yes. Kobo’s, last year, spent a remarkable share of its time saying no.
Rakuten Kobo rejected 45% of the titles submitted to Kobo Writing Life, its self-publishing service, in 2025, and chief executive Michael Tamblyn attributes more than 80% of those rejections to books he judges to be manifestly AI-generated and of very poor quality.
Hundreds of thousands of submissions, on his account, were turned away.
The figures came from Tamblyn directly, first in a keynote at the CONTEC conference in Buenos Aires in April and then amplified in a post on Threads in early May.
He described the platform as being on the receiving end of a firehose, a volume of machine-written manuscripts that would barely have registered as a category a couple of years ago and now dominates the reject pile.
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