KBoards: The original Indie Author Forum
The story of KBoards (Originally KindleBoards) is both long and involved, but it played a major part in the early days of indie publishing and still packs some SEO power. New authors searching for answers still find their way there, so I felt it was only proper to write a article about it.
A little history first.
In autumn 2007, months before the first Kindle ever shipped, Canadian technologist and hobbyist novelist Harvey Chute registered a humble domain by the name of KindleBoards.com. Chute possessed twin passions: early-adopting gadgets and storytelling. With Amazon’s e-reader still a rumor, he predicted that a dedicated corner of the internet would one day teem with questions about screens, formats, and—eventually—how authors might sidestep New York gatekeepers. Harvey’s instinct proved prophetic.
When Kindle debuted that November, KindleBoards became ground zero for hardware teardowns, software hacks, and first-week “unboxing” diaries. Yet Chute, posting under the simple avatar of “Harvey,” noticed that authors were trickling in just as quickly as gadget geeks. These writers saw more than a new reading device; they saw an open door to readers. Harvey embraced them, creating the Writers’ Café sub-forum—an online coffee shop where dreamers swapped ideas on metadata, pricing, and cover art. That simple gesture seeded a movement that would forever entwine KBoards with the birth of modern self-publishing.
The Golden Era: Community, Craft, and Cooperation
Between 2010 and 2014, self-publishing exploded. KDP lowered its barrier to entry; Smashwords and Draft2Digital broadened distribution; and social media amplifiers like Twitter accelerated word-of-mouth. Whenever algorithms shifted or royalty structures changed, KBoards was first to debate, dissect, and document. Membership ballooned past 40,000 registered accounts at its zenith, with daily traffic approaching half a million page views.
The Writers’ Café buzzed twenty-four hours a day. Dawn on the Pacific Coast meant Australian night owls were already trading data on 70/30 royalties. Afternoons in Europe lit up with threads on keyword stuffing, metadata hacks, and emerging genres. Late-night in North America transformed into impromptu sprint sessions, where thriller writers urged romance authors to hit the 2,000-word mark before midnight.
Harvey, equal parts curator and custodian, kept the place civil. His moderators—volunteering fans known affectionately as “the Boardies”—enforced a short code of conduct. Respect every poster, disclose affiliate links, no personal attacks, and always keep spoilers hidden behind the recommended tags. Promotion was allowed but corralled to designated sections. New authors could ask “naïve” questions without ridicule, seasoned six-figure writers could reveal tactics without fear of piracy, and traditional-only holdouts occasionally converted after observing indie dashboards posted in real time.
Harvey’s Passing and the End of an Era
On August 28, 2014, the forum banner turned gray. Harvey Chute had passed suddenly at the age of fifty-three. The news rippled like thunder. Condolence threads filled dozens of pages, united by gratitude for a man who gave writers a safe harbor in stormy publishing seas. Behind the scenes, Harvey’s family weighed technical upkeep, rising hosting costs, and the relentless growth curve. They chose to honor his legacy but recognized their limitations when it came to server maintenance and community management.
2015: Acquisition by VerticalScope and an Uneasy Transition
In May 2015, the Chute estate sold KindleBoards—rebranded months earlier as KBoards—to VerticalScope, a Toronto-based marketing conglomerate specializing in high-traffic forums from automotive to outdoor sports. The deal promised server upgrades, professional moderation, and new ad revenue streams. For many authors, the news triggered déjà vu: a beloved indie brand acquired by a corporate entity whose main KPI was advertising margin.
At first, cosmetic tweaks were minor—an updated logo, a responsive theme. But subtle changes emerged. Affiliate-style banners encroached on header space. Page load times spiked as third-party scripts siphoned user data. Most significant, VerticalScope modified the Terms of Service, adding clauses that granted broad license to content posted on the forum. Writers worried that their marketing copy, book excerpts, or advice posts could be repurposed without credit.
Loyal Boardies protested. Some moderators resigned. Threads cataloged broken features—a search function throttled by aggressive caching, private messages missing attachments, sudden 500 errors mid-post. For tech tinkerers, the telltale footprint of cost-cutting was clear: minimal development resources paired with maximal ad insertion.
The Membership Exodus
By late 2017, daily post volume had halved. Indie influencers like Hugh Howey, Courtney Milan, and David Gaughran—once frequent contributors—migrated to Facebook groups, Patreon communities, and paid Slack masterminds. The Writers’ Café lost the lightning-stroke synergy that had powered craft innovation. Membership trickled downward below 25,000 active users by 2019, and Google Trends documented KBoards’ keyword interest dropping over 60 percent from its 2015 peak.
Several rival communities flourished in KBoards’ shadow: 20Books to 50K on Facebook, Wide for the Win, and genre-specific Discords that combined real-time chat with lower ad noise. KBoards tried to stem the tide by re-introducing “Ask Me Anything” events and pinning success-story interviews, but the momentum had shifted. Modern authors preferred ecosystems offering integrated video, file uploads, and algorithm-free networking. In that sense, KBoards’ static bulletin-board code felt frozen in 2010.
Today’s Landscape: A Forum in Maintenance Mode
In 2025, KBoards.com is still around. VerticalScope’s network ad bar rotates house ads, insurance banners, and collect-email pop-ups. Fewer than a thousand posts per week land in the Writers’ Café, many from nostalgia-driven veterans answering brand-new authors who stumbled onto an old Google link. Some gems remain: a ten-year archive of metadata experiments, timeless posts on newsletter swaps, and one of the web’s earliest royalty-split spreadsheets. Yet replies often arrive days, not minutes, later.
A skeleton moderator staff—the last of Harvey’s original volunteers plus two VerticalScope employees—keep spam at bay. Rules are technically unchanged, but enforcement now leans on automated filters rather than human nuance, occasionally blocking legitimate posts that mention off-site links. For seasoned Boardies, the site has become a bittersweet museum: a place to look up a craft checklist written in 2012, then quietly click away to more vibrant pastures.
A Fair Assessment: What Remains Valuable
For all its reduced sparkle, KBoards offers something no other platform can replicate: institutional memory. Newcomers can trace the arc of self-publishing from Wild West to mainstream by scrolling month-by-month. They can watch the birth of Kindle Select, witness the first $100K indie milestone, and read cautionary tales of authors burned by vanity presses. That archive functions as an academic primary source—especially helpful for researchers and historians chronicling twenty-first-century publishing.
Moreover, the forum still nurtures pockets of specialized knowledge. A thread from 2013 on EPUB validation remains a go-to answer today. A veteran cover-designer’s five-part tutorial on typography still saves authors hundreds of dollars. And despite VerticalScope’s corporate distance, the occasional staff update ensures the site is not entirely abandoned.
This is not to say there is no new content, there is. Veteran users will recognize a few names that still post regularly and that shared knowledge is still high quality. New users are advised to check the dates of the posts they read as KBoards can suffer from its content being somewhat antiquated. The search engine works, but it may take you years into the past.
Two Illuminating Statistics
Independent surveys indicate that forum-centric traffic among indie authors fell by 72 percent between 2016 and 2024, eclipsed by Discord and Facebook groups. Yet a metadata scan of Amazon author pages shows that 13 percent of bestselling indie romances published in 2023 still credit a KBoards thread as their first exposure to rapid-release strategy, proving legacy influence lingers long after daily chatter subsides.
Closing Thoughts: KBoards’ Legacy and Lessons
KBoards embodies the lifecycle of an online community in the digital age. It blossomed under a visionary founder, fused technology with camaraderie, hit meteoric scale, suffered the shock of sudden leadership loss, underwent corporatization, and—without a nimble reinvention—entered gradual decline. Yet decline does not equal erasure. For many, Harvey Chute’s forum provided the first safe harbor to confess writing dreams out loud. It taught new voices to price confidently, to request professional covers, to trust data over dogma.
In 2025 the site feels like a brilliant bookstore whose aisles grew dusty, not because the books lost relevance, but because the checkout counter was replaced with billboards. Still, the volumes remain on the shelves, waiting for curious minds. Enter respectfully, archive what you need, tip your hat to Harvey’s pioneering spirit, say hello to Becca and Anne, and carry those lessons forward into whichever next-gen community you choose.
Website Link
https://www.kboards.com