In a surprise move, Mark Lefebvre has left Kobo Writing Life. Lefebvre—known to many by his pen name, Mark Leslie—was director of self-publishing and author relations at the Writing Life platform. He founded and managed it for its six years to date. He leaves it operating at an impressive level: 25 percent of English-language books sold on Kobo come from Writing Life, he says.
In an exit interview with Hot Sheet, Lefebvre said that his departure is by mutual agreement with Kobo management, reflecting his own desire to look for new career opportunities and Kobo Writing Life’s readiness to evolve in unspecified ways.
We learned that about half of Lefebvre’s own books are traditionally published, most recently with Dundurn Press in Toronto, Canada’s largest independent house. Lefebvre told us that he produces two books per year, one self-published and one traditionally published, and that his income from his books is split almost evenly between the two. “My traditional money is coming mostly from print sales,” he said, “and about 90 percent of my indie sales are digital.”
Lefebvre said that the abrupt closure of a competitor platform, Pronoun by Macmillan, surprised him, as it did many (see our separate item), not least because a major house can benefit greatly from the acquisition of an indie outfit and its data. Kobo Writing Life looked at Vook, Pronoun’s predecessor, six years ago “because they had a really nice platform,” Lefebvre said, and Kobo might have considered a white-label arrangement with them. Kobo decided, however, to build its own platform.
“You look at an intelligent publisher like Hachette,” Lefebvre said, “and at how they acquired Bookouture in the UK. The smartest thing they did was not just acquire them and take over all their operations, but they also left Oliver Rhodes in charge. Oliver has the smarts of traditional publishing but the adeptness of an indie publisher. So while Hachette is giving Bookouture print distribution, the people at Bookouture are still controlling digital publishing. That’s a perfect example of big publishing and little publishing working together. I look at that and I wonder why more publishers aren’t doing it that way.”
He continued, “Publishers are criticized for not knowing how to sell ebooks, but that’s because they’re so good at selling print books. And they overprice ebooks the way indies underprice ebooks. A publisher should focus on the thing he’s known for.” Lefebvre said he has had good experiences working with WMG Publishing, which is run by author-publishers Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith; Kobo Writing Life collaboratively published anthology work with WMG. “They did the print edition,” Lefebvre said, “and Kobo did the ebook editions.”
Bottom line: Today, Kobo has some 75,000 authors registered, with roughly 35,000 in the active category (in publishing mode), Lefebvre said, noting that signup rates have stayed remarkably consistent since the launch of Kobo Writing Life in 2012. There’s been a big spike because of KWL’s new distribution option for OverDrive, a sister Rakuten company. The option lets KWL authors select which of their titles can be offered to libraries directly from their accounts. Still, in Canada, Lefebvre said, many people don’t know the global scale of Kobo. As he leaves the company, about 45 percent of writers at Kobo Writing Life are from the US. “The biggest growth we’ve seen in recent years,” he said, “has been in France and Italy,” not least because Kobo arranged to do a promotional contest with Mondadori. And while his next move career-wise is still up in the air, Lefebvre is doing something familiar this month: using NaNoWriMo to crank out a first draft of his next book.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
