The founding director of Kobo Writing Life joins the Oklahoma-based ebook distributor as it announces new services for authors
Authors who are familiar with Mark Lefebvre’s work as the founding director of Rakuten Kobo’s Writing Life—Kobo’s self-publishing platform—will be interested to know that Lefebvre now is joining Draft2Digital as its incoming business development director.
Lefebvre, who publishes fiction as Mark Leslie, spoke with Hot Sheet last November as he left Kobo and now says that the distance from that six years of work—where he developed high regard for Kobo and its people—has given him some helpful perspective. “In the same way that my previous role in the creation of Kobo Writing Life was, at the time, the perfect job for me, this new role at D2D fits me like a glove. It perfectly matches my passion, my desires, and my expertise.”
At D2D, those assets will be contributing to his work both with company partnerships and authors. “It’s the crossover of both author-facing and partnerships that makes this role ideal for me,” he says, adding that he’s attracted by the collaborative leadership style at D2D. Based in Waterloo, Ontario, Lefebvre says his goals include “bringing more of a presence for D2D to Canada” (D2D is based in Oklahoma City) and involving author communities that he’s a part of.
As The Hot Sheet has reported, D2D’s suite of services has been expanding. In September, they announced they’ll soon launch D2D Universes, which picks up where the now-closed Kindle Worlds left off. Writers who were with Kindle Worlds are being given first access to D2D Universes, which should be available to a wider author base in about a month, he says. They’re also testing a print-on-demand service, D2D Print, which they hope will attract those authors unhappy with Amazon’s switch from CreateSpace to KDP Print. Lefebvre says the company hopes to have an announcement and launch for that by the end of the year.
During the year between Kobo and D2D, Lefebvre says, he’s been busy on several writing projects, including The 7 P’s of Publishing Success, Killing It on Kobo, and a larger how-to, Indie Publishing Insider Secrets, planned for 2019. In fiction, Lefebvre has just released Macabre Montreal with co-author Shayna Krishnasamy, one of six ghost story books for Dundurn, the Canadian independent house, and he’s been making acquisitions for the Fiction River anthology from Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Westley Smith’s WMG Publishing. Since January, he’s been producing a weekly podcast, Stark Reflections on Writing and Publishing.
Bottom line: Lefebvre says that what he’s liked best in the last year is being able to assist writers without the overhang of a major corporate entity. He likes the kind of multi-service support that D2D’s Books2Read listing service offers: directing users to all retail sites for a title. He adds, “I wanted to ensure there was a voice out there that could appreciate the strengths of traditional publishing as well as the strengths of self-publishing. But also a voice that wasn’t afraid to respectfully call out some of the negative things, or legacy errors, that each side can sometimes be blind to.”
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.
