Here is a great interview I performed with Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords. He gives valuable insight on self-publishing and where he believes the industry is heading. Enjoy! Here is an excerpt.
JR: How did the idea of Smashwords come about?
MC: My wife and I wrote a novel a few years ago called Boob Tube. It’s a roman a clef about the daytime television soap opera industry. My wife is a former reporter for Soap Opera Weekly Magazine. Despite being repped by one of the best literary agencies in New York, we were unable to sell the book because publishers questioned whether there was a large enough commercial market for a book targeting soap opera fans. Previous soap opera-themed novels had performed poorly. This frustrating experience opened my eyes to what I believed to be a big problem – that publishers value books through a myopic prism of perceived commercial potential, yet they have no way to accurately gauge commercial potential. Because they’re unable to take a risk on every author, they say no to many great authors. I imagined the hundreds of thousands of talented authors around the world who would never get a publishing deal simply because traditional publishing couldn’t accommodate them. That’s how I got the idea for Smashwords. I envisioned creating a free ebook publishing platform that would allow any author, anywhere in the world, to publish an ebook. That’s what we launched in 2008, and then the following year we expanded into distribution with agreements with Barnes & Noble, Kobo and Sony, and then in 2010 we became an authorized distributor for the Apple iBookstore.
Read the rest of the interview here:
http://hobbesendpublishing.com/industry-interview-smashwords-founder-mark-coker/
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