Saturday, August 04, 2012

Mark Coker on The Future of Publishing


Mark Coker, as many of you will know, is the founder of Smashwords, the ebook distributor. Turns out that he was recently invited to give a couple of presentations to the 2012 conference of the Romance Writers of America.

On his blog, Mark has some profoundly interesting and useful things to say about romantic fiction. More to the point, he has made available all the slides that he used in his talk entitled 'The Future of Publishing'.

Even if you have been avidly following all the changes in technology and publishing practice over the last few years, I strongly advise you to take a look at this. It doesn't take long to go through it and you will learn a great deal. Much of it is based not on speculation and opinion but on actual sales data from the Smashwords experience. Marvellous stuff.

Mr Coker is not above criticism (in particular his choice of Word as the source file for his operation has been questioned), but generally speaking he is light years ahead of those in mainstream publishing.