Less than a week after Book Expo America (BEA) ended last Thursday, the inevitable post mortems began, from bloggers and industry heavyweights alike. The buzz from last year, it seems, has become an all-out chorus of industry folks singing the praises of digital’s promise. One can imagine that this is sweet music to Mark Coker’s ears. Coker is the founder of Smashwords, self-described as “an ebook publishing and distribution platform for ebook authors, publishers and readers.”
Coker started Smashwords in May 2008 after he and his wife Lesleyann, who covered soaps for Soap Opera Weekly, wrote a roman à clef and ran the gauntlet of publishers, countless revisions, and review cycles that went nowhere. After two years, they had nothing to show for their efforts. Coker diagnosed the problem: his book was being pitched on its perceived commercial value. That “approach to commercialized publishing is poisonous to the future of books,” he says.
What’s wrong, Coker states, is that the trade publishing industry is running a business. “[They] have to pay their Manhattan sky rise rents.” Because of this business model, traditional publishing is unable to take a risk on every author. Coker likens traditional publishing to the bouncer in front of the club, or St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, perpetuating a “culture of no.” Today’s authors have to approach the Big Six with an already established platform, their own marketing strategies, etc. – things publishers of old used to do – to get consideration. Coker says today’s authors should ask what can publishing do for them that they cannot do for themselves.
“My background is in Silicon Valley,” Coker says. “We like to throw technology [at] everything.” The end result was Smashwords.
At the Smashwords web site, writers can create a user profile, upload their work in a software format, set pricing and sampling parameters, and almost instantly become published authors. They can earn up to 85% in royalties from their work, which is accessible in popular text formats and on e-readers like Sony, Nook, iPad, and Kindle. Smashwords launched 140 books in its first year in existence. Year Two saw an explosion of the catalogue to 6000 books, then 28,500 by the end of last year. By the end of March of this year, the total had surpassed 40,000. Last week, Smashwords published its 50,000 e-book and its 20,000 author. “I’ve created a monster,” laughs Coker. “We created the printing press and put it online.”
Coker likens this new digital assault on traditional publishing to an uprising, the literary equivalent to some aspects of this year’s Arab Spring. After all, traditional publishing had fashioned itself to be the Maginot Line between good writing and some of the aggressively bad self-published works on the market. However, says Coker, “if I remember my history, the Maginot Line and the fortifications there proved to be permeable.”
For all of his optimism, Coker concedes, though, that some of the works in his catalogue are not ready to be published. The biggest problem with Smashwords, he says, is that “we really make it too easy for an author to publish.” To improve the quality of the catalogue, he explains, “We go out of our way to educate authors that they need to respect these publishing best practices.” This includes style guides, Coker’s own Smashwords blog, forums, and writing groups.
Ultimately, readers determine who becomes a bestseller. “Readers aren’t demanding perfection but they are demanding that their time is respected,” he says. The authors who cut corners are the ones who don’t sell. The platform will cleanse itself of the bad writers. “The good stuff quickly rises to the top, and the bad stuff becomes invisible.”
Overall, Coker sees more respect coming to self-publishing. To illustrate this, Coker holds up Amanda Hocking, the 26-year-old Minnesota author who sold over a million e-books and just inked a four-book $2 million deal with St. Martin’s Press. On the flip side of the coin, there’s bestselling author Barry Eisler, who turned down a half-million-dollar deal, also with St. Martin’s, in order to self-publish his next book. Coker predicts that inevitably, we will see examples of authors producing one book independently and one book with a traditional publisher.
Undoubtedly, Smashwords will have its own role to play in this paradigm shift. “It’s definitely an exciting time,” Coker says. “Authors today have more opportunities to reach readers than ever before. Talented authors will have the opportunity to reach more readers than ever before.”
Tomorrow: One author takes advantage of digital publishing on the way to a book deal
Later: A prolific author makes digital publishing work for her
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