Overview
Every author’s path to readers is different — and it should be.
The marketing strategies that energize one writer can feel like slow torture to another, and the rapid release sales approaches that work beautifully for a high-volume genre author may be completely wrong for the author who releases one carefully crafted novel every two years.
So why do we keep chasing the same tactics and feeling like failures when they don’t work for us?
In this session, publishing industry veteran Mark Leslie Lefebvre cuts through the noise to help you build a marketing and direct sales approach that fits your actual life, your genuine comfort level, and your real goals as an author. Drawing on more than thirty years in the book industry — as a bookseller, a publisher, an author who has embraced both traditional publishing and self-publishing, and the Director of Business Development at Draft2Digital — Mark offers a frank, encouraging, and practical framework for understanding your own creative business.
We will explore how to honestly assess your goals and bandwidth, how to evaluate marketing strategies and various sales strategies and approaches (including direct sales options) against your personal strengths and limits, and what the genuine pros and cons of each approach look like — not in theory, but in the day-to-day life of a working author. You will leave with a clearer sense of which tools and techniques are most likely to serve you, and why the best marketing strategy is always the one you will actually sustain.
Speaker Bio
Mark Leslie Lefebvre is a Canadian author, industry veteran, and publishing consultant with more than thirty years of experience across every corner of the book world. He has worked as a bookseller, a bookstore manager, and a publishing industry representative, and served as a former president of the Canadian Booksellers Association. He spent six years as Director of Self-Publishing and Author Relations at Kobo, where he was the driving force behind the creation of Kobo Writing Life, one of the largest direct-to-retail publishing platforms in the world. He is currently the Director of Business Development at Draft2Digital. The author of more than forty books across fiction and non-fiction, Mark is the host of Stark Reflections on Writing and Publishing, an independently produced podcast that has aired weekly without interruption for more than eight years and over 470 episodes. He is a frequent speaker at major publishing conferences across North America and Europe, including Superstars Writing Seminars, NINC, Author Nation, and the SFU and WCU Masters programs, and has been heard on nationally syndicated radio programmes. Mark lives in Waterloo, Ontario and can be found at markleslie.ca and starkreflections.ca.
Tickets $17.31, Free to ORW members (only $60 for a year’s membership!) Book On Eventbrite