Interview: Mark Coker, Founder of Smashwords

Self-Publishing Review has a great interview with Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, a digital publishing platform and online bookstore for self-published authors and their readers. Regular readers will know that we often announce ebooks that appear on Smashwords.com.

In the interview Mark explains why he started Smashwords.

A few years ago, my wife and I wrote a novel, a satire on Hollywood celebrity, and we signed on with one of the most respected literary agencies in New York City.  We and our agent had high hopes for selling the book, but in the end, publishers told our agent they questioned whether our target audience, daytime television soap opera fans, read books.

As you might imagine, after spending thousands of hours on our novel, it was quite frustrating to have a publisher deny us the opportunity to reach our audience.  In the end, I decided that in today’s Internet age, every author should be allowed to publish, and it should be up to readers to decide what’s worth reading and what’s not.  I envisioned a social publishing platform for books, similar to how YouTube is a publishing platform for video.

Mark also talks about the benefits of ebooks, the Kindle, why Smashwords is strictly DRM-free, recommendations for ebook authors and what’s in the pipeline for Smashwords.

Today seemed a great opportunity to announce Mark and wife Lesleyann’s novel Boob Tube (Smashwords ID of 3).

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