Mark Leslie Lefebvre is a writer, editor, publisher, and bookseller. If you asked him to leverage a single title, he’d likely default to “book nerd.”
There are very few people in the world who understand, in detail, so many different aspects of bookselling, of traditional publishing, and of the self-publishing realms. Mark Leslie Lefebvre has been writing since the mid 1980s and had his first work published in 1992, the same year he started working in the book industry. In that time he has been at the forefront of major changes and evolutions within the book industry on numerous fronts and technologies, including early adoption of eBooks, print on demand, and indie publishing.
Mark—who has managed indie, academic, mall, big box, and chain bookstores—has been a long-time pioneer and explorer within the book world. He self-published his first book in 2004, almost a decade before it became more mainstream. He first started podcasting his fiction back in 2006. In 2009 his bookstore was the 2nd in Canada and the 9th in the world to leverage Print on Demand technology right in the store using an Espresso Book Machine, and in 2012, he was the driving force behind the creation of Kobo Writing Life, Rakuten Kobo’s answer to Kindle Direct Publishing. He was a founding director of the board of directors for BookNet Canada, a champion on the Professional Advisory Committee for self-publishing in the establishment of Sheridan College’s Honors Degree in Creative Writing and Publishing, and is a founding member of Wide For the Win. He left full-time corporate bookselling work in 2018 to write and continue to operate Stark Publishing, his publishing and consulting business. Among his clients are authors who have earned five and six figure incomes, signed half-million dollar publishing deals, and the world’s largest author-centric self-publishing platform, Draft2Digital.