Mark Leslie Lefebvre has worked in the book industry since 1992 in almost every type of brick and mortar, online, and digital bookstore. He is a past President of the Canadian Booksellers Association, former Director of Self-Publishing and Author Relations for Rakuten Kobo, and the founder of Kobo Writing Life, Kobo's free direct publishing platform. He has given talks about the business of writing and publishing across North America and in Europe. Mark consults for Draft2Digital as Director of Business Development where he works on collaborations between the world's leading distributor of indie author titles and their retail and other industry partners.

With over thirty years of experience in bookselling and as an author who has embraced both traditional and indie-publishing opportunities, Mark is an advocate for helping authors understand the options available to them for finding success on their own unique author journey.

Publishing Aggressively Wide by Mark Leslie Lefebvre

You Did the Hard Part and Distributed Everywhere. This Is the Book about What Comes Next.

What if being "wide" was never a destination you reach, but a direction you keep facing?

Most authors who go wide do the horizontal work. They set up their accounts, push their books out to every retailer and library platform, grab the universal link, tick the box--and stop, because they've arrived. Meanwhile, that same author has never sold a short story to a paying market, never run a Kickstarter, never serialized anything, never licensed a translation for a territory they can't service themselves, and has no idea that presales and pre-orders are two different animals. They went wide in one direction. But there are five or six others.

In Publishing Aggressively Wide, Mark Leslie Lefebvre--founder of Kobo Writing Life, Director of Business Development for Draft2Digital, and author of Wide for the Win--picks up where that earlier book left off. Drawing on more than three decades as a bookseller, author, and publishing insider, he offers an honest seven-point diagnostic for the "wide but shallow" author, then walks the wider map: treating your rights as inventory, knowing when a publishing deal is actually the wide move, using short fiction as an engine, serializing without burning out, and funding the special editions you couldn't otherwise afford directly through your readers. Then, in the final section, he tries to talk you out of most of it--because an author running three channels with real attention is aggressively wide, and an author running a dozen badly is just tired.

Short on purpose, and meant to be read in a sitting or two, argued with, and then used. Somewhere in here is a door you haven't tried. Let's go find it.

[This book is exclusive to the 2026 Novel Writing Tools StoryBundle]

 

REVIEWS

  • "The book is everything I expected and more. Written in a conversational tone, the book can be consumed cover to cover or by subject matter/topic. There is a wealth of information inside, some of which validates what I figured out on my own, but all of which will be helpful as I make my way along the WIDE journey. I like that the author explains his reasoning for his opinions as well as sharing what worked or didn't work for him, thus allowing readers to decide for themselves how to proceed on their own journey. As Mark says: there are no silver bullets to success, but this chock-full-of-knowledge book provides a strong foundation to give authors a fighting chance in the world of publishing WIDE. I'd give this ten stars if I could."

    – Linda Shenton Matchett

  • "Mark has crafted the ultimate book for WIDE publishing. This is the first book I read that lead me to think about publishing wide as a mindset, rather then simply a long term strategy. If I had to summarize this book in one world I would sat 'possibilities'. Wide for the Win is really about that. The endless possibilities an author can unlock if they just stop for a second and think of the whole world that exists outside of Amazon. And that world is large enough to welcome anyone willing to take the leap and start thinking WIDE. Highly recommended."

    – Anonymous

  • "I read your Wide for the Win book and took copious notes. Soon after, I left KU and went Wide. I dug deep into every book platform's ecosystem. In one year, my revenue doubled. Two years later, I'm still pleasantly surprised. This was probably the best business decision I made as an Indie."

    – Tikiri Herath

  • "These reminders and insights are so powerful! And thank you for sharing that YouTube link! I've been doing this for several years without finding my rhythm (or financial success), and that one presentation may have just led me the last few steps on my long, dark journey from burnout. Sending a cyber-hug of gratitude and appreciation!"

    – J. Martain
 

BOOK PREVIEW

INTRODUCTION: The Irony of a Book on Publishing Wide That Isn't Everywhere

I have written a book about publishing wide that you can currently only get in one place.

Don't think I'm not aware of the irony of that.

But I'd like you to reflect on the special itch that creates, because it's the same itch I felt when I decided to write it and make it part of this special annual Storybundle.

You see, I have spent a good portion of the past fifteen years arguing, in rooms and on stages and into microphones, that an author who ties their entire livelihood to a single retailer is standing on ground they do not own. I helped build Kobo Writing Life partly out of a conviction that writers deserved more doors than one. I joined Draft2Digital as a part-time Director of Business Development to further my support for platforms that help authors with getting their work into the wider world of digital publishing.

Heck, I wrote an entire book called Wide for the Win on the subject. There is a Facebook group with tens of thousands of members in it whose whole reason for existing is the proposition that one channel is not enough.

And yet, here I am, handing you a title that exists nowhere but inside a StoryBundle curated by Kevin J. Anderson for the fall of 2026.

I could pretend this is an embarrassing contradiction that I'm cleverly working around.

But it isn't. It's actually the argument itself.

In Wide for the Win I spent some time on the difference between a tactic and a strategy, and I want to drag that distinction back out here because it's load-bearing for everything that follows.

A tactic is a single move. It's concrete, it's short-term, it's a piece advanced on one square of one board. A strategy is the whole tournament--the plan, the overall shape of the entire thing, the reason you're advancing that piece at all. Plenty of tactics live comfortably inside a good strategy. That's what tactics are for.

Exclusivity as a strategy--as an identity, as the entire architecture of your business, as the answer you give without having asked the question--is the narrowest way to build a writing career I know of. I'll go on saying that until someone takes my microphone or my keyboard away.

Exclusivity as a tactic, chosen deliberately, bounded in time, entered into with clear eyes and for a specific gain, is just a single move on the much larger chessboard that an author is playing.

So let's look at the move. This bundle puts my work in front of a self-selected audience of writers who have already demonstrated, with their credit cards, that they want to get better at this. It arrives with Kevin J. Anderson's name attached, which carries reach I could not manufacture on my own in a decade of posting. It pays in a lump rather than a trickle, which is a genuinely different financial instrument than royalties that dribble in ninety days after the fact. And it drops me into a lineup alongside other amazingly talented authors whose readers may never have heard of me and now perhaps will.

None of that is available to me if I simply upload this book everywhere I can distribute it and then sit back and cross my fingers and toes and push out a lot of hope into the universe.

I'm not speaking hypothetically. I've been fortunate enough to be invited into a number of themed StoryBundles over the years, and there have been years where the income from one or two of those bundles represented a meaningful share of my annual digital income--a share that could stand up next to what I earned across a handful of the larger ebook retailers combined. That is not an argument for abandoning the retailers. It's an argument that the map of where money comes from is considerably larger than most of us are drawing it.

Which brings me to what this book actually is.

This Is Not Wide for the Win Again

Wide for the Win came out in 2021 and it is, structurally, a book that is about mindset related to channels. Retail. Libraries. Direct. Other. It moves horizontally. It asks: given this thing you've made, how many storefronts can you get it into, and how do you behave once it's there?

That question still matters. A lot. I still stand behind the book.

But it's one axis, and in the years since, I've become convinced there's much more to it. And much more for me to say within that realm. Things that are complementary or even take those principles and walk them up to the next level.

Because here's what I keep seeing happening across the indie author landscape. An author does the horizontal work. After their initial Kindle Direct Publishing play, they set up an account at Draft2Digital, they perhaps publish direct or use D2D or another aggregator to push the book out to Kobo and Apple and Barnes & Noble and the library aggregators.

They get the universal link, they tick the box.

They are genuinely wide, by any reasonable definition.

And then they stop, because they've arrived. They've become wide. It's done.

Meanwhile the same author has never sold a short story to a paying market, never run a Kickstarter, never serialized anything, never signed a deal for territories they can't service themselves, never sold a translation, never put a chapbook in a reader's hand at a table, and has no idea that presales and pre-orders are two different animals.

They went wide in one direction and then they stopped.

But there are five or six other directions.

That's the axis this book runs along. Not how many stores carry your book, but how many ways your work can reach a reader and how many ways it can earn. This includes thinking about rights. About formats. Publishing paths. Funding models. Length. Cadence.

It's the whole map, not the one road you already know.

On the Word "Aggressively"

I chose it on purpose, and I want to be precise about it, because I don't mean what you might reasonably think I mean.

I do not mean hustle. And I do not mean more, faster, harder, at the cost of your health and your relationships and the actual writing. I co-wrote a book called The Relaxed Author with Joanna Penn and I'm not about to spend twenty-thousand or so words undoing it.

By aggressive I mean active as opposed to passive. I mean going after opportunity rather than waiting to have it handed to you. The passively wide author is available in a lot of places. The aggressively wide author is actually doing something in a lot of places, and--this is the part that matters--has chosen which places, on purpose, for reasons they could explain out loud.

There's a chapter near the end of Wide for the Win called "Wide Is Being Inclusive," and if I'm honest, it's the chapter that's grown most in my estimation since publication. Wide was never really about distribution. It was about refusing to narrow your thinking prematurely--about staying open to the reader who found you somewhere you didn't expect, the format you assumed wasn't for you, the platform you'd written off, the publishing path you'd decided was for other kinds of writers.

This book is that chapter, given just a little more room to breathe, like a brilliantly aged wine that I let sit out before serving it.