Reedsy

Reedsy

The Reedsy marketplace brings authors and professionals together to work on crafting new books.
Type of business	Privately held company
Type of site	Self publishing services
Available in	English
Founded	Summer 2014
Headquarters	London, U.K.
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Area served	Worldwide
Founder(s)	Emmanuel Nataf Ricardo Fayet Vincent Durand Matt Cobb[1]
Services	Reedsy Marketplace (matches authors with professionals) Discovery (author promotion) Book Editor (manuscript preparation) Reedsy Learning
Employees	20-25 (2020)[2]
URL	reedsy.com
Current status	Active

Reedsy is a British startup online author services firm based in London which serves as a bridge uniting authors and publishing freelancers in the self publishing industry.^{[3][4][5][6][7]} While it serves primarily as a clearing house for top publishing talent,^[8] the firm has expanded to offer a variety of tools and services for would-be authors.

Reedsy has no brick and mortar real estate for a headquarters; rather, the firm collaborates remotely from wherever they are.

While the firm is headquartered in London,^[9] it is "completely officeless" such that its staff is physically distributed in different locations, and conducts business entirely on computers via cloud computing.^[10][11] In 2019 the firm had a staff of 25, and had 150,000 authors in its community and 1,500 freelancers, including editors, designers, marketers, and ghostwriters.^[12] To run the business without a fixed office requires internal discipline and transparency, according to a report in TechCrunch magazine.^[7] The firm believes in the benefits of self-publishing in that it "brings more diverse books to readers and allows authors to write for countless niches that no publisher would ever care about".^[13]

We'd like to become the backbone of the industry, helping authors and publishers produce beautiful high-quality books. We will build on our experience designing curated communities to create more tools for authors to find their audience.

— Co-founder Emmanuel Nataf, 2015^[14]

Vetting professional freelancers[]

Reedsy does have special events where team members get together physically in person, such as this group hike.

A chief task of the firm is to vet the credentials of publishing industry professional freelancers.^[15][16] These freelancers are not salaried employees but rather they work on a project basis with authors. Reedsy vets story editors, cover designers, ghost writers,^[17] marketing strategists and other freelancers, by verifying their previous work experience for mainstream publishers as well as examining their overall track record in the publishing industry.^[18][19][20] Further, they monitor the interactions between freelancers and their author clients. While the firm gets applications from many freelancers, they only accept a few, and they allow "only the publishing world's elite" to list with their service, according to a report in Fast Company magazine.^[21] According to co-founder Emmanuel Nataf, from 2014 to 2015, Reedsy initially received over 7000 applications from professionals in the publishing industry, and selected 300 designers, editors and marketers between 2014 and 2015.^[14] According to one estimate, 95% of Reedsy's freelancers worked in the past for one of the Big Five publishers.^[22][23] For example, when the established publishing house Macmillan laid off three senior executives in April 2020, two of them began freelancing with Reedsy soon thereafter.^[24] But the process works both ways; some professional freelancers at Reedsy have returned to work in the world of corporate publishing.^[25] Reedsy freelancers have worked with top writers such as Ken Follett, Neil Gaiman, George R. R. Martin, Stephen King and Jodi Picoult.^[14] In addition to vetting freelancers, the firm verifies the credentials of writing contests to help writers avoid wasting time with fake contests and prizes.^[26] Reedsy keeps track of writing contests, updating its lists frequently, and provides writers with details such as the prize amounts, entry fees, and deadlines.^[27]

Educational services[]

Reedsy offers tools and services of an educational nature to assist authors. The courses are primarily targeted toward writers new to publishing.^[28] There are training courses to help authors navigate the self-publishing process.^[29][30][31] There are detailed explanations of how to do a book proposal.^[32] Reedsy's Learning series approach is not to use a whiteboard or podcasts or a textbook, but rather to offer serialized short courses, each about five minutes in length, delivered to a writer's email inbox every day for ten days.^[28] Some courses offered are Self-publishing 101, Book Marketing 101, Facebook Ads for Authors and All you Need to Know About Amazon Algorithms.^[28] The firm host webinars to help authors with such issues as improving a story's pacing.^[33] The platform offers 30+ free online courses to help authors with book development.^[31][19]

Tools[]

An innovative tool available to writers is Reedsy's Creative Writing Prompts. Through the web, writing prompts are sent that help authors develop their writing skill.

Reedsy offers online software tools to help authors convert their manuscripts to files suitable for publishing purposes. Reedsy's free Book Editor is an online word processor geared to publishing.^{[34][35][36][31]} Writers can write their book using this software; when finished, it is easy to export the completed manuscript to a proper format for publishing such as PDF, ePub, or Mobi.^{[34][37][18][31]} The software permits collaboration at every step of the writing process,^[38] and it formats the writer's manuscript in publishable format while writing in real-time.^[37] Since 2015, writer Jen Glantz has written five books using Reedsy's software to edit and format her books.^[39]

Reedsy's Book Editor is a free tool that formats a manuscript in publishable format in real time.

An original Reedsy online tool is its Plot Generator: the user chooses a genre, such as drama or fantasy or mystery or romance of science fiction, then the tool automatically generates ideas for a protagonist, secondary character, plot and even a plot twist; if a user likes a particular idea, he or she can keep it while shuffling the remaining combinations around, as a creative way to generate ideas.^[40]

Author promotion services[]

A continuing struggle for indie authors is how to promote their self-published books.^[41] There have been many book public relations sites and marketing firms that often don't deliver as they promise.^[41] Initially, to help authors promote their self-published works, Reedsy offered suggestions from professional book marketers in the form of blog posts, emails, Learning Courses, and live web content that the firm dubbed Reedsy Live Sessions.^[13]

Reedsy's Discovery platform became available to authors in 2019.^[42][13][42] It offers users a web page to help them promote their books on the site.^[43][31] It is Reedsy's alternative to Goodreads.^[42] The intent is to offer affordability and credibility to authors' marketing efforts.^[41] The sales page for promoted books includes a "buy button".^[41] Vetted reviewers can download a free copy and write a review.^[41] For $50, writers can submit their soon-to-be-published works to elicit reviews and hype about a month before their book launch day.^[42][13] The service depends on computer algorithms as well as human curation to select which books to emphasize on their site.^[13] For an author, publicity from the site could lead to greater exposure and the possibility of getting favorable reviews of their books.^[13]

The Reedsy Marketplace[]

Books created with help from Reedsy professionals.

Users interface with the Reedsy site by browsing through freelancer profiles.^[19] Typically an author can request free quotes from freelancers, and if an official collaboration agreement is made, Reedsy reveals contact information to connect them.^[19] A tentative contract, reached by both parties, specifies how much the author will pay the freelancer, and what work will be performed. Reedsy takes a 20% cut of each contract, 10% from the author, 10% from the freelancer.^[44] The firm offers a satisfaction guarantee, so conceivably a dissatisfied customer could request another freelancer if the initial effort was deemed unsatisfactory.^[19] Subsequent collaboration between the author and the freelancer, such as editing and formatting, can be handled entirely through Reedsy's website.^[45]

Some authors who have entered and won a Reedsy writing contest can use that to jumpstart a career as a writer; for example, Joshua Insole won the writing contest twice and is now working as a writer full-time.^[46] Some writers start up their own presses; for example, Theresa Batalogianis began Cnoc Máirtín Press and hired freelancers to help with copyediting and graphic art.^[47] In some cases, authors, working with traditional publishing houses, have grown frustrated with a lack of marketing support; for example, Greg White complained when his publisher forgot to ship copies of his book to his launch party, so White went to a Reedsy freelancer to help him redesign his book.^[48]

Costs[]

According to statistics compiled by the firm, the average cost for copyediting a 60,000 word manuscript was $1020, proofreading was $540, and cover design was $700.^[49] Hiring a ghostwriter to write a complete book from scratch could cost $20,000 to $30,000 per book, and $40,000 to $60,000 to hire a more experienced ghostwriter.^[19] One account suggested that hiring a freelancer through Reedsy could be relatively expensive and that there were less expensive services available.^[19]

Competitors[]

Reedsy's primary direct competitor in the self-publishing services field is New York-based Bibliocrunch, which offers similar services.^[23][50] An indirect competitor is the emerging Internet juggernaut Wattpad which is a global storytelling social platform, which uses reader feedback to hone stories which then get developed into books and movies; instead of linking up authors and freelance professionals to craft books, as Reedsy does, Wattpad develops stories with reader feedback in the online community, and highly rated stories, which attract much attention from readers, can then be picked up by large publishers such as Macmillan.^[51]

History[]

Co-founders Emmanuel Nataf and Ricardo Fayet.

Co-founder Emmanuel Nataf was a business student at the Rouen Business School, and he moonlighted as a management consultant.^[14] While reading his Kindle, he saw an opportunity to use technology to help publishing professionals work as freelancers while helping fledgling authors navigate the self-publishing world.^[14] He wanted authors to have the same level of quality that writers get from their affiliations with traditional publishing houses.^[14] He credited Amazon for disrupting the publishing industry, and enabling firms like Reedsy to exist.^[14]

In 2014 Nataf partnered with Ricardo Fayet and Vincent Durand and Matthew Cobb to start the company in London. The fledgling firm received funding from Seedcamp,^[9] with an initial funding of $1.25 million.^[12] Self publishing was expanding at a rapid pace, and yet it was difficult for authors to find qualified assistants to help them get their books in good shape, as well as learn what to do; so the firm became an online platform to not only connect authors with freelancers but to help authors learn about self publishing, and to help them promote their self-published books.^[31] The firm expanded; in 2016, the Reedsy community included approximately 20,000 authors and 500 freelancers.^[52] By December 2016, Reedsy had shepherded 1,300 books into the world.^[53] In 2019, there were approximately 150,000 authors in the community and 1,500 freelancers.^[12] During its first five-year period, according to Reedsy, authors seeking marketing guidance from Reedsy have numbered in the tens of thousands.^[13] The firm has experienced rapid growth.^[8] Self-publishing has become respectable; as one writer put it:

Five years ago, self-publishing was a scar. Now it’s a tattoo.

— Author Greg White in 2016.^[48]

Reedsy has been active in promoting itself within the publishing industry. For instance, it publishes best-of lists, such as its "115 best books of all time" list.^[54] It recently published its Top Ten list of Christmas stories.^[55] In some respects, the firm is assuming the role of a major player in the publishing world, by recognizing literary magazines such as Bard College's magazine entitled Conjunctions.^[56] The firm donates a share of its profits to Room to Read, which is a nonprofit organization that provides girls in Africa and Asia with access to education.

In the last two decades, despite the explosive growth in self publishing,^[8] there has been a precipitous drop in income for writers in general; a survey in 2019 by the Authors Guild found that income for American authors from 2009 to 2017 dropped 42%.^[57] While income for self-published authors doubled since 2013, their income levels were 58% lower than those of traditionally published authors.^[57]

External links[]

• Essay by Reedsy Founder 2016

References[]