The Reedsy platform offers an exciting eco-system for authors to help craft beautiful books. There are two main focal points: the first is the editor and the second is the marketplace. Both are offered in a slick user-friendly interface that makes it easy to find editors, proofreaders, cover designers, ghostwriters and marketers to help you with your book production. The editor allows you to import your finished manuscript and export it for digital and print.
The marketplace:
There are a selected ‘curated’ group of freelancers available that Reedsy, according to the ‘About’ page, “only work with editors, designers, marketers, and ghostwriters who have experience crafting books that land on the New York Times bestseller list.”
The impressive CV’s are evident to see. When hunting down your collaborators you search and save the ones that resonate with you the most for future viewing. There is also a starred review system in place and freelancers are required to link to projects they’ve worked on.
Click on the sections you require and you’ll get an option to filter down the services you’re looking for.
Editing: copy editing, developmental editing, editorial assessment, indexing, proofreading, query letter review.
Design: Book interior design, cover design, illustration, production management, typography
Publicity: blog tour and press coverage
Marketing: advertising, email marketing, marketing strategy and metadata and blurb optimization
Ghostwriting: Book ghostwriting, Book proposal and Short-Form Content and finally, Website Design.
For each speciality, you can refine your search by fiction/non-fiction and filter by genres
We used the service for finding an editor and asked for five quotes. You can message each freelancer to ask questions through the internal communication system and when ready award the work.
Reedsy charges a 10% service fee for each project through the marketplace.
When you’re ready you can submit briefs and raise quotes with up to five professionals. Overall, ours was a smooth experience and we’ll definitely use again.
The Reedsy Editor:
Create a book and either import and paste in your chapters and sections. Drag and move around chapters, add front and back matter. Overall it’s simple to use and you can assign a small selection of template or theme styles for your book. When you go to export you get the ability to drop chapter numbers, use drop caps, show endnotes.
There were a couple of bugbears here. There is currently no centre alignment or scene breaks in place which is annoying, to say the least. Although it’s apparently coming down the pipe I would have expected this basic function in a first release. So, double spacing had to be used for the scene breaks which wasn’t ideal as it broke consistency with the other books.
Book settings:
Add your title, sub-title, edition, author name, description, ISBN and other basic information. There’s an image upload for book imprint and the cover.
Overall the editor is impressive with no cost to get digital epub and mobi files as well as print book PDFs. This is a massive plus that could potentially save a large chunk of change in formatting costs.
I do love the interface and service all round. It’s not perfect yet but I’m confident that after a few updates it will get there.
To get a $25 credit for services through the platform you can use this link. Be advised that I will also get a credit which is a big win-win all round, I’d say. So, don’t be scared…
