Established in 2014, Reedsy is an online marketplace for authors to meet and hire publishing professionals—everyone from editors to marketers—and just recently won the FutureBook BookTech Award.
Next week, Reedsy will debut its new Editor tool, and CEO Emmanuel Nataf has given us a sneak preview. What we’ve seen so far indicates that it’s a potentially useful concept that could help authors of all paths to publication organize, professionalize, and strategize their production.
On Monday Feb. 15, authors can start accessing a first iteration of this online book formatter. Here are some of its key features:
- There are two templates—one for fiction, one for nonfiction.
- Additional template themes are to come, based on user feedback.
- The templates and processing have been developed and tested in cooperation with IngramSpark’s team to meet Ingram quality standards.
- Book files from the Editor have also been pushed to Kindle and are rendering fully in .mobi conversion.
- For now, you copy and paste chapters separately into the Editor, and your original formatting survives. Chapters then can be moved and processed independently of each other within the Editor.
- Eventually, the system will import and parse Word documents into chapters automatically.
The user interface of the Reedsy Editor is based on the familiar construct of Microsoft Word but is free of toolbars—it has the composition feel that many enjoy on Medium or in Google Docs.
The Reedsy Editor will soon allow multiple people to edit or gain access to a file at once, Nataf says. That’s when we’ll see the coming-together of the Reedsy proposition: use its marketplace to find and hire an editor, then meet up with that editor in real time in the Editor tool.
Reedsy’s tool also saves versions of your updates for you. “As part of the product, there’s going to be a writing timeline,” Nataf says. “You’ll be able to go through all the versions of your book. You’ll never have to think about saving the file. You can save backups of your versions, and if you don’t, we’ll save versions for you.”
Here’s a video of the Reedsy Editor in action.
And yes, the magic words for authors have been spoken: “The Reedsy Book Editor is completely free,” says Nataf.
A note for our publisher readers: Reedsy for Publishers is coming in March. Much of what we know about this development remains off the record for now, but a feature of this part of the system will allow an entire team from a publishing house—let’s say the design, edit, and marketing groups working on a major series—to function in the tool’s collaborative space on one unified, iterating edition of the manuscript, rather than on pieces. This is what was called for, in fact, by author Kathrin Passig in Berlin last April at Publishers’ Forum.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
