Reedsy Opens Discovery as a New Marketing Option for Indie Books

Describing its new platform as “a modern and indie-focused version of Goodreads,” Reedsy hopes to aid in reader discovery of self-published titles

While Reedsy is best known as a marketplace for author services—primarily used by editors and designers who work with indie authors—on March 4 it will launch a new feature, Reedsy Discovery. The service is meant to provide a solution to the marketing struggle faced by the self-publishing authors who make up its core market. Co-founding CEO Emmanuel Nataf tells us that he’s very happy with users thinking of it as a Goodreads for indies, minus the titles from traditional publishers.

Authors will pay $50 for each book they’d like to have promoted on Reedsy Discovery. For that, Nataf tells us, authors will get what he describes as “exposure to a community of readers interested in their genre plus potentially a review of their book, if one of our reviewers picks it up.” Authors will choose a Discovery launch date, the day on which their title will enter the Discovery feed. The book will then remain on the site, though its position will drift downward, depending on the title’s ability to attract user upvotes and comments.

Planning to launch with 100 reviewers, Reedsy is looking for more. An application form to become a Reedsy reviewer is here. The reviewers will be getting:

• free advanced reading copies
• a dashboard that streamlines the process of receiving books for review
• a space to grow their audience for their own reviews

Nataf says there’s potential income for reviewers as well; readers can tip reviewers when they like what they read, although Nataf says this element is “completely experimental” at this point.

The payment of $50 does not guarantee a review, let alone a positive review. Nataf stresses that Reedsy wants honest reviewer activity. Reviewers who opt to review a Discovery title will have the option of marking a book as DNF (did not finish), which will put the book back into the pool for other reviewers. Negative reviews will not prevent a book from having a landing page on the Discovery Launch feature; in the event a book is reviewed negatively, users of the platform can elevate a title through their own upvotes and comments in favor of it.

Shortly after launch of Discovery, Reedsy will start a weekly newsletter, which will be the main method of marketing the book reviews. Nataf characterizes that newsletter as reaching tens of thousands of readers, “and then we’ll add options for daily and/or monthly and separate content per genre,” not unlike the way that Open Road has segmented out its subscriber base by genre and interest. Naturally, if things go very well with this initiative, we’d expect to see Reedsy offer a variety of BookBub-like advertising placements in those emails, or dedicated promotional blasts. 

In an early site demo, we’ve seen Buy buttons on book pages going solely to Amazon in the UK (Reedsy is based in London) and US, but Nataf says that authors can use the store of their choice for their Buy button. “We’re distributor-agnostic,” he says.

Bottom line: The book pages we’ve seen in the demo are attractive, informative, and effective. The real question here is that “tens of thousands” crowd that Reedsy says is waiting for these indie reviews and recommendations. Nataf says the readers have been gathered by the early use of ads and a blog, and indeed, we think it may be Reedsy’s own evergreen content that will push visibility to start. Their blog includes roundups of predominantly traditionally published titles, with headlines such as “The 100 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time,” “100 Best Horror Books of All Time,” “The 30 Best YA Fantasy Books for Teens,” and so on.