In the last decade the publishing industry has undergone fundamental shifts via the application of digital technologies, which led to parts of both the content design and production processes to be fundamentally transformed. The changes have been driven mainly by the needs of publishers to adapt to changing reader tastes and sales processes, on example of which, is the shift to eBooks sales at the expense of traditional paperbacks. However, one important stakeholder in this creative industry process, the authors, both established and new, were largely left out of the process, resulting in the
development of publisher-centric platforms.
At the same time, the applications of digital technologies led to an increase in the number of self-publishing platforms: (i) established authors were increasingly frustrated that they were not being consulted, as publishers rushing to harness a digital-first future, and resented both the consequent lack of the loss of editorial control and the ever higher royalties requested by these publishers to recoup their digital technology investments; and (ii) new authors felt that established publishers, with the need to recoup their investments had become too risk-averse and were too quick to refuse books from new authors.
For all their advantages, there are several issues with existing self-publishing platforms, that are major drawbacks, even today: (i) Marketing and promotion remain the author’s responsibility. With approximately 1,4m books published each year on Amazon Kindle Store alone, most books, remain largely unnoticed; (ii) Online book editing is still, not possible. Authors must make changes offline and upload the modified texts as a ‘new-version’, making reconciliation, track, trace and editing, very difficult, (iii) Reviewers and critics ignore most self-published books, as they are unsure of the Quality process undertaken and wait till an authoritative 3rd party vouches for a published tome and (iv) while Supporting tools, such as formatting toolbars, offer a poor user experience.
As a result, most self-publishing authors do not get their book properly edited or do not work with a cover designer to create a good jacket that is attractive for readers. Lastly, they often lack a marketing strategy to make a difference in today’s competitive environment. As a result, they are inclined to introduce a product to the marketplace that lacks polish and underperforms.
Reedsy is the world’s only curated self-publishing digital marketplace, connecting authors with the world`s best freelance publishing professionals, who, working together collaboratively, using Reedsy’s well-integrated set of online editing and publishing tools, can create high-quality books, beautifully designed and typeset, and promote them to a wide audience through multiple channels. It is the only digital marketplace from Europe of its kind that can compete with the major global publishing platforms such as Amazon, offering high quality self-publishing at a competitive cost point, and thereby enabling both (i) the growth of Europe’s creative economy in this creative industry pillar and (ii) supporting Europe’s authors and creative minds to find a global audience in a hyper-competitive publishing world.
The purpose of the project is to refine the functionalities of the platform and scale up through partnership building activities – two of the foundations of Reedsy’s success and expansion plan.
