Podcast appearances and mentions of ricardo fayet

How can you get your books surfaced when readers ask an AI what to read next? What are the hallmarks of authors and businesses that last more than a decade in the indie author industry? Ricardo Fayet gives his marketing tips after more than a decade at Reedsy. In the intro, Expanding Your Book's IP through Merchandising [Wish I'd Known Then]; Guide to writers conferences [Kindlepreneur]; Rick Rubin and Stephen Pressfield on resistance and the muse [Tetragrammaton]; Pulitzer Prize winners disclose AI usage [Nieman Lab]; My new rebuilt fiction site JFPenn.com. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Ricardo Fayet is the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Reedsy, a marketplace for writers to find vetted freelancers, author training courses, and lots more. He's also the author of How to Market a Book and Amazon Ads for Authors. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes How AI search actually finds and ranks the books it recommends Why keywords and search volume are disappearing as marketing metrics Building an internet footprint so your book is worth recommending Why Claude leans on Goodreads while ChatGPT and Gemini lean on Reddit Product is more important than marketing, and how to find your comp titles Passion, business sense and resilience in the authors who last You can find Ricardo at Reedsy.com. Transcript of the interview with Ricardo Fayet Jo: Ricardo Fayet is the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Reedsy, a marketplace for writers to find vetted freelancers, author training courses, and lots more. He's also the author of How to Market a Book and Amazon Ads for Authors. So welcome back to the show, Ricardo. Ricardo: Thank you, Jo. It's been a while. Jo: It has been a while. As we were saying, it's been a decade, which is crazy, because you and I see each other at events and things. For anyone who doesn't know you— Tell us a bit more about you, where you're from, and also, what is Reedsy these days and how have things changed? Ricardo: Yes, sure. I think I'm hard to dissociate from Reedsy because my only background really is Reedsy. We started Reedsy right after business school for most of the founders. There are four founders, and I'm one of them. We've been going since 2014, so it's been 12 years. We started around the same time, and you started even earlier than we did, but we've had the chance to meet at quite a few conferences since. I think the main thing we're still known for is our marketplace. Since the very beginning, Reedsy is a curated marketplace where authors can come in and look for editors, cover designers, marketers, ghostwriters, literary translators, author website designers, pretty much any freelancer you would ever need to hire throughout your writing career. That's how we started. That's our main source of revenue and our main business. Since then, as you mentioned, we've also added courses, live events, so we've got a membership under Reedsy Learning. The main thing we're proud of right now is our writing tool, Reedsy Studio, because we've been pouring a lot of engineering talent into it over the past five, six years, and I think it's a really cool writing tool that is 90% free. It also does the formatting, so it's a good alternative to Vellum or Atticus for those who haven't purchased those tools. So there's a lot of things that Reedsy does at this point, which always makes it hard for me to describe what we do. Jo: But you generally serve writers. That's probably the crux of it. Ricardo: Exactly, yes. We're mostly at the production stage. The thing we say is we help authors make beautiful books, right? That's a little bit the tagline that applies to 90% of what we do, though we also help a little bit with the marketing side of things. Jo: And then just tell people where your accent is from. Ricardo: So I'm half French, half Italian from my parents, and I was born in Spain. So depending on my mood and the moment, it might be anywhere from French, Italian, Spanish. It's anyone's guess, really, at this point. Jo: Yes, exactly. You've been part of the indie author ecosystem, as you said, since 2014. You're often at the author conferences, and you stay abreast of everything that's going on. So what are the biggest changes you've seen in the industry since you started out? Like you said, you guys came from business school. You chose to come into the industry at a particular point, and yet things have changed. So what do you think are the biggest changes, and how have you seen authors adapt? Ricardo: It's crazy, the amount of things that happened in the past 10 years. Obviously we came into the industry as a result of Amazon launching Kindle Direct Publishing, and then the Kindle Store becoming one of the number one places where people buy books. That's what enabled self-publishing in the first place as an industry, and obviously we wouldn't exist without self-publishing being a thing. But then I think probably one of the biggest changes that happened was the introduction of Kindle Unlimited and various other subscription models. Perhaps as a response to that, afterwards, I would say direct sales is the other massive change that happened in the industry. The ability for authors to sell direct to their readers via their websites, or running Kickstarters, or basically the ability to reach your customers directly. Now, obviously, artificial intelligence is probably the biggest change of them all, not just in publishing, across every industry, but of course it's going to affect publishing very strongly, or it has already started making big waves. So I would say those are the three main changes that we've seen happening in the industry. Jo: Just interestingly, given that you're French, Italian, Spanish, European— Has the pace of change been the same in mainland Europe? Because you and I have also met up at European conferences, but I just get the sense that each individual European country, the UK included, as I include the UK in Europe, goes at a different speed. Ricardo: No, they definitely do. Our market at Reedsy is all in English. We only have an English website, and I would say 70% of our market is US, then 15% UK, and then Australia, New Zealand, et cetera. We do have clients in continental Europe, but they're mostly going to be American or British expats. A lot of retired people who write books and use Reedsy services. I think the main reason for that is that self-publishing as an industry hasn't really grown in Spain, France, Italy the way that it's grown in the US and the UK, probably because these are countries where book buying habits are a lot more traditional. So all my friends from high school and university in France, they all buy books, they all buy paper books. They all buy from bookstores. They don't really buy from Amazon that much. They love the smell of paper, all these sorts of things. So obviously that makes it harder for indie authors in those countries because they cannot place their books in the places where people buy them, which is traditional brick-and-mortar bookstores, or at least it's much harder. So there is an indie movement in those countries, but it's much smaller. I would say Germany is maybe the exception in Europe, where I've seen more and more full-time indie authors, but I don't think it's a market that's comparable even to the UK. Jo: Interesting. Okay, so let's go to marketing, because you love marketing, you have a newsletter about it, and you have a book, How to Market a Book, same title as mine, and we've found each other in our Also Boughts over the years. You have, however, updated yours several times. 2025 was your last update. Mine was 2016, so yours is definitely the most up-to-date one. So what are your thoughts on how authors can reach readers now? And let's split this into two. Let's start with some tips for new authors who just have maybe one book and are really just starting out. Ricardo: Yes, first of all, sorry for stealing your title. Jo: Oh, you know, it's never been a problem. Ricardo: We were trying to come up with something… I know, I know, I know. But still, we wanted something more original, and then we realised that for SEO purposes, that's the title we should really go for. The good thing is, if you search “how to market a book” on pretty much any retailer, you're going to find your book or mine in any order really, but those are going to be the top two books to this day, thankfully, so I'm good with that. I think in terms of marketing tips for new authors who have just the one book, I'd say, despite all the changes in the industry, the basics of marketing still stay the same. One of my big mantras when it comes to marketing is that product is more important than marketing. So having a great book is going to be more important, in my opinion, than being a great marketer. Having a great product. By that, I generally don't talk about literary value or prose or anything like that, just because I'm not a book critic. I'm not an editor. My opinion on whether a book is good or not is worth zero. From a marketing standpoint, for me, a good book is one that resonates with its intended audience. So the first step for newer authors is to basically figure out who they wrote this book for, right? Have an idea of who their target market is. A great way to do that, without entering into marketing jargon like proto-personas and stuff like that, is to think in terms of comp titles, comparable titles. I think that's probably the base of any marketing, whether traditional publishing houses or indie authors, to think, “Okay, which other books out there are similar to mine?” If your book is completely unique, you have, I would say, 99.9% chance of not selling, because your market doesn't exist, and 0.01% chance of creating your own market and completely dominating it, right? So being unique is not necessarily a bad thing, but I would say 99% of the time, it is. Obviously being unique within an existing niche, within an existing market, that's completely different, but you need to work on some comparable titles. So I would say that's where I would start, and that's one of the things that AI is great at. If you even just plug in your book into an AI chat that has enough context, if you're comfortable doing that of course, or if you plug in a synopsis, like a long synopsis, you can basically ask the AI chats, “Okay, what would be some comp titles?” Either you'll have heard of those books, and you'll think, “Okay, they're good comps,” or you may not have heard of them, in which case I would really recommend buying them and reading them and seeing whether they're comps or not. I think that's where marketing starts. Jo: Yes, and we might come back to that for book discoverability. Well, let's just talk about it now, because I now pretty much use Claude for discovering books as well. I just find that the Amazon search, for nonfiction it works really well, right? As you said, if you want to learn how to market a book, you just search “how to market a book”, and our books are very well titled for that. But for fiction, it's so difficult to find new books and comp titles, especially if you don't write in a clear genre, which I don't. I know lots of people do. So we're writing cross-genre. So in terms of book discoverability, I know you've been looking into SEO for books and all of that. What are your thoughts on how authors can more effectively have their books surfaced if people are using the AIs for finding books? Ricardo: That's a very big topic. That's one of my favourite topics right now. That's what I talk about in my marketing newsletter, and I want to start a Substack on the topic as well, because I think it is the future of book discoverability. As you say, search on Amazon isn't great, and if it's not great on Amazon, you don't even want to imagine on Google Play, Kobo, all these sorts of places, right? If you search on Kobo or Apple Books or Google Play for witch cozy mysteries, the top 10 books are going to have exactly “witch cozy mystery” in the title or the subtitle or the series title, right? Jo: Yes. Ricardo: Search is very simple on those sites, so it's very easy to game, but it's terrible as an experience for readers. So I do think that a big part of search is going to move to AI, and now you have Rufus within Amazon itself that appears as a chatbot and encourages you to talk with it, to ask for recommendations. In the beginning Rufus was really terrible, but now I recommend authors play with it. In general, I recommend when it comes to AI discoverability that authors play with all the AI search tools. So it's going to be Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Rufus within Amazon. Just like we talked about comp titles, right, ask for something like, “What would you recommend for fans of this book? Which other books would you recommend?” Or if you're looking for something specific that describes your book, what books would you recommend on… I think one of your examples was fiction around masonry or something like that, right? Jo: I always say, for example, if you ask for action adventure thrillers on pretty much anywhere, you're going to get 20 books by male authors. For those of us who are female authors, but also who have female main characters, you can then be far more granular. That's just not something that necessarily works on Amazon. So, action adventure thrillers with female protagonists written by female indie authors, which is very specific. That will work in AI, whereas that definitely won't work on Amazon. Ricardo: Exactly. So one of the great things about AI search, and terrible things at the same time, is that the concept of keyword is lost, right? So we title our books How to Market a Book because the keyword that people would search for is “how to market a book”, or “book marketing for authors”. Those were the two keywords that had the biggest search volume if we looked at Google Keyword Planner, or any search tools that give you keyword volume. When it comes to AI search, since it's conversational, and it's very personalised, and it can go as niche as you want, keywords are going to disappear, and search volume as a metric is going to disappear. The search you just told me about, maybe there are 10 people who are going to run it exactly. Most people are going to run variations of that. Since you can go as granular as you want, it's going to be very long phrases, very long sentences. So the whole concept of keywords, search volume, SEO, is going to disappear in favour of what some people call GEO, generative engine optimisation, AIO, AI optimisation, AI search optimisation. There's a bunch of names for it, but it is a different discipline. It still works on the basis of Google SEO because what most of these search engines will do is they're going to search the internet, right? They've been trained on a lot of information, but not all of that information is current. Most of these models have been trained on documents and web pages before 2021. That's why when you used the very early versions of ChatGPT, and you asked it about current events or current books, it didn't find it. It didn't have that information. Now all these models have the ability to search the web, and they do that really effectively. So the first thing they're going to do if you run a search like that is they're going to run dozens of different searches on Google or a similar search engine. Action thriller books with female protagonists. Action thriller books with female protagonists by indie authors. Action thriller books by indie authors. They're going to create what I call a corpus, so a massive document of information with candidates, books that probably meet those criteria that they have found through regular web searches. Then they're going to go through all those books and determine which are the most relevant to recommend, and they'll return with that. Then they'll usually have a verification layer as well, which is, okay, I have these five books that I want to recommend to this user, but I just want to make sure first that they are written by indie authors, that they do have a female protagonist, et cetera. And if I'm not able to verify that, I'll flag it in my answer to them. So there are these three layers. Web search, then ranking of the book candidates, and finally a verification layer, and then they serve you the answer. Obviously, that's really powerful. If that's the way that search is headed, which I firmly believe, then we as authors need to learn how to get our books in there. Jo: Yes. It's so interesting, and I do this all the time. Really niche stuff, like a thriller about anatomical Venuses, which are these models from anatomy museums and stuff like that, with an edge of the supernatural. What is brilliant is that you can find the books that come up. I actually got one that I read and reviewed, and it was fantastic. So I love the more granular thing, but we're really in the very long tail now, right? It feels like you can write a very nuanced book, and it will be surfaced, but only by a few people. So do we have to write our books and then try to not even retrofit them in the way that we used to? We used to try and figure out the seven keywords and all of that kind of thing, and now I almost feel like we just get to be grownups, where you just get to write the book and put it out there, and these things are more intelligent than the search terms. Ricardo: Yes, absolutely. I think in terms of the variety of books that are going to be read and discovered, that's amazing. A little bit like the whole indie publishing movement was amazing, because if you remove the traditional publishing gatekeepers, then suddenly zombie books aren't dead anymore. Zombies are alive again. They've… Jo: Come to life. Ricardo: They've come alive, and so you get a bunch of zombie books again. It's not a small niche audience. It's actually a pretty big niche audience that loves zombie books, and suddenly they have those to consume. This is a little bit similar on a much, much bigger and more granular scale, because anyone can find exactly the kind of book that they're looking for, with the tropes they want, with the type of characters they want, with the type of author they want, and you can basically use any kind of filter. So for discoverability on the side of the reader, that's great. For the authors, it doesn't mean that you can just write whatever you want and then rest, and readers will find them. Because your books still need to have generated a certain internet footprint and a certain review footprint in order to become interesting or recommendable to AI search engines, right? Unless you're the only book that an AI search engine can recommend for that specific search, and yours was very specific, so it might have been the only one. If there are other candidates, the AI search engines are pretty smart. They're going to recommend the candidates that have more reviews, better reviews, or are more famous, that have more, when I talk about internet footprint, more pages talking about them on the internet. That's for me the big finding I've seen. The more pages you have on the internet talking about your book, so that could be book review sites, that could be Goodreads lists, Listopia lists, anywhere on the internet where your book is mentioned, that creates a footprint for it. The more footprints, the more famous your book looks to AI search engines, and so the more worthy of recommendations it is to them. Jo: Yes, and this is one reason why I now ask people, especially when you sell direct, or say you have a Kickstarter and you want reviews, I ask people if they can review on Goodreads. Obviously Goodreads is owned by Amazon, but it is far more searchable by the bots than Amazon is. I sometimes find that Amazon gets blocked. Or Amazon blocks some of the bots, let's put it that way. They might change over time. They own 15% of Anthropic or something. But Goodreads I feel like does get indexed, and I'm not willing to engage on Reddit. I know Reddit is another popular one. Just be very clear on social media, because some people think, oh, I just need loads of influencers to talk about my book, and that will impact the AIs. But I find that social media just almost isn't even there. Ricardo: It depends on which social media. For me, Reddit is a social medium, right? It's a very weird one, but it's obviously the number one social medium used by AI search engines, and it's pretty dodgy stuff with lots of conflicts of interest, because Google has a paid partnership with Reddit. I think Sam Altman has shares in Reddit. So both OpenAI and Google Gemini heavily rely on Reddit for their AI answers, right? If you ask anything from ChatGPT or Gemini, I'd say there are very high chances that in the sources and the citations of the answer, you're going to find Reddit, right? That goes for books as well. Every time you ask for book recommendations, Reddit is going to be big for those two AI search engines. Claude, it's a little bit different. They do have a little bit of a relationship with Reddit, but I don't think it's as big. I found that Claude relies heavily on Goodreads, not Reddit. To me, Goodreads is another social medium at the end of the day, right? It's not the kind of social medium we think of, like… Jo: It's not TikTok. Ricardo: It's not TikTok. TikTok is surfaced a little bit, but not that much. It might become more surfaced in the future, but right now what I've found is, it's really Reddit and Goodreads. Facebook, LinkedIn, but LinkedIn is big for nonfiction topics more than fiction, because there are just not a lot of fiction readers, sorry, talking about their favourite books on LinkedIn. They usually go to other places for that. Jo: Yes, it's really interesting. So obviously TikTok has its own BookTok thing, so some people are finding books on BookTok, and some people like me are finding books through asking Claude, and that's just my overwhelming feeling about the industry. We talked earlier about what's changed. When I started, so 2006, there wasn't even KDP, and then KDP arrives, then you came in 2014, and probably until maybe a few years after that, there was one way to self-publish. Then what's happened since is this kind of splintering. There are so many ways to self-publish. There are so many ways to reach readers. There are so many ways to market. So someone, for example, could sell direct on TikTok Shop, only market through TikTok, and you wouldn't even know that they existed over in another ecosystem, right? So do you feel like that's happened too, this total splintering? Ricardo: Absolutely. I think there are so many different ways in which you can reach your audience now and monetise it as well, that it's absolutely possible. We both know examples of authors who are only visible to their TikTok niche, right? I think the big difference is also monetisation, because earlier you also had different ways of becoming well-known. Like you had Facebook, you had potentially Twitter, back when it was Twitter. Various social media, word of mouth. But where people bought books was Amazon. So that was your monetisation. It was either selling your book on Amazon, or potentially getting KU reads after that when KU launched. Now you can sell on TikTok, you can sell direct, you can run Kickstarters, you can start a Patreon or Substack and make your money through there. There are pretty much infinite ways through which you can monetise your content as a creator. Most of those places will also have a discoverability engine built in, so you can not only sell through there and make money through there, but also grow an audience there. That's probably the biggest competition that Amazon has ever had to face, is this sort of splintering. For us authors and content creators in general, it's amazing, because it's a bunch of different opportunities. Jo: Yes, and I think probably that's circling back to marketing. As we've said, some things have changed, some things stay the same. Is the email list still the number one way to market, do you think, for authors who want a long-term career? Ricardo: I think so. It's just the one thing you really own that allows you to communicate with readers, right? Because even if you build a following on TikTok, TikTok can change. The things we said about Facebook 10 years ago, if you build your Facebook group, Facebook can change, and Facebook changed. Facebook destroyed the reach of pages, and now groups also aren't amazing, et cetera. So the same thing that happened to Facebook can happen to TikTok, can happen to any other social media. Substack is a bit of a hybrid because it is a newsletter, it is a mailing list, but it also has a discoverability engine built in. So I still wouldn't really go all in on Substack. The great advantage there is that you do own the emails, right? So you can move away from it at some point. For me, the email list is the one thing that you are completely in control of. Personally, the main thing I check is my emails every day. I spend more time in my inbox than anywhere else, and I think that's probably the case for most people. So I do think, despite the influx of mails that readers are getting in their inbox, I still think it's one of the most important marketing tools for authors. Jo: Yes, and I still remember when I started my list in December 2008, and I still have people on the list who've been with me that whole time, and have moved email list services several times as well. So I think that's important too. The care of that list too is so important. One of the things that I am annoyed about with Substack, I don't have a Substack, but when I follow some people's, it's always constantly trying to get you to sign up to other people's lists, trying to subscribe you to this or that or the other. I'm like, “That's so annoying.” Now I've found on all these email services they're trying to pair you with other creators and cross-promote and all of this. So it feels like even the email list is becoming a difficult place unless you really protect it. So just protecting your list, I think, and remembering that those are people. Those are people who've bought your books, or people who read your emails. Like people listening to this, these are humans. Sure, some bot might be looking at the transcript, but humans listening to this are individual humans with individual email lists. We tend to forget that, don't we, as you get a bigger list. You think about it as a big number, whereas it's still individual people. Ricardo: Yes, it becomes a number, it becomes metrics, the open rate, the click rate, and all that. But the great thing about email is that you get replies in your inbox. There you remember that they're actual human beings who write you back. I think for readers, the ability to write back to an author and get a response is just amazing, right? If you write to your favourite author and they write back to you, that's the best feeling ever as a reader. So I think email is still one of the best ways to turn your readers into fans and into super fans of your brand, by just interacting with them and answering them. Because yes, you can answer comments on TikTok, Facebook, and all those places, but it doesn't feel the same as an author answering you in your inbox, I feel. So you do get that ability to create a real connection with readers directly through email. Jo: Yes, and I think that trust and the reputation is so important. Just in terms of seeing the authors that you've seen over the years, like I said, you've been going to a lot of the author conferences. You know a lot of the authors in the industry. A lot of people will know you from events. But you've also seen authors come and go, and you've seen vendors come and go. Both of us have seen people arrive, and we'd be like, “Oh, yes, I wonder how long they're going to last.” Then some people do and some people don't. So what are some of the elements that you've noticed about the businesses that last more than a decade? Ricardo: I think they need to solve a genuine problem, or offer a genuinely better solution than one that already exists. I see a lot of businesses come in and they do what another vendor already does, without doing it necessarily better. Those businesses tend to disappear, or linger there, but you don't really hear about them again. When they solve a real need… I still remember when BookFunnel came out, and they've since become massive with one very, very basic thing, which is, “We will take care of delivering your ebook files to readers.” That's how they started, and that's how they became massive. To me at the time, I was like, “That seems like a very small problem,” because I can just email an ebook file. I didn't realise that it was so complicated for a lot of readers to upload files to their Kindle or other devices, and that having a service that takes care of that for you is just massively helpful. I realised that when I published my books, actually. So businesses that solve even micro or apparently very small problems, but they really solve them effectively, they stay. Others that surf on trends, they tend to disappear when the trend disappears. When there's a new marketing trend, and that trend stops working, then those businesses tend to go. Jo: Yes, and what about the authors who last? Because let's face it, most of us don't solve a problem in a different way. Maybe you could say we solve your entertainment problem in a different version to your last book. What about the authors who last long term? What have you noticed about them? Ricardo: Two things. So the first one… Maybe three things. First one is passion. I always say to people who are looking to start self-publishing, I always say that publishing in general is probably one of the worst ways to make money. It's awful. You can pick up any other occupation and it's probably going to be easier to make money. So writers who make a career do it because they need to write, because they have a passion for writing. So a lot of people who come into the industry thinking, “I've heard about all these self-publishing success stories. Surely I can write a book and I can market it. It's not that hard. So that's going to be a great way to make quick bucks,” those generally don't last, because they don't have that genuine passion. The first hurdle they're going to face—and there's going to be a bunch of them along the way—they're going to quit. The second thing is business sense, or business education, the basics of business, right? Thinking in terms of marketing, thinking in terms of who's my reader, unit economics. If I'm selling my books at $3.99, I shouldn't be spending a ton of money. If I just have one book at $3.99, I cannot afford to pay $5 on ads to generate a sale. So those kinds of basic economics or business knowledge, I think, if not a requirement, it's a massive plus. The third thing is resilience. The industry has changed a lot, as you mentioned. There are a bunch of ways now to reach an audience. There are a bunch of ways to make money. It can also be distracting, because you go to one of these conferences and you go back thinking, “Oh, I've got to create my own website, sell direct. I've got to launch my Substack. I have to use Claude Code for my ads,” and three more things, “and I have to set up my TikTok Shop and do TikTok Lives to sell books,” right? Jo: All of those by next week. That's why we go to the conference. Ricardo: Exactly. All those by next week, right? And during that one week after the conference, you have the energy to start implementing all those things, but afterwards you lose that energy and you go back to, “I just want to quit.” So you need to have some sort of resilience, and the business sense of, “Okay, I'm going to try this for the next six months, and I'm going to stick to it, and I'm going to see whether it works or not. And if it doesn't work, I'm not just going to despair. I'm going to try something else.” That goes for marketing tactics, but also goes for books. Most authors I know who make a living writing, they didn't get there with their first book or even their first series. A lot of times I see authors who write a couple of series, and those series do okay. They sell a little bit, but not much, and it doesn't afford them to quit their day job. Then suddenly, based on what they've learned with those first two series and what they've learned potentially going to conferences or listening to podcasts like this, et cetera, they write a third series that's a hit. That's a hit, and that's instantly much easier to market, and that's when they can afford to go full time and write full time, because they've found that sort of product market fit. And product market fit for me is the main thing for marketing in general and for authors in particular. Until you find that, everything is really difficult from a marketing perspective. But finding it usually requires writing more than one book and more than one series, because you're rarely going to get the big lottery ticket on the first try. Jo: Or ever. I think it's really important. I've never had a breakout book, but I've made good money every year. I think, and Hugh Howey said this, that the real story of self-publishing is not the people who make seven figures a year, it's the people who can go on a holiday once a year, or the people who can just put a bit towards their mortgage or whatever. So you may never have a breakout series. I think that's really important, too. Ricardo: That's true. Jo: That's true. You can just keep writing and make all right money and be what we call in the mid-list. Ricardo: Yes, but you've got to keep going. You've got to have that resilience to keep going, probably because it's your passion. Exactly. You're not chasing that seven figure series. You're writing because you need to write. Jo: Yes, and you can't stop, and you get the bug. I think when you're writing that first book, I'm not sure if people understand that you either get the bug or you don't, I think. You've written a couple of books now. Do you think you have the bug, or is it more about the business? Ricardo: I don't have the bug. I definitely don't have the bug. I would've kept writing otherwise. Jo: You're a technologist, right? Ricardo: Yes. I'm more of a technologist, more of a marketer. To write my first book, How to Market a Book, I actually had to write newsletters, because that I can manage, right? One newsletter a week. Now I don't even manage that. I send it once every two weeks when I can even manage that pace. But back then I did one newsletter a week, and that's how I wrote my first book. I then put all these newsletters together, and that was before the age of AI, so I couldn't just dump all that into ChatGPT and tell it, “Create me a book based on that.” I had to do it myself. Jo: Oh, terrible. Ricardo: Terrible, I know. The days when we had to work. No, but that was a really good experiment. The second book, Amazon Ads for Authors, I actually wrote it from scratch, and I didn't love the experience. I loved the finished product, I'm very proud of it, but I didn't enjoy the experience of writing it. Amazon Ads is not the most exciting topic in the world. Even for people like me, who actually enjoy Amazon Ads, it's not super exciting to write about. The fact of having to write that whole book from scratch, I didn't love the experience. So now I do want to write a third book at some point, but I think it'll probably be in the format of the first one. Like, when I finish my series of newsletters on AI search and AI discoverability, I might do a booklet or something around it, but we'll have to see. It's not my favourite thing. It's a good thing I don't need to. Good thing I'm not an author, basically. Jo: No, but I think that's really great to recognise. You actually have written books that support your business, and that is very common for nonfiction writers. That's completely normal for nonfiction authors. So I think that's another important thing for people to recognise, is that the reasons we write are different, the reasons we market are different, and we all have different approaches. As we wind up, and obviously you talked a bit there about how easy it is to generate books with AI, and that is probably one of the biggest things that people are worried about. Now, those of us like you and I have been talking about AI at conferences and things for years now. Neither of us are afraid of it, I think basically because both of us use it, and we're technologists, so we just get on with it. There is so much fear in the community. There's so much negativity. You mentioned Substack, and now they've integrated Pangram, which is renowned for false positives around what is written with AI, and so people are very worried. If we look forward and we look at the next decade, this is not going away. This is going to change a lot of things. So how should authors be thinking about AI, do you think, if they want to prepare for the next decade? Ricardo: I think they need to play around with it, because you and I know that until you actually use it, you don't realise what it's capable of. We've both had these moments of “Oh my God, I'm going to be out of a job,” or “Oh my God, this is incredible,” the kind of things it's able to do. You also realise by using it the things it's not great at, or the things it can be good at but needing a lot of human input. There are courses out there, there are books, there are a lot of things, but for me, the most important thing is to start playing around with it. So you can pick one specific topic to play around with. Either something that you've been meaning to get into for years and haven't done, or something that really annoys you. Looking at the results of your Facebook ads, for example. If you run Facebook ads in the first place, and when you log into your Meta dashboard you cannot make sense of it, take screenshots or download the data, feed it to an AI chat, and talk with it. One of my biggest tips when talking to AI chats is asking them questions rather than asking them for things to do. Because if you just feed it your advertising data and you tell it, “Tell me what I should do,” the chat has no context about what your ads are about, what your goal is, et cetera, et cetera. If you feed it just a screenshot and you say, “Here are my ads. I would like you to help me make sense of them. What do you need to know from me in order to help me with this?” Then it's going to start asking you questions. “Okay, what are you advertising?” They're books. “Okay, what kind of books? Where are you selling? Are your ads going straight to Amazon or retailers, or are they going to your website? If you sell direct, okay, are these conversion ads?” Et cetera, et cetera. So you build that context, and they can help you with it. So that's just one example, but I would pick one thing that you want to test AI with, with zero expectations. Don't expect that by the end of the week you'll have a full system for understanding your Meta ads thanks to AI. You might get to that or you might not, but at least you'll play with it and you'll understand its capabilities, and have a sort of understanding of how it works and how you can potentially use it for other things. I think that's the best way to adapt, because once you play with it, you start thinking. You're walking the dog and you're just thinking, “Ha, I could maybe use it for this thing or that other thing,” and that's how you progressively become more familiar with it. I think there are a lot of worries around AI, but as you say, it's there to stay. So far, I think I was looking at data this morning, and the unemployment rate in the US has stayed stable ever since ChatGPT was introduced two years ago. So there are a lot of narratives out there around how it's going to replace humans, it's going to replace jobs, et cetera, which it might do. I'm not great at predictions usually, but so far it hasn't. What it will definitely do, however, is completely change the way we work. Obviously AI was one of our big reckonings at Reedsy, because we run a marketplace. Our main business model is the marketplace, where authors come in and look for editors, for marketers, for cover designers, for translators, and some of these domains and services are being transformed by AI, right? AI translations are massive right now. We haven't really seen a decline at all on the Reedsy marketplace, but we're prepared for it. It might very well happen, but what we think is happening, or is going to happen, is professionals using AI tools to provide a better output or a faster output or a cheaper output, or all three of these things. So for example, we now have literary translators who say they're open to editing AI translations, right? So you can come in, you can have your book translated with AI, whichever tool or method you choose for that. Then if you want a set of human eyes on it, you can hire a literary translator who's open to working on an AI-translated manuscript, and that's obviously going to be much, much cheaper than paying 10 cents per word from scratch for a literary translator. I'm not necessarily recommending you completely bypass literary translators, or that you go this way, but you have options, right? You have options for different sets of budgets. I think all these human editors, narrators, translators, designers, et cetera, they're not going to disappear, but they might have to reinvent the way they work in the future. Jo: As we all are doing. As you say, for me mostly it's the business side, getting Claude to help me with business stuff. Like even bookkeeping. There are bills that we've all been paying for years that we can now maybe reduce, and reducing costs as well as increasing profit is obviously good business sense. So, interesting times. But just as we wrap up, what are you excited about in what's coming? How do you see Reedsy shaping up in the next decade? What is coming for you and Reedsy? Ricardo: We're really excited about the decade to come, because obviously 10 years for a startup is a long time. I think most startups after 10 years, the founders are gone. Jo: Yes. Ricardo: Or they've exited or they've sold or whatever. We've stayed, we're the same founders, and we're still as excited because I think we have new products, right? We're working on new things. As I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, Reedsy Studio, our writing tool, is probably one of the things we're most excited about, because first, it's getting adopted very fast. It has startup-like growth that we hadn't seen for other products in a long time, and it has very cool technology built in. We probably have a team of 10, 15 engineers now working full time on it and adding a lot of things. So we've added templates for plotting your book, with relationships within different characters and places and magic systems and things like that. We've added writing goals and writing statistics. We still have the free exports. One very cool thing we've added is real time collaboration. So just like Google Docs, you can write in real time with a co-author, or you can get an editor to work in there live with track changes. So you could have an editor working on chapter one while you're writing chapter three, for example. That kind of thing. It's really powerful technology, and that's one of the things we're really excited about for the future. A business, just like authors, we've got to reinvent ourselves. We've got to find ways to keep things exciting and keep motivated, and that is definitely one of them. When adoption goes along with it, then that's obviously super satisfying. Jo: Brilliant. So where can people find you and Reedsy online? Ricardo: So Reedsy you can find at reedsy.com, R-E-E-D-S-Y.com. And there you'll find the whole suite of tools and services. For me, you can find me mostly by email, as I mentioned. That's the one place I check consistently every day, and my email address is ricardo@reedsy.com. So again, R-E-E-D-S-Y.com and ricardo@reedsy.com. You can email me any questions you have about this episode, about AI book discoverability, about marketing, about Reedsy. I always try to answer every email I get, because I think when we started Reedsy, I really appreciated people like you, and some other agents and editors and authors we contacted who were influential in the industry, who actually answered us and took the time to do that. So now I try to answer every email I get, because I feel like we've been very lucky in the beginning to have those people answering our emails, so we should do the same. Jo: Oh, well, thanks so much for your time, Ricardo. That was great. Ricardo: Thank you, Jo. Thanks for having me again.The post Book Marketing, AI Book Discoverability, And Resilience, With Ricardo Fayet first appeared on The Creative Penn.

The way readers search for their next book is changing dramatically. With Google's generative search and Amazon's upcoming AI-driven recommendation engine, authors face a completely new landscape for book discovery. But how exactly will these changes affect your books' visibility? Reedsy's Ricardo Fayet joins us to share practical steps to make sure your books remain discoverable and compelling to readers in this rapidly shifting landscape.//Draft2Digital is where you start your Indie Author Career//  Looking for your path to self-publishing success? Draft2Digital is the leading ebook publisher and distributor worldwide. We'll convert your manuscript, distribute it online, and support you the whole way—and we won't charge you a dime.  We take a small percentage of the royalties for each sale you make through us, so we only make money when you make money. That's the best kind of business plan.  • Get started now: https://draft2digital.com/• Learn the ins, the outs, and the all-arounds of indie publishing from the industry experts on the D2D Blog: https://Draft2Digital.com/blog  • Promote your books with our Universal Book Links from Books2Read: https://books2read.com  Make sure you bookmark https://D2DLive.com for links to live events, and to catch back episodes of the Self Publishing Insiders Podcast.

In this Self-Publishing Advice Conference highlight, Martin Cavannagh of Reedsy moderates a panel with editor Rebecca Heyman, designer Danna Mathias Steele, and marketeer Ricardo Fayet. The session examines the role of professional services in the success of self-published books, focusing on how expert editing, design, and marketing can increase sales and long-term profitability. The discussion also outlines how Reedsy's marketplace connects authors with established industry professionals and includes case studies of authors who improved their publishing results through professional partnerships. This is a post from SelfPubCon (The Self-Publishing Advice Conference), an online author event run free twice yearly in association with the Alliance of Independent Authors. Find more author advice, tips, and tools at our Self-publishing Author Advice Center, with a huge archive of nearly 2,000 blog posts and a handy search box to find key info on the topic you need. And, if you haven't already, we invite you to join our organization and become a self-publishing ally. You can do that at http://allianceindependentauthors.org.

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The term "self-publishing" doesn't mean that you sit in a cabin in the woods all by yourself and emerge with a published book as if you'd done it all singlehandedly.It's rare to find one person who has all the skills required to turn an idea into a physical book. We need cover designers, formatters, web designers, assistants, and more. You might be self-publishing, but you will need some help.But what if you don't know anyone who can help? Where can you find skilled professionals who can produce the high-quality work your book deserves?I asked Ricardo Fayet, the cofounder of Reedsy, a curated community of book professionalsIn this week's episode, you'll learnHow to search Reedsy to find experienced professionals who specialize in your genreHow Reedsy vets the professionals in their marketplaceHow Reedsy makes money and saves you money at the same timeListen in to discover how Reedsy can help indie and traditional authors create beautiful, compelling, and marketable books, and find all the related links in the blog version.Support the show

Mark interviews Ricardo Fayet of Reedsy about their new online course on How to Write a Novel. Prior to the interview, Mark shares and reflects on a brief industry update related to Amazon's recent AI-related change, comments from recent episodes, and word about this episode's sponsor. Reedsy contains an online listing of vetted professionals from across the industry, including editors, cover designers, and marketing experts. Get $20 off hiring a pro through Reedsy using Mark's Reedsy affiliate link. In the interview, Mark and Ricardo talk about: Ricardo's persona and image being directly attached to Reedsy When Reedsy started and what the main idea behind it was, and the value proposition to authors How only 3 to 5% of the professionals who apply to be on Reedsy actually make it through The Reedsy online writing tool that you can use to write and export professional looking ePub and print-ready PDF files Some of the future development plans for the Reedsy writing platform, including collaboration with an editor Ricardo's HOW TO MARKET A BOOK, which is free in eBook edition The 2nd book he wrote and released in Jan 2023 called AMAZON ADS FOR AUTHORS which is the 2nd book in the Reedsy Guides series Some of the reasoning behind why one of the books is free in eBook and the other has a retail price associated with it (hint: it's a marketing tip) Important marketing information that Ricardo would want authors to know The new Reedsy course that runs 3 months and helps authors work through the first draft of their novel The various ongoing cohorts for the course, including one that opens in Sept and another that starts Oct 30th, to co-incide with NaNoWriMo, then the next that'll start in January 2024 The term "Reedsian" which is used to denote Reedsy employees Tom Bromley, the instructor they hired to teach the How to Write a Novel course The intial launch price for the course, which is $1000 - and that it'll be going up shortly after the September launch Ricardo's previous attempts to try to write a novel and how this course might be one that he himself can benefit from Some of the things that surprised Ricardo about Reedsy since it's launch nearly 10 years ago How to find Reedsy and Ricardo What Ricardo is looking forward to about the future of our industry And more...   After the interview Mark reflects the overall supportive nature of the publishing industry   Links of Interest: Reedsy Reedsy's How to Market a Book Online Course Subscriptions for Authors Episode 018 - Finding The Right Professional with Ricardo from Reedsy Episode 006 - What's Wrong with Indie Publishing (Mark's "10-year-olds playing soccer" analogy) Mark's Wide for the Win Update Page YouTube Video: OH NO! Is Amazon Anti AI? Buy Mark a Coffee Patreon for Stark Reflections Best Book Ever Podcast Lovers Moon Podcast The Relaxed Author Buy eBook Direct Buy Audiobook Direct Publishing Pitfalls for Authors An Author's Guide to Working with Libraries & Bookstores Wide for the Win Mark's Canadian Werewolf Books This Time Around (Short Story) A Canadian Werewolf in New York Stowe Away (Novella) Fear and Longing in Los Angeles Fright Nights, Big City Lover's Moon Hex and the City The Canadian Mounted: A Trivia Guide to Planes, Trains and Automobiles Yippee Ki-Yay Motherf*cker: A Trivia Guide to Die Hard   Ricardo Fayet is one of the four founders of Reedsy, a marketplace connecting authors to the world's top publishing talent--from editors to cover designers, book marketers, or literary translators. He's the author of two books on marketing for authors, and a regular presenter at several prestigious writers' conferences: NINC, 20BooksVegas, and The Self Publishing Show Live, among others.   The introductory, end, and bumper music for this podcast (“Laser Groove”) was composed and produced by Kevin MacLeod of www.incompetech.com and is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

My guest this episode is Ricardo Fayet, a cofounder of Reedsy, a marketplace connecting authors to editors, cover designers, book marketers, translators, and other professionals. Also, full disclosure, I am also a developmental editor for Reedsy. As for Ricardo, when he's not coming up with new and expanded services for Reedsy, he's writing books on an important part of the publishing ecosystem: marketing. ALLi's Inspirational Indie Author Podcast stream is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, a global, independent ebook and audiobook publishing platform that empowers authors with a quick and easy publishing process and unique promotional opportunities. To reach a wide readership, create your account today! Thank you, Kobo, for your support of this podcast. Find more author advice, tips, and tools at our Self-publishing Author Advice Center, with a huge archive of 2,000+ blog posts, and a handy search box to find key info on the topic you need. We invite you to join our organization and become a self-publishing ally, if you haven't already. You can do that at allianceindependentauthors.org. About the Host Howard Lovy has been a journalist for more than 35 years, and now amplifies the voices of independent author-publishers and works with authors as a developmental editor. Find Howard at howardlovy.com, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Marketer and Reedsy Co-founder Ricardo Fayet on the essential elements of marketing your book, the importance of knowing your target audience and how to utilise different platforms to find your readers.  This interview was recorded in 2021.*ABOUT RICARDO FAYETRicardo Fayet is one of the co-founders of Reedsy, a marketplace connecting authors to the world's top publishing talent--from editors to cover designers, book marketers, or literary translators. He oversees the marketing for all Reedsy products--Marketplace, Book Editor, Learning, Discovery--and is a big SEO and Facebook advertising enthusiast. He is the author of How to Market Your Book where he has distilled lessons learned from helping thousands of writersHis weekly book marketing newsletter is read by over 150k writers.*RESOURCESFollow Ricardo Fayet:Twitter: @RicardoFayetOther links mentioned:LJ RossJoanna PennPublisher RocketFree BooksyBookbub*For show notes, transcripts and to attend our live podcasts visit: podcast.londonwriterssalon.comFor free writing sessions, join free Writers' Hours: writershour.com*FOLLOW LONDON WRITERS' SALONTwitter: twitter.com/​​WritersSalonInstagram: instagram.com/londonwriterssalonFacebook: facebook.com/LondonWritersSalonIf you're enjoying this show, please rate and review this show!

Reedsy is on a mission to help authors and publishers create beautiful books. Today we'll chat with co-founder Ricardo Fayet to learn how Reedsy's marketplace--its publishing ecosystem--connects indie authors to the world's top publishing talent.//Draft2Digital is where you start your Indie Author Career//  Looking for your path to self-publishing success? Draft2Digital is the leading ebook publisher and distributor worldwide. We'll convert your manuscript, distribute it online, and support you the whole way—and we won't charge you a dime.  We take a small percentage of the royalties for each sale you make through us, so we only make money when you make money. That's the best kind of business plan.  • Get started now: https://draft2digital.com/• Learn the ins, the outs, and the all-arounds of indie publishing from the industry experts on the D2D Blog: https://Draft2Digital.com/blog  • Promote your books with our Universal Book Links from Books2Read: https://books2read.com  Make sure you bookmark https://D2DLive.com for links to live events, and to catch back episodes of the Self Publishing Insiders Podcast.

Reedsy co-founder Ricardo Fayet delivers useful tips for running effective Amazon Ad campaigns.

En este episodio, entrevistamos a Ricardo Fayet, un experto en mercadotecnia de libros, y el fundador y director de marketing de Reedsy.com, un marketplace de autónomos que ofrecen servicios para escritores.En este fascinante entrevista, Ricardo nos cuenta:Porque es más importante conocer el mercado de tu libro, y no escribir el texto perfecto.La importancia económica de escribir una serie de libros para tener éxito financiero como escritor.Las ventajas, y desventajas, de vender tu libro directo sin acudir a Amazon, y como vencer a las desventajas.Cómo exportar archivos listos para ser publicados en Amazon desde su herramienta gratis, el Reedsy Book Editor.Escucha el episodio entero a continuación…Recursos mencionados en el podcast:Reedsy.comPerfil de Ricardo Fayet, incluyendo detalles sobre cómo ayudó a los escritores J. Benjamin y Kan Savsci CycleHow to Market a Book (libro disponible gratis)

Reedsy es una plataforma que permite a los autores escribir su historia, apoyarse en otros y contactar con profesionales de la edición desde la misma web. Hablamos de Reedsy con uno de sus fundadores, Ricardo Fayet, que nos cuenta las posibilidades que podemos encontrar en ella. Todos los enlaces y libros mencionados en el podcast están aquí: https://escritoremprendedor.com/que-es-reedsy/

So you've written your book, now what? This week on the Writers Advice Podcast we're joined by the Founder of Reedsy Ricardo Fayet who tells us everything we need to know when you're ready to launch. In this episode learn about: Creating the right editor Marketing your book Building a personal brand Creating your covers Writing a book series The ins and outs of Amazon We're running a competition to win a copy of each authors book that has been interviewed on the podcast so far! To enter, fill in your details at oliviahillier.com/podcast and a very large package could be coming to your door very soon. Download the first pages of my brand new book 'Have We Met Before?' HERE Join the Writers Advice Podcast membership: Olivia Hillier is creating Podcast & Books | Patreon Find more about Ricardo and everything that Reedy has to offer at Reedsy.com To contact me: Instagram: @_oliviahillier Website: oliviahillier.com TikTok: @oliviahillierauthor

Episode Show Notes In this episode we cover:  Marketing mindset principles The top 3 things everyone should to do market their books Budget marketing Launch mistakes Overview of advertising This week's question is: what's your word for 2022? Recommendation of the week is: A Spindle Splintered by Alix E Harrow Apple  Kobo  Amazon UK  Amazon USA  ***this show uses affiliate links Find out more about Ricardo at: How to Market a Book   Rebel of the Week is: Rowan James If you'd like to be a Rebel of the week please do send in your story, it can be any kind of rebellion. You can email your rebel story to rebelauthorpodcast@gmail.com or instagram me @sachablackauthor 2 new patrons this week, welcome and thank you to Jessica Smith and Jessica A McMinn. A big thank you to my existing patrons as well. If you'd like to support the show, and get early access to all the episodes as well as bonus content you can from as little as $2 a month by visiting: www.patreon.com/sachablack  This Show is Sponsored by ProWritingAid Get 20% off using Sacha's link. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram  

As a freelancer or someone who utilizes them, how can you spot an imposter from an actual business or genuine opportunity? Today's guest is Ricardo Fayet. Ricardo is the co-founder of Reedsy, a community of over 150,000 authors worldwide and a curated network of 1500 handpicked freelance professionals from editors, cover designers, illustrators, book marketers, and publicists. They help bring over 500 books to life every month. Reedsy was named Book Tech Company of 2015 by UK Trade Magazine. Ricardo has been invited to speak at the Frankfurt Book Fair, London Book Fair, and dozens of other writing and publishing conferences. Show Notes: [0:57] - Ricardo shares his background and what Reedsy is all about. [3:10] - There are other freelance websites that are very general. This means they are not very curated. But now there are other sites popping up that are more specific. [5:28] - Asking about work experience is really important. [7:14] - You must trust the platform you are looking for a freelancer on. [8:36] - When hiring a freelancer, you need to treat it as a hiring process. [9:48] - Illustrators and graphic designers are usually easy to hire because you can see their work and choose the style you like. Other jobs are harder to hire. [11:02] - One scam is companies hiring freelancers rather than hiring full time employees to avoid paying for benefits. [12:32] - If a platform guarantees a certain amount earned as a freelancer in the first month or two, doubt it and look at the fine print. [13:39] - There's a tricky email scam that is designed to force you into creating a profile. [16:28] - Create a profile, even if unused, to prevent other artists or freelancers from stealing the identity or your work. Well known platforms can also usually detect when there is a false profile. [18:20] - Large platforms won't be able to investigate until there are victims who have negative experiences with a freelancer. [20:01] - It is highly recommended to charge for services at the beginning of a project. [22:20] - A lot of freelancers on many platforms do not live in the United States and if there is a problem, the legal process becomes almost impossible. [24:00] - Platforms may charge a freelance fee which actually protects both parties. [27:01] - As a freelancer, you are very much at the mercy of the clients and their banks. [29:45] - You have to strike the right balance between solid contracts and trusting people. [33:05] - Don't hesitate to say no to a contract if you feel like something is off. Thanks for joining us on Easy Prey. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes and leave a nice review.  Links and Resources: Podcast Web Page Facebook Page whatismyipaddress.com Easy Prey on Instagram Easy Prey on Twitter Easy Prey on LinkedIn Easy Prey on YouTube Easy Prey on Pinterest Reedsy Ricardo Fayet on Twitter Ricardo Fayet on LinkedIn

Ricardo Fayet co-founded Reedsy, an online marketplace offering every service an indie author could ever need. But did you know they also support the SPF Foundation?

Ricardo Fayet, one of the founders of the resource marketplace Reedsy, discusses FINDING A CREW FOR YOUR CREATIVE VOYAGE. He discusses what signs might tip off authors that they have reached the point where investing in this kind of help makes sense, how authors can decide what to outsource, best practices for finding a good match between needs and resources, and how to work effectively with these professionals to make it the most productive and creatively energizing experience for both parties. For a transcript of this interview and links to more information, go to https://www.theindyauthor.com/podcast.html. Did you find the information in this video useful? Please consider supporting my work at The Indy Author via Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/theindyauthor) or Buy Me a Coffee (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mattydalrymple). Ricardo Fayet is one of the four founders of Reedsy, a marketplace connecting authors to the world's top publishing talent--from editors to cover designers, book marketers, or literary translators. He's the author of several Reedsy Learning courses on marketing and a regular presenter at several prestigious writers' conferences, including NINC, RWA Australia, and The Self Publishing Show Live. He recently released his first book, “How to Market a Book: Overperform in a Crowded Market.”

In the past self-publishing wasn't synonymous with quality, but that's changing at an exciting pace. Access to an online world of professionals is sweeping away the stigma, as self-published authors are now competing at the highest level. Ricardo Fayet is co-founder of self-publishing marketplace Reedsy, and author of ‘How to Market a Book: Overperform in a Crowded Market'. In this episode he shares invaluable and actionable insights for aspiring authors. Find out how to focus your mind on the business of writing, learn the value of research, and discover the facts and myths of a successful marketing campaign. If you want to take the plunge and make your work sell, this is not to be missed. Behind The Spine is the audio accompaniment to The Writing Salon - you can sign up to the newsletter here. var podscribeEmbedVars = { epGuid: 'behindthespine.podbean.com/07d3bccb-8080-3ac9-b210-3b2abf1e50ec', rssUrl: 'https://feed.podbean.com/behindthespine/feed.xml', backgroundColor: 'white', font: undefined, fontColor: undefined, speakerFontColor: undefined, height: '600px', showEditButton: false, showSpeakers: true, showTimestamps: true };

Episode 064 / We answer your questions about newsletter content and autoresponders plus tips for reviving backlist sales and launch strategies for debut authors and/or first in series books. Intro links: Come over and say hi to Jami and Sara in the WIKT Facebook group! You can find show notes and links at wishidknownforwriters.com. In this podcast episode, you’ll discover: What kind of newsletters we send to our list and how often we email What special things we do for our readers through our newsletters Tips and ideas for growing a newsletter Launch strategies for debut authors and/or first in series books Plus, our tips on how to revive backlist, our favorite conferences, and what we wish we’d know about beta readers and editors Genre discussed in this podcast: romantic comedy, cozy mystery and historical mystery. Links: Jami’s Launch Plan Sara’s New Release Timeline Episode 26: Book Launch Plans: The Mega Episode Episode 36: Trends in Selling Direct and Audiobooks with Damon Courtney of Bookfunnel Episod 28: Make Your Emails to Readers More Effective with Ryan Zee of Booksweeps and Plottr Tips on reviving backlist from Ricardo Fayet on the Kobo Writing Life Podcast David Gaughran’s Starting from Zero SPF 101 Course (affiliate) NINC The Big List of Craft and marketing books mentioned on WIKT podcast episodes

EPISODE 241I Today's guest is Ricardo Fayet, one of the founders of https://reedsy.com/ (Reedsy), a one-stop shop for writers. At Reedsy, authors can find editors, book cover designers, marketers and more to help with the business of publishing a great book. Writers can also use the Reedsy Book Editor, and learn a ton from the blog, Reedsy Live (live webinars), and Reedsy Learning -- all for free. We talk about these things as well as Ricardo's first book, https://www.amazon.com/How-Market-Book-Overperform-Marketing-ebook/dp/B08TZJQ1FB/ (How to Market a Book: Overperforming in a Crowded Market). It just came out in January 2021, and is free as an ebook, and also available in print. Ricardo gives us so much valuable information in this episode, you'll need to take time to write it all down! Be sure to sign up for Reedsy's email newsletter on https://reedsy.com/ (their home page) so you don't miss anything! You can also follow them on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ReedsyHQ, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/wearereedsy, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/reedsy_hq/, and on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpo0MkTAyEl73PmIVs8CQvQ.

Ricardo Fayet, the head of marketing and one of the founders of Reedsy, joins us on the podcast this week to discuss his book How to Market a Book: Overperform in a Crowded Market. Ricardo uses his wealth of marketing experience to give advice and share some best practices for finding your target audience, discovering new readers on different retailers, and converting page views to book sales. Learn more about this episode!

The word "Marketing" has become a scary word for so many authors. If given a choice, most authors would outsource their marketing to someone else but if we are ever going to grow and sell more books then we need to change that negative mindset. In this episode I highlight a few important things about marketing from Ricardo Fayet's new book, "How To Market A Book' - Overperform In A Crowded Market. - The responsibility of marketing your book falls solely on you even if you have gone the traditional publishing route. - Marketing in simple terms is the act of telling as many people about the book you have written. - Marketing is a skill that needs to be learned and can be learned. - As an Indie Author you need to adopt an attitude of learning. Follow me on Facebook, and subscribe to my YouTube Channel and WordPress blog. Thank you for visiting and listening. Rolain.

Ricardo Fayet is one of the four founders of Reedsy, a marketplace connecting authors to the world’s top publishing talent—from editors to cover designers, book marketers, author website designers, and literary translators. He’s the author of several Reedsy Learning courses on book marketing and a regular presenter at several prestigious writers’ conferences: NINC, RWA Australia, and The Self Publishing Show Live, among others. He's also currently finishing his very first book on marketing. In his spare time, he enjoys watching football, and carrying tactical analyses to explain why his favorite team won—as well as referee mistake analyses to explain why it lost.How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you'll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing. Join Rachael's Slack channel, Onward Writers! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Episode 046 / Founder of Reedsy and soon-to-be published author, Ricardo Fayet joins us to talk about how authors can work with Reedsy to find freelancers, get their books in front of reviewers, and find translators. We also touch on simple ways to improve your sales pages and reach international readers. Intro recap: Sara talked about what she’d learned from launching a special edition hardcover: 1) you need a long lead time so you don’t have to pay expedited shipping on the books, and 2) set up a sign-up page first to find out if anyone is interested, then set up a sales page with a “pre-order” before ordering the books from IngramSpark. Sara did the sign-up, but not the sales page and she’d do both if she does it again. Sara’s a founding author at BingeBooks, which recently launched. It’s a bookish site for readers to discover new books, keep track of books they’re reading, and connect with authors. They have a waiting list for authors who would like to claim their profile. Jami’s 99 cent sale is running and she’s directing clicks to her series page, which is one of David Gaughran’s recommendations for good conversions. Jami gives the tactic a thumbs up. Jami’s also running ads on Facebook and Bookbub. Come over and say hi to Jami and Sara in the WIKT Facebook group! You can find show notes and links at wishidknownforwriters.com. In this podcast episode, you’ll discover: How Ricardo came to create Reedsy, a marketplace to connect writers and freelancers Ricardo’s advice for authors who don’t like Facebook The difference between having an advertising presence and an organic presence on a social media site Common mistakes Ricardo sees authors making How Reedsy’s professional review service works Why focus and discipline are important for longevity Countries that are “ready” for translations and have a maturing digital market Reedsy’s translation assessment feature Growth of digital sales in Europe because of Covid and lockdown Connecting with international authors to market translations How to find and work with a translator on Reedsy Trends: more translation and continued growth of audio Ricardo’s tips for reaching an international readers Links/tips: Reedsy Direct Sales tips: Woocommerce and Paypal.com/shipnow Sara’s Snowflake Special Edition Hardcover David Gaughran’s Youtube channel BingeBooks BingeBooks Waiting List for Authors WIKT podcast with Patricia McLinn The Big List of Craft and marketing books mentioned on WIKT podcast episodes

If you haven’t heard of Reedsy, you’re living under a rock. On this episode, I sat down with co-founder Ricardo Fayet, and we discussed the art of marketing your book and working with book promoters. It was a very interesting discussion, and we talked about a lot of interesting things regarding marketing our own books. So, click PLAY and listen to my discussion with Ricardo on book marketing!   In this episode, you will:   Learn why we all have to market our own books Learn why book marketing is so important Learn ways to work with book marketers Learn ways to market your book on your own   Hosts & Guests Host – Christina Kaye Guest Host – Ricardo Fayet (Reedsy)   To Learn More About Reedsy: https://reedsy.com/   To Find Book Marketers: https://reedsy.com/marketing/book-marketer   To Access Reedsy Learning Resources: https://blog.reedsy.com/learning/   To Contact Christina Kaye: info@writeyourbestbook.com www.writeyourbestbook.com   For a Consultation with Christina Kaye https://calendly.com/writeyourbestbook/freecoachingsession   To Follow Christina Kaye https://www.facebook.com/writeyourbestbook https://www.instagram.com/writeyourbestbook/ https://pinterest.com/xtinakayebooks022

If you haven’t heard of Reedsy, you’re living under a rock. On this episode, I sat down with co-founder Ricardo Fayet, and we discussed the art of marketing your book and working with book promoters. It was a very interesting discussion, and we...

Reedsy offers authors a one-stop shop for finding editing, cover design, marketing, and more. Co-Founder Ricardo Fayet chats with D2D's Dan Wood about everything the service has to offer.Find more about Reedsy at https://reedsy.com  //Draft2Digital is where you start your Indie Author Career//Looking for your path to self-publishing success? Draft2Digital is the leading ebook publisher and distributor. We’ll convert your manuscript, distribute it online, and support you the whole way, and we won’t charge you a dime. We take a cut of royalties on each sale you make through us, so we only make money when you make money!• Get started:  https://Draft2Digital.com Get insider info on indie author success from our blog.• Visit: https://Draft2Digital.com/blogTune in to our monthly livestreams and ask us anything!• D2D Live: https://D2DLive.comPromote your books with our Universal Book Links!• Books2Read: https://books2read.com//Get ahead of the Self-Publishing game with our Amazing Partners//Findaway Voices || Find a narrator, produce your audiobook, and distribute it to retailers worldwide, including Audible.com and Apple Books.• http://findawayvoices.com/d2dReedsy || Assemble your team of publishing professionals! Find editors, cover designers, marketing experts, ghostwriters and more.• https://reedsy.comBookBrush || Build graphics and video that help you market and promote your books.• https://bookbrush.com/d2d-mockups///Join the D2D Community Online//Facebook || https://facebook.com/draft2digitalTwitter || https://twitter.com/draft2digital

Ricardo Fayet joins me to discuss how the Reedsy marketplace and tools can help you sell more books.

Ricardo Fayet, one of the co-founders of Reedsy, joined us this week to talk about book advertising, getting book reviews, search engine optimization (SEO) for authors, and other marketing tips. Reedsy is a website that…Continue ReadingSFA 028 – Marketing Tips, Getting Book Reviews, and Advertising and SEO with Ricardo Fayet 

Back in Florida to present at this year's NINC writers' conference, the SPF team recorded an edition of the Self Publishing Show in front of a live audience - a first - made up of indie authors and experts, including self publishing guru David Gaughran and Reedsy's Ricardo Fayet. It turned out to be a lively and informative affair!

Ricardo Fayet, co-founder of Reedsy, answers all our questions about the company from founding principles to their latest launch, Reedsy Discovery. He talks about SEO and steps authors can take to increase their searchability to ensure new readers find their books. He also discusses the manual process of acquiring freelance professionals to provide authors support for every step in their publishing career.   

In this episode Chris interviews Ricardo Fayet, one of the founders of Reedsy, about their new Book Promotions Services data base. This searchable data base helps authors find specific promotions that fit their platform level, their budget, and their goals. Show Notes & Links: -What in the heck is Reedsy? -Sorting through the Book Promotions Services data base by criteria. -How was the Reedsy list curated? -Is a BookBub Featured Deal really worth the investment? -What are the best alternatives to a BookBub Featured Deal? -Why a lack of budget shouldn't stop you from applying for a BookBub Featured Deal. -What is the value of running free promotions? -Ricardo's smarty pants tips: why authors don't need to be doing everything. Links - Click 'em they're live: Reedsy.com website Reedsy Book Promotions Tool 2019 Link to Becca's new nonfiction book (a sneak peek)

Discover the inspiration for the site that's bringing professional self-publishing to the masses.

As I prepare for the launch this summer of "The Centauri Survivors" my YA SciFi novel, I have been using the services of Reedsy.com, and so I caught up with co-founder Ricardo Fayet to talk about Reedsy Discovery: https://reedsy.com/discovery a service that allows you to showcase your new publication, the free Reedsy Book Editor: https://reedsy.com/write-a-book, and Reedsy's marketplace for writers. We also talk about why now really is the very best time to be publishing your own book.

As I prepare for the launch this summer of "The Centauri Survivors" my YA SciFi novel, I have been using the services of Reedsy.com, and so I caught up with co-founder Ricardo Fayet to talk about Reedsy Discovery: https://reedsy.com/discovery a service that allows you to showcase your new publication, the free Reedsy Book Editor: https://reedsy.com/write-a-book, and Reedsy's marketplace for writers. We also talk about why now really is the very best time to be publishing your own book.

It was a blessing to have Ricardo Fayet, Co-Founder of Reedsy, on the podcast today to share more about what Reedsy is all about! Ya'll have to check out this site! It is a wealth of research and knowledge we can depend on - right at our fingertips! Will you accept the challenge? Go over to reedsy.com and live there for awhile! There is a fabulous, trusted marketplace to find the perfect expert for you! You can take free courses, find experts on their vetted marketplace, use their free editor tool, and even submit your upcoming book to their new service, Reedsy Discovery! If you want to be a reviewer, send in your application today! Trust me when I tell you that this will be worth your time! I love it! @ReedsyHQ Instagram Facebook Email Ricardo with any additional questions - ricardo@reedsy.com Blessings, Jen --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/jen-lowry-writes/message

Ricardo Fayet is one of the founders of Reedsy, an online marketplace connecting authors with the world's very best publishing talent (think editors, cover designers, book marketers, etc.). A digital marketing enthusiast, he also helps authors find their audience and is now busy growing Reedsy Discovery. https://reedsy.com/discoveryNOTE: Register before March 31, 2019 and use coupon code WORDSLINGER at checkout to save $10!DID I MENTION?Cover your nakedness and your shame with a Written World Tee, now with 100% more Kevin words! http://bit.ly/writtenworld-teesNew to Wordslinger Press, pick up Writing a Better Book DescriptionPick up a copy of Kevin Tumlinson's newest Dan Kotler archaeological thriller at https://kevintumlinson.com/booksCONNECT ONLINE:Website:: https://reedsy.com/discoveryNOTE: Register before March 31, 2019 and use coupon code WORDSLINGER at checkout to save $10!Twitter Handle:: RicardoFayetYouTube Channel:: https://www.youtube.com/c/reedsyHow can listeners join your mailing list?: By signing up to Reedsy Discovery: https://reedsy.com/discovery--THIS EPISODE OF THE WORDSLINGER PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY:Draft2Digital—Convert, publish, and distribute your book worldwide, with support the whole way. https://draft2digital.com/wordslingerWordslinger Press—This is your chance to start your indie author career right. Pick up books and other products to help you build and grow a successful writing career. Start growing at http://wordslingerpodcast.comSupport this show: Subscribe and share!Support us on Patreon: https://patreon.com/wordslingerpodcastPick something up to read that will be tough to put down—Archeological Thrillers, Science Fiction, YA Fantasy and more, at https://kevintumlinson.com/books

In this episode Chris interviews Ricardo Fayet, one of the founders of Reedsy, about their new Book Promotions Services data base. This searchable data base helps authors find specific promotions that fit their platform level, their budget, and their goals. Show Notes & Links: -What in the heck is Reedsy? -Sorting through the Book Promotions Services data base by criteria. -How was the Reedsy list curated? -Is a BookBub Featured Deal really worth the investment? -What are the best alternatives to a BookBub Featured Deal? -Why a lack of budget shouldn't stop you from applying for a BookBub Featured Deal. -What is the value of running free promotions? -Ricardo's smarty pants tips: why authors don't need to be doing everything. Links - Click 'em they're live: Reedsy.com website Reedsy Book Promotions Tool 2019 Link to Becca's new nonfiction book (a sneak peek) Link to find out more about Chris' online course, The Content Formula: a Blueprint for Fan Engagement  

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Ricardo Fayet is a founder and the chief marketing officer of Reedsy, a company that is changing the way books are published by giving authors and publishers access to talented professionals, powerful tools, and free educational content. Quotes To Remember: “If you’re looking to self-publish your book, first you need to do a lot of learning.” “Learn about the manuscript of revision.” “If you send your book out there and it doesn’t have the right cover, it’s just money that you’re gonna lose.” “You need to publish a lot if you want to make money in writing.”   What You’ll Learn: Making Your Books Look More Professional How Reedsy Helps Self-Published Authors Generating Revenue From Your Books Tips and Advices for Book Authors   Key Links From The Show: Ricardo’s Site Kindlepreneur   Recommended Books: Uncommon Stock:Version 1.0 by Eliot Peper Uncommon Stock:Power Play by Eliot Peper Uncommon Stock:Exit Strategy by Eliot Peper Metadata by Jeffrey Pomerantz Let's Get Digital by David Gaughran   Support Breakthrough Success On Patreon Please consider supporting Breakthrough Success on Patreon. I publish five episodes per week which I carefully prepare for, and I choose to not run ads in my podcast to enhance the listener experience. I offer my patrons various perks, and even a donation as small as $1/mo would make a big difference for growing and maintaining Breakthrough Success. You can support Breakthrough Success by going here.

In Episode 18, Mark interviews Ricardo Fayet, one of the founders of Reedsy, an online marketplace connecting authors with top editors, designers, ghostwriters and publicists. An avid reader and a person who travels the world to attend industry events and author conferences, Ricardo shares his insights and tips for authors, including a number of free resources that authors should be taking advantage of. In the introductory segment, Mark shares an update on the forthcoming half-marathon he has been training for with his partner, Liz, and also shares some information about their next collaborative project, the book Spirits Untapped: Haunted Bars & Breweries. In the Terrible Tongue Twister segment, sponsored by Findaway Voices, Mark doesn't trip over his tongue. It's a first in this ongoing series that makes Mark usually look like quite the fool. In their interview, Ricardo and Mark discuss: How Ricardo got involved in co-founding Reedsy straight out of business school via discussions with co-founder Emmanuel Nataf about the need for authors to find quality professional services The travel, book shows and author conferences Reedsy travels to and the growth the company has seen both internally and the many freelancers that are on the platform The vetting that is done for the professional services offered and how only 3% of applicants are approved to be listed on the platform How an author would use Reedsy to find, for example, a developmental editor for a particular genre (using Mark working on a non-fiction paranormal book, as an example) The various service providers that you will find listed on Reedsy (including editors, book design, book cover design, illustrators, web designers, ghost writers, publicity and promotions and book marketers) The free online editing tool (Reedsy Book editor) that allows authors to export a perfectly formatted ePub or PDF document for POD printing The more than 35 free online email text-based courses that Reedsy has available. (Which provide a daily 5 minutes per day way for an author to learn something new that they are interested in) How Reedsy makes money, and a comparison to another company that offered services and wasn't transparent about their business model Ricardo's impression of the industry having just returned from London Book Fair The predators whose practices prey on the hopes and dreams of writers and Ricardo's frustration with these companies Trends in the maturing indie publishing community that Ricardo is paying attention to both in English language markets as well as in Europe in German, French and Italian Why authors shouldn't just jump in and hire a marketing expert (one of the most common questions Ricardo receives) and the Book Marketing 101 Free Course on Reedsy that helps authors learn the core basics that can help them before they look at hiring a book marketer   After the interview, Mark shares his thoughts and reflections on the free resources available, specifically calling out some of the free Reedsy resources that Ricardo mentions and how authors might be able to incorporate those types of free learning opportunities into their daily routine. He thanks the patrons who are supporting the podcast on Patreon and thanks listeners for offering him their free time in listening to the podcast. Use this affiliate link to sign up for a free account at Reedsy and get a $20 credit towards any purchases there. Links of Interest: Reedsy Blog Online Editing Tool Free Online Courses Ricardo's Article on 12 Book Marketing Mistakes Authors Make - https://blog.reedsy.com/book-marketing-mistakes/ The Creative Penn Podcast Kindlepreneur website Tomes of Terror: Haunted Bookstores & Libraries Free Friday Frights NINC (Novelist's INC) Conference Haslam's Bookstore Sixty Spooky Seconds about the ghost of Jack Kerouac

This week we talk to Ricardo Fayet, one of the founders of Reedsy, a curated site for matching authors and publishers to industry professionals like editors, designers, marketing professionals, or website designers. He explains to us how the site works, what kind of services indie authors can find on Reedsy, and how to find the best person to work with you. Reedsy is highly curated - they only accept around 3% of the industry professionals who apply to be listed - so they're confident in the quality of the service providers on their site. And that's nice to know when you're planning to spend your hard-earned money on getting your baby (ie your book) published. :) It's a fascinating interview - as well as demystifying Reedsy for us, Ricardo also gives some tips for authors that he's picked up from the many indie conferences he's attended, and talks about some of the changes he's seen since Reedsy first started in 2014.

Simon had a solo interview with Ricardo Fayet from Reedsy where they discussed all things Reedsy has to offer: Reedsy is the place to go for anything authorial: Editors, Designers, Website Editors, Publicists, Marketers and more! They match authors with the perfect team to create a brilliant package with your work at the center. Authors tend […] The post The Tech for Writers: Reedsy with Ricardo Fayet appeared first on The Tech For Writers.

Ricardo Fayet is a cofounder of Reedsy, an online marketplace that connects authors with everything you need to succeed, from free educational courses, to a platform to help you find the best cover artists, book designers, and publishing support. Ricardo and a friend got the idea for Reedsy in business school. They approached developing Reedsy […] The post 178: How to Build a Team for Your Self-Published Book with Ricardo Fayet appeared first on TCK Publishing.

In this episode we discuss agent query letters and much more with Reedsy Founder Ricardo Fayet. We were inspired to do this episode by reading Ricardo's excellent post for the Reedsy Blog on query letters, which you can view here: https://blog.reedsy.com/how-to-write-a-query-letter/Find out more about Reedsy and Ricardo at:https://reedsy.com/https://twitter.com/reedsyhqhttps://www.facebook.com/wearereedsy/https://twitter.com/ricardofayetEmail: ricardo@reedsy.comAs always, for more book marketing and book publicity tips, please visit www.smithpublicity.com, Smith Publicity on Facebook, and @smithpublicity on Twitter and Instagram.Host/Producer: Andrea Kiliany Thatcher

In this episode we discuss agent query letters and much more with Reedsy Founder Ricardo Fayet. We were inspired to do this episode by reading Ricardo's excellent post for the Reedsy Blog on query letters, which you can view here: https://blog.reedsy.com/how-to-write-a-query-letter/Find out more about Reedsy and Ricardo at:https://reedsy.com/https://twitter.com/reedsyhqhttps://www.facebook.com/wearereedsy/https://twitter.com/ricardofayetEmail: ricardo@reedsy.comAs always, for more book marketing and book publicity tips, please visit www.smithpublicity.com, Smith Publicity on Facebook, and @smithpublicity on Twitter and Instagram.Host/Producer: Andrea Kiliany Thatcher

James Blatch and Lucy Dawson introduce the Self Publishing Formula Foundation, a partnership with Reedsy, that will help four authors each year to fulfill their dream of publishing and marketing their books. This week’s highlights include: The origins of the SPF Foundation How the foundation works and how to apply What SPF are looking for […]

Ricardo Fayet is the co-founder of Reedsy, a global network that connects authors and publishers with top editorial, design, marketing and ghostwriting talent. A technology and startup enthusiast, he likes to imagine how small players will build the future of publishing.  CONNECT ONLINE: Website(s): https://reedsy.com Twitter handle(s): @RicardoFayet ___ GOT A QUESTION FOR KEVIN AND HIS GUESTS? CALL 281-809-WORD (9673)

Welcome to The Writing Coach. On this podcast, I speak with the instructors, editors, coaches, and mentors who help writers and authors create their art, build their audience, and sell their work. In ep. #48 of The Writing Coach podcast, I speak with Ricardo Fayet. Ricardo is one of the founders of Reedsy, an online marketplace for publishing professionals. Authors and publishers can browse profiles, write project briefs, request quotes, and then work with top level freelancers, including editors, interior designers, cover designers, ghostwriters, and book marketers. During our conversation, Ricardo describes: Why not just authors, but also publishers are using Reedsy How Reedsy's intense curation process ensures only top level professionals enter their marketplace Reedy's unique approach to content marketing How the Reedsy text editor makes writing and publishing a book even easier than ever before And much more Listen to the episode now! The Writing Coach #48 Show Notes Here is where to find Reedsy online: Reedsy: https://reedsy.com Reedsy Book Editor: https://reedsy.com/write-a-book Reedsy Learning: https://blog.reedsy.com/learning Reedsy Live: https://blog.reedsy.com/live Blog piece on Third Omniscient vs Third Limited: https://blog.reedsy.com/third-person-omniscient-vs-limited Read the transcript from the training I hosted for Reedsy Live last November, or watch the video recording below: The Writing Coach is brought to you by: Click here to learn more about Writer's Craft Academy Download the podcast here:

Many of the publishing tools indie authors need to access are hard to find – at least with the quality and trustworthiness you need in order to make your book of the highest quality. That’s why Ricardo Fayet and the folks at Reedsy developed their online platform. It’s a site that brings together editors, graphic […]

The past few days I spent at the London Book Fair. I was there for the first time and had no idea what to expect. Overall it was a really nice experience and I finally met few people I had interviewed before, so it was super cool. It was nice to meet in person Mark Dawson, Joanna Penn, Ricardo Fayet from Reedsy and Dan Wood from Draft2Digital. And of course I met new people and as a result you will be having new interviews with very interesting guests coming up, so if you haven’t done so already please make sure you subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher not to miss any of the upcoming cool content. I wanted to make today’s episode about the London Book Fair and share my impressions, observations and takeaways from the time spent there. So this will be a bunch of different thoughts in not so structured format, but hopefully you’ll like it nevertheless. What is the London book Fair? The London Book Fair this year celebrated its 45th anniversary. It is the world’s leading publishing event: the global marketplace for rights negotiation and the sale and distribution of content across print, audio, TV, film and digital channels. It had 25,000 publishing professionals from over 124 countries. Impression Number 1 - Self publishing’s place The London Book Fair was held at Olympia, which was built at 1886. The stunning buildings have unique atmospheres and create unforgettable settings for events, exhibitions and conferences. The place was huge - so huge that you may get overwhelmed and have no clue where to go. I even lost the cloak room at the end of the day and I was risking going back home without my coat. It took me about 25 minutes to finally find the place and get it. The funny thing - well it was a minute away from the place I started the search. Anyway I think you’ll be more interested in self-publishing than in my coat. So on the fair I realized how self publishing was perceived in the industry. As I said that place was huge, but vast majority of exhibitors were from the traditional publishing industry. So all self-publishing related boots (when I say all I mean only 3 - Amazon, Kobo and Draft2Digital) were put in the furthest possible corner - at the very end of the floor - completely isolated from the main hall. That fact itself illustrated that self publishing was still not considered as serious player in the publishing industry and is completely ignored by the traditional publishers. In fact the whole place was centered on printed books and the digital solutions were not highlighted at all. Besides that by walking through few boots and asking few questions I realized that the traditional publishers have been ignoring the existence of the self publishing solutions so much that they did not even have basic knowledge about those. But I’d love to see what will be the situation at the same London Book Fair in 5 or 10 years. Impression Number 2 - Books Being a book lover it was amazing seeing so many different books at one place. Colorful, different shapes and genres, good quality books everywhere. You can only imagine how disappointed I was to find out that all those books were only there to be looked at… oh and you could touch them too of course. But no one was giving away any books and you could not buy any one of them. So my initial plan of bringing home new reads did not work and the next day I went back with a much smaller bag… Impression Number 3 - the Author HQ Amazon had a space within that far away self-publishing corner I mentioned, where it had its Author Headquarter. There it organized different panels and discussions, where Amazon’s successful independent authors were featured. The authors staid after their session to interact with the audience and answer their questions. That place was very dynamic and always full. People were even sitting on the floor because there was not enough space. That made a big contrast compared to the half-empty and boring boots in the main hall. Even the people were different at the Author Headquarter. The dress code was more casual, there were indie writers with beards, tattoos and crazy shoes. The atmosphere was not official and people were relaxed. This whole difference was very similar to corporate life and entrepreneurship. The “normal” people who thought they were more legit and reputable in the main hall and more prestigious space and the cool people who were more fun, independent and creative. I think you can guess where I spent most of the time at the fair, right? Impression Number 4 - Writing is part of the author When I spoke to the authors and listened to their sessions it became obvious that writing was integrated part of their life and their personality. It was their passion, it was their lifestyle, it was their business and part of who they are. They had the writing in their daily routine. You could not imagine those people not writing or not reading. They were trapped in what they had chosen… in a good way, of course. Impression Number 5 - Writing Success When I was listening to the successful independent writers such as Joanna Penn, Mark Dawson and Rachel Abbott I found one similarity there. All three of them had corporate pasts and used their business mindset in marketing their books and putting their author brands out there. None of them wrote and waited to be discovered. All of them treated writing and their books as business, all of them made a plan and worked hard to make things happen. As opposed to many fiction writers who consider their writing being art and shy away from marketing the successful authors balanced well their creative processes and the promotional efforts. Impression Number 6 - Don’t Give Up Rachel Abbot has sold over 2mln books already. And she is completely independent self-published from the very start. Guess what was her initial target? One thousand copies. Mark Dawson confessed that when he put his first book on Amazon in the first month he sold 1 or 2 copies only. And this is the same person, who made almost half a million dollars last year from his book sales. What did they do besides creating the business plan I mentioned before? Well, they did not give up. I am sure the road was not very smooth and they must have felt like giving up at least once… but they haven’t. And that made all the difference… (wow the last part sounded like Robert Frost poem The Road Less Travelled)

Today I am talking to Ricardo Fayet. Ricardo is co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Reedsy, a marketplace connecting authors with the best publishing professionals (think editors, proofreaders, designers, marketers). An avid reader and technology enthusiast, he likes to imagine how little players will build the future of publishing, further empowering authors and allowing them to publish to the same standards as the biggest publishing companies. In this interview I try to understand what Reedsy is, how it works and how writers can benefit from it. Make sure you check out their book editor tool - it's great.

Today I am talking to Ricardo Fayet. Ricardo is co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Reedsy, a marketplace connecting authors with the best publishing professionals (think editors, proofreaders, designers, marketers). An avid reader and technology enthusiast, he likes to imagine how little players will build the future of publishing, further empowering authors and allowing them to publish to the same standards as the biggest publishing companies.In this interview I try to understand what Reedsy is, how it works and how writers can benefit from it.Make sure you check out their book editor tool - it's great.Click to view: show page on Awesound

Ricardo Fayet Co-Founded Reedsy, a Marketplace of editors and cover designers for books, providing book marketing services and agent assisted publishing. Ricardo takes us from the time Reedsy was founded to the new models and tools that they are introducing. We talk about books, self publishing, marketplace, editing, ebooks, agent assisted publishing, among other topics of interest to authors. Reedsy has a very stringent acceptance process for editors and cover designers, and we learn that their acceptance rate (less than 3 percent) is less than that of Harvard or McKinsey. We conclude the discussion with Reedsy's plans for translations, India, and Ricardo's dream book. Please subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or Stitcher and if you like this podcast, please leave a review!  Shownotes from this episode are available at mykitaab.in/ricardo #selfpublishing #marketplace #startup #reedsy