Subscribe
Sign in
Reedsy Book Editor — Professionally designed books in seconds
74
Replies
@helencrozier also how much does reedsy get from freelancers who get work from the platform? I assume 10% or so
@helencrozier the Reedsy Book Editor is completely free. Authors and publishers only pay when they contract for services; Reedsy charges a 10% commission fee to both clients and professionals.
Hello Product Hunt! Founder of Reedsy here, happy to respond to any question you might have about the Reedsy Book Editor. You can also read more about how we built it here: http://blog.reedsy.com/reedsy-bo...
You can see a sample of a formatted book here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/789vh8...
@emmanuelnataf Looks fantastic! Two questions for ya ->
1. Is there any way to import content from an RSS feed?
2. Is there a read-time feature? I like to know how long a chapter would take average readers, so that I can balance the book out into manageable chunks.
@msitver Hello Michael,
1- We plan to add import from most traditional text files (doc, rtf, etc.) but not from an RSS feed at the moment (first time we see demand for it). We'll have a think though, an RSS feed is pretty straightforward to import!
2- Statistics/analytics about the book is planned. So a lot of more than read-time is coming :).
@emmanuelnataf homepage looks great. I haven't signed up for a trial, but I have a few questions:
1. Is it possible to insert images inline? I write mostly technical books with lots of screenshots.
2. What does code formatting look like? (as in, can I format text "as code")
3. Why no MOBI export?
@mijustin
1- Yes, just drag and drop.
2- We haven't added that for now. What would you be interested to see though?
3- We could add it but felt it wasn't necessary for now: adding your epub to KDP gives you a MOBI that works perfectly. Do you feel it's missing?
Wow this is so cool!
I word surrounded by a lot of writers and I always pity them when I take a glance at all the outdated tools they use for production (cough MS Word cough).
I'll be sure to share this with all of them!
@paisano Hello Paisano, I believe my team has been in touch. But basically since the editor is completely new we haven't changed the redirection yet. Just go into "My Books" in the sidebar to start writing. Hope this helps!
@emmanuelnataf yes your support team helped right away. It was a firewall issue for me. Not a glitch on your part. I'm loving it... thanks! I spoke to the celtx.com team long ago when they decided not to support books or novels anymore to focus only on screenplays and told them that someone else would come along to do it and sure enough here you are. Thanks!
Looks really good @emmanuelnataf! Wonder if there was a way to import content from blogs (WordPress/Medium) to publish a compilation of essays?
@batraatin Hello Atin, you are actually the third person to ask us if we could add RSS feeds / blog integration so I think we'll look into it :)
Very big fans of Reedsy -- the team, their products, everything. I know first-hand as an author that writing and formatting a book is not as simple as opening Microsoft Word. But Reedsy is intent on simplifying things so that it can become as simple as that.
@lekha25049632 Once signed in, feel free to ask for recommendations via the Help! button :)
I think this is a great tool! I am definitely going to use it. A lot to develop still but it's a good start.
O'Reilly developed a similar tool https://atlas.oreilly.com. It has some extra features compared to Reedsy, but they stopped giving access to it. I would love to see Reedsy getting to that point.
@robernunezz Thanks for the feedback! Agreed, we went for a simpler tool as a start as it'll cover most needs.
Everyone is commenting that this looks nice, which it definitely does, but has anyone tried it?
I just created an account as I wanted to try out the editor, but I can't even find it? I created my account and I have a 'My Collaborations' in the sidebar, but that just tells me to fill in a profile and link up with social networks etc. Well my book is personal so it's not a collaboration, and I don't really want a profile or to 'connect with others', I just want to write and export - is that not possible? The landing page simply says 'Write, Edit, Export' but I can't figure out step one unless I have to jump through the hoops first?
I closed the window and decided to just stick with my normal editor, but would be interested in knowing if I just missed the 'Create Book' icon somewhere...
@idemonix Hello Dan, it's simply because you signed up as a freelancer and not an author… I have switched your account, just reload Reedsy :).
@emmanuelnataf Ah ok, I was a bit confused by which to pick (I'm a freelancer that's thinking about writing a book) but to be honest I didn't think it'd have any bearing on the editor so I just kind of rushed through the sign up to get to the meat and potatoes. Will give it another look later, thanks for the reply.
I would love to know how this compares to GitBook. Especially the way it saves documents. Do you have a versioning tool built-in? Thanks!
@noxowe We built Reedsy for a more "mainsteam" market: anyone with absolutely no technical skills can use it and get a book formatted the way a Penguin would do it. Gitbook is closer to Leanpub and better fitted for technical books that are continuously updated.
Think of Reedsy as a medium for books with some of the collaborative features of a Google Docs. Versioning has already been built but not released yet; it will come in the coming weeks.
@emmanuelnataf Thanks for your fast response. This is a huge plus :)
If you have versioning, I would love to try Reedsy, just you know, I'm a developer :D
@noxowe Haha - think of it a Time Machine for your book. You can see a screenshot of it in this article: http://publishingperspectives.co...
This looks like such a great alternative to something like Work or Pages for writing a book. The versioning is such a nice addition!
Looks awesome. Any reason we couldn't use this for shorter form content like White Papers?
Had signed up for Reedsy some time back. Was in search for a service that'd help me create a book out of my blog. I was hoping to import the Wordpress XML to the editor. Is it part of the roadmap for the product? Any possibility that I perhaps missed the feature?
@kasturika_r As you're not the first one asking it's become part of the roadmap :).
So far I'm pretty excited about this product! It will be a great asset for POD services, like Createspace. Although, as far as I can see you can't use it to create a Word Doc which means I can't use it for Smashwords, which does make me a little sad. So probably will still write my book in Google Docs and then copy it to Reedsy, use it for formatting. Then copy back to Google Docs so I can transfer it to Word and then format it for Smashwords.
@dredurr Many things:
1- The Reedsy Book Editor is web-based with auto-backups
2- We control the formatting of the book from the very beginning to save a lot of time once the book is ready for publication. Scrivener is an interesting tool to work on the storyline but it's a real pain in the ass to get a good epub/PDF file for distribution from it.
3- Scrivener doesn't really work for book editing. Reedsy will soon add Google Docs-like features for live track-changes, commenting, etc.
This is very cool! I see that you allow exporting to ePub format (for Amazon I presume) but would it also have a deeper integration to walk you through the entire ePublishing process on Amazon (or do you see the tool expanding to include that experience)?
@sarthakgrover At this point we work with several distributors/aggregators so provide perfectly formatted files (Kobo and Ingram) but don't offer distribution services ourselves.
Authors and publishers can come, download professionally designed files and then use them with the service they like (there are a lot of players offering distribution services: Draft2Digital, BookBaby, IngramSpark…).
Note that the epub files are perfectly compatible with Amazon KDP which convert them into mobi files.
@emmanuelnataf Okay, that is fantastic. The sample book looks really nice! What are your thoughts on media (photographs) etc within the book? Are you going to stay focused on just the writing aspect (which is great!) or is that something you see happening in the future?
@sarthakgrover So you can already drag and drop images into the editor and it formats them perfectly for a 6" x 9" book (standard American trade book format), same for the ePub file. For very illustrated books (art books), we still recommend to hire a professional typesetter, book interior designer.
The Reedsy Book Editor will be perfect for fiction and simple non-fiction work :).
The Fundraising Playbook