The Kobo Writing Life team is excited to announce our latest Facebook Live Q&A on May 30th 2019. From 12:00 PM-1:00 PM EST, our takeover host, Ricardo Fayet from Reedsy will be answering all your questions on the Kobo Writing Life Facebook page.If you can’t make the takeover, feel free to comment on this post with your questions and we can ask them for you! Keep reading to learn more about Ricardo and his experience in the indie world, and get your questions ready!

Hello authors!

In the run-up to my KWL author takeover next week, I wanted to come on here and introduce myself a bit. 

Now, at this point, I would convince you of my publishing bona fides with intriguing stories about how I spent years working up the ladder at a major press, rubbing elbows with prominent editors and swapping cards with Salman Rushdie. But the truth is … I don’t really have much of a background.

When my three other co-founders and I started Reedsy five years ago, the number one question I’d get was, “so, what’s your background?” And used to hate it. I never knew what to answer.

I’ve only recently started to appreciate the fact that none of us had worked in publishing before. Now, I can see that it actually gave us an edge. When you’re deeply entrenched in such an established industry as traditional publishing, you can often miss some obvious solutions (and see problems where there aren’t any).

As “outsiders,” the first thing we wanted to know when we learnt about self-publishing was: “Who does the editing? The design? The formatting? Who helps market the book?” Once we started looking into this, we noticed something interesting: just as more authors were moving into self-publishing, more editorial, design, and marketing staff from big publishing companies were starting to go freelance.

And that’s how Reedsy was born. 

We set out to bridge this wave of self-publishing authors with those high-quality freelance publishing professionals. Since 2014, we’ve grown into a community of over 1,500 freelancers, from editors to proofreaders, designers, typesetters, illustrators, marketers, publicists, ghostwriters, and website designers — all individually vetted by our team.

One of the things about Reedsy that appeals to experienced indie authors is that it’s self-service. Need a copy editor? You can find one on Reedsy. Need a cover designer? Same. Need someone to help you put together a marketing plan? Ditto. But most first-time authors don’t know what they need. They know they want to publish a book, but that’s it. 

So early on, we set out to create a proper hub for authors that would be more than just a marketplace. We wanted something that could guide them through the whole publishing process, from the earliest stages of writing to the most technical of marketing.

This hub now includes free courses, free webinars (similar to the KWL Takeovers!), a free formatting tool, hundreds of blog posts, free marketing newsletters… and Reedsy Discovery, our latest discoverability tool.

So, to bring things full circle, I can finally say I have a solid background in publishing. Over the years, I’ve had the chance to meet and learn from some of the best authors in the business (mostly at conferences, always at the bar … ), as well as work with publishers, film/TV agents, book marketers, and all the other awesome companies in the industry (hello KWL!). On top of that, I live in Europe, so have a good grasp on what the book market is over here. 

All that is to say: ask me anything! I look forward to Facebook-living with you.

Ricardo is one of the founders of Reedsy, a curated marketplace to find the right editors, designers, marketers or website designers for your books. He’s also a private Facebook/Bookbub/Amazon ads consultant for some authors, and is behind the launch of Reedsy’s latest initiative: Reedsy Discovery.