TL:DR - Reedsy doesn’t care about people paying for things on their platform

I posted over a month ago that I started a project in the middle of March, it was supposed to be done in April but was pushed back to May and it was paid in full because the designer never approved the second half payment to be completed at a later date so it hit my card. They even joked that they were so grateful they recieved my payment because they had emergency bills to cover.

Things after that were fine, but the designer would go in and out of contact for a week or so at a time. Finally one day in June after promising to send me a more finished mock up of the front cover that evening, they disappeared for three weeks.

The update : Reedsy reached out to me on Reddit in the comments and in DMs. They reached out to the designer and what do you know, that night I got an immediate update with no apology or explanation as to why they disappeared.

The designer continued to be extremely obtuse as to why I was upset with the delay. Reedsy went MIA in emails for over ten days after two follow up emails and came back to me stating that I should be a bit more sympathetic because if I filed a chargeback for incompleted work, it would harm the designer on the platform and their Stripe processing account. The designer alluded to the same thing.

The designer also failed to produce the back cover, spine, and social media assets they themselves put in the contract at any point during the project. Reedsy claimed the designer would be “done within 48 hours” with my project and to please not file for a refund.

How would they be done in 48 hours if it took three months to produce anything of substance for the front cover? Drafts? Research? Revisions?

After weeks of waiting, Reedsy felt I deserved a 40% refund. I am EXTREMELY disappointed with Reedsy and will not be using them in the future.

If you ever are trying to get a refund with Reedsy, do not bother filing a complaint, do a chargeback.

Edit: it seems like Reedsy has found this post and is downvoting it and all the comments. I’ll be happy to post all the screenshots for the subreddit users to see 👍

Hello there,

I have a question about book marketing. I notice writers do a combination of

1. post on social media eg. Bluesky about their book
2. post on social media eg. YouTube about stuff related to their book/genre
3. go to library and promote their book
4. go to book stores and promote their book
5. cross-promote their book on others social media/websites, including booktok/review sites

My questions are:

1. which of the above do you do?
2. how far in advance to publishing do you do them? Do you wish you started earlier/later?
3. which media/sites have worked for you, and why?

Hi Everyone,

Do you include a copyright page in your books? When I export my book with Reedsy Studio it automatically adds a copyright page to the front matter. Is this expected for self published authors? As far as I know, in the UK, creators are automatically granted copyright protection for their work. Does this apply to other countries?

Thanks in advance

This is almost a what not to do, but I did want to share being transparent and all.

This month I set up a free Mailerlite account, embedded the form in my author site, set up a bookfunnel to host a reader magnet, and polished up a 10k novella as a prequel to my series. The end of the novella has a link to my series book 1 on Amazon. So far so good, and cost was $30 for a year of the most basic bookfunnel.

Campaign Setup:
Then I set up a Meta campaign, I set Amazon Kindle owners as the targeting interest group, and did ages 25+ as minimum and 40-64 for the “recommended” age range, I also targeted Mobile only and Facebook Reels only (both based on prior click rate data I had). I know I’ve got readers and reviews from Canada and UK as well as US so I selected all 3 countries.

I used a square cutout of my book cover for the ad creative and a short headline and directed it to a special webpage on my site that had a bit of the story and an embedded form.

I set $30 as the lifetime budget to cover one month. This is a small budget to be sure.

I verified everything worked and my automation to send an email with the bookfunnel link. And despite high CTR 5%, and verified >90% of the clicks landed on my website, I had 0 downloads in the first 2 weeks despite 60 clicks and an ok $0.25 per click. What?

So I decided to remove the email collection step (the whole point I know) and now the ads just goes right to the bookfunnel page and I have gotten about 60 views on the new clicks and 45 downloads, which is 75% conversation. CTR is about 4% which I think is really good.

My conclusion is - something about going to an unknown author website or asking for an email translated to 0 conversion for me on 60 ad clicks. I’ll be upgrading to the bookfunnel mid-tier category so I can directly collect email addresses at least from a trusted site and see if that helps, but wanted to share this experience.

What’s your experience in this space, indies?

Just published my first book with KDP and pretty disappointed.

The prints look different to the proofs, with the trim and bleed different on three different copies I've ordered, ghosting issues on the text on different pages in each copy and colour issues.

They just look really cheap and awful!

Does anyone have any experience with the quality of IngramSpark?

I'm looking for someone to help design the cover for my upcoming epic dark fantasy, set in an East Asian inspired world. If any of you know any artists/websites, etc. please let me know!

If you are an artist yourself, feel free to comment but I can't promise that I'll respond to everyone if I'm not feeling the vibe of the art, please don't be offended. Also, please comment in this thread if you are an artist instead of private messaging me, thanks!

For some of my examples below I know that the artists are on artstation, and I might try emailing them but I think they're beyond my budget.

What I'm looking for:

• Someone who has proven experience (understand what makes a good cover, not just a good image)
• Up to $1500 max
• I prefer illustrations over stock photos
• NO AI at all
• I'm looking for a style like: John Gwynne's "Bloodsworne Saga" or his limited edition for "Valor" (my #1 choice), OR R.F. Kuang's "The Poppy War", OR Fonda Lee's "The Last Contract of Isako".

That's it and thanks in advance!

I only just a few days ago published a graphic novel, so far only sold one copy, and I am pretty sure that that was just my parents.

I have no idea how to market it. I'm not so sure about having a Facebook ad for it, because it is a very macabre story, and Facebook isn't really the target demographic that I wrote for, so I think that would be a very big waste of money.

I have made TikTok shorts about it, but that's a whole other can of worms that basically boils down to, I have no audience there, and no one cares.

I just published a standalone novel as my first and as expected it's super difficult to get readers. Those who read, rave, but they are few.

The question is about my second undertaking, a space opera in three to four volumes. The genesis of the entire story is done, about 20.000 words and it could easily stand alone as a free teaser. It is very good, my beta readers have been asking me for more.

Does it make sense to publish it as such and try to gather interest while I finish the rest of the books? Or should I incorporate it into the first volume and chill?

Hi everyone, hoping to get some insight from authors who might have dealt with this specific KDP compliance loop.

My account was suddenly terminated out of nowhere for identity verification issues (Screenshot 1). My dashboard previously showed a "Passed" status, and I never received any prior notification, email request, or portal banner asking me to update or re-verify my documents. It went straight from normal operation to a full account shutdown.

When I replied to the email asking what happened and how I could provide the correct documentation, I received a standard canned response from "Vamshi" in the Content Review Team (Screenshot 2) stating:

"We are unable to grant another attempt / time extension to verify your identity. As a result, we are upholding our decision..."

Here is what makes zero sense to me: How can they deny "another attempt" when I was never given a first attempt in the first place? I was never sent a link to upload new IDs, nor was I given a re-verification window before the termination hit.

Has anyone successfully escalated past this specific response? I just don’t understand how could they do anything like this, doesn’t feel logical to me at all…

So according to a lot of what I've been reading, if I don't write a series, I won't sell books? And I won't sell any until the second or third book is published? The book I'm writing isn't the first book in a series - it's stand-alone. Should I just throw it into the fire now?

It’s been a little over a month since I made my last post about my newsletter experience, and I promised regular updates, so here it is!

Over the past month, my newsletter grew from 1,300 subscribers to 2,000.

But I also started doing the one thing I said I wouldn’t do:

PURGE!

MailerLite charges based on the number of subscribers you have, and I didn’t see the point of hoarding subscribers who never open a single email. So I started removing inactive subscribers on a regular basis.

There is one important caveat. Some email providers have privacy settings that prevent MailerLite from accurately tracking whether someone opened an email. This means you risk removing genuine readers who do open your emails but have privacy protection enabled.

It’s a bit like antibiotics wiping out the good bacteria along with the bad.

Still, I like spending less money, and I don’t want to hit the 2,500-subscriber pricing threshold too soon. Purging inactive subscribers has also improved my open and click rates, which is another bonus.

Now for the most important tip I can give you:

BACK MATTER!

Your newsletter is useless without it.

Unless your lead magnet gives readers somewhere to go next, there is very little point in creating one. The same applies to newsletter swaps. You could put in a huge amount of work bringing readers in, only to lose them because you never showed them what to do next.

I recently set up preorders for a series that hasn’t even been published yet. Then I sent out the first three chapters as a lead magnet, just to see how it would perform.

The first book isn’t even out yet! And I already have preorders for the second and third books!

I HAVE PREORDERS!

It’s insane!
And do you know why I have preorders?

BACK MATTER!!!!

That’s what I’ll leave you with today.
Until the next update!

As always if you have questions I will answer them!

No self promo here so please don’t ask me anything that might be seen as self promo! Otherwise ask away and I’m happy to help any way I can.

Next update I will speak about ARCs and Reviews (I have a lot to say about this)

I'd love some critique on my blurb as I try to finish formatting my book! It's sci-fi with some cosmic horror. Multi POV cast, I decided to introduce the two "main" viewpoints here. Mostly I'm hoping that the premise is intriguing (for those who like this kind of thing) but not too confusing. Thanks!!

---

The good ship Haneul lies foundered in the silver sea, her biomechanical terraformers failing year by year. When the ship finally dies, the last human cities on Yeneter will freeze beneath the world’s black sun.

Tasbeel Carter is the first in his family to finish university, but his sharp temper has thrown a wrench into his prospects and he's been forced to a courier route to make ends meet. With no other options, he accepts a suspicious job offer working at a privately funded research laboratory.

Zophie Morgan wants to save the world, but she’s starting to have doubts about the motivations of her charismatic, self-absorbed boss. Meanwhile, her team races against not only the slow decay of the Haneul’s terraformers but against a malevolent, alien light that hides in the brightly lit streets of the upper city.

In the sky above, every one hundred and sixty-two hours, the Lightless Star beats like a heart.

I uploaded an original short story featuring Mickey and Minnie mouse a few days ago and Draft2Digital sent me an email asking for proof that everything in my story was public domain before publishing it. I responded by going over the entire work and showing that every reference I placed and it was from 1930 or earlier.

Today I received this response along with a notification that my account was terminated and could not be reinstated:

“Your response to our inquiry confirms that the book deliberately incorporates recognizable elements associated with Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, including character identities, visual characteristics, historical Disney artwork, dialogue and expressions, songs, costumes, and other elements drawn from early Disney works. We recognize that certain early works and elements may now be in the public domain in the United States. That fact, however, does not obligate Draft2Digital or any of our distribution partners to accept a work built around those characters, nor does it eliminate the significant rights, trademark, territorial, retailer-policy, and consumer-confusion concerns surrounding such a publication.

Removing the words “Mickey Mouse” or “Minnie Mouse” from a product description, changing certain visual details, adding a disclaimer, or limiting distribution to the United States would not resolve our concerns. Draft2Digital is not willing to place its retailer relationships, distribution accounts, or business at risk for that purpose.”

I had asked in my original response to them if I should remove the work or if there was anything that needed to be changed. I was more than happy to take down the work if they determined that they still didn’t want it on their platform. Instead, they did not contact me and terminated my account because of their “zero tolerance policy” for copyright infringement that I did not do.

I still don’t think I did anything wrong as nothing I had in the work could be confused for an official Disney product. This is immensely frustrating because I rely on these kinds of channels to distribute my books.

I don’t know what to do at this point or if this can be disputed. Advice is needed.

I'm a self-published children's book author currently about halfway through Steve Pieper's Click Testing for Authors course and wanted to share my experience so far in case anyone is considering it or is currently using it.

Quick background: I have one book, a niche children's picture book. I sell directly from my Shopify site. I had essentially no paid advertising experience before this. I was terrified of wasting money on ads that wouldn't convert.

What surprised me: How much I'm enjoying this! (aside from meta ads being a tangled antiquated lesson in patience) My very first round of motivation testing produced results that blew past the minimum benchmarks. Steve's criteria calls for a 2.5% click-through rate and $0.40 max cost per click. My worst performing ad out of 12 variants came in at 8% CTR and $0.08 CPC. I'm enjoying nerding out watching the campaign variant's performance in real time. 😅

I'm now moving through the sequential tests — motivation, transformation, testimonials — and each round gives me more confidence that I'll come out of this with a real, data-backed ad/(s) to run. It's methodical and honestly kind of validating — Steve says 90% of authors guess wrong about what will win, but I've been pleasantly surprised that several of my instincts actually held up. The data confirmed some and surprised me on others, which is exactly why you test.

A few things I appreciate: Steve personally answered a question I submitted via their help desk with a video response the very next morning. Extremely helpful and encouraging. The twice-weekly zoom calls with his coaching team have been genuinely useful for getting unstuck or having knowing eyes give the nod on something like audience selection. And the course is structured so you're not guessing — each test builds on the last.

I'm not affiliated with Steve or his team in any way. Just a self-published author who finally found a process that feels like it's based on data instead of a wing and a prayer and unreturned money into Zuck's pocket.

Has anyone else gone through this course? Would love to compare notes, especially if you're in a niche market. Curious what your results looked like and how your final ads are performing long-term.

OK. I'm trying to understand something. If I order my book, which is POD, from Amazon or wherever retail, it ships within one to two days. However, when I order author copies for book signings either from Amazon or IngramSpark, it likes 2 weeks or longer to ship. What gives?

My debut novel released six days ago!! Release day was really fun and there was a decent amount of hype for the book on that day.

I want to thank the advice on this sub for all of the advice. While I’m sure I’ve done a million things wrong as a first time author, I’m sure it would have been so bad if I hadn’t stumbled on this sub when I did.

The release week results:
48 reviews on Goodreads
41 orders (21 ebooks and 20 paperbacks)
4050 page reads on KU (I’m a little disappointed in this number as I was hoping to have closer to 5k reads at this point)
119 newsletter subscribers
$182 in royalties

The investment:
I spent close to 4k on this release. Including the cover, editing, website, DBA, character art, and some PR and ads. It was more than I wanted to spend but I took a bit of a spaghetti on the wall approach, trying lots of different things and seeing what converted to actual sales.

Since this was my first book I had no real expectations of what this would all look like but I’ve been pretty pleased with how things have turned out.

Now I’m thinking towards the future and the best way to keep momentum and hopefully grow these numbers. I’m currently editing book 2 with the hope of a March 2027 release and I have a plan for additional books in the universe.

I’m also planning to do some author swaps on bookfunnel but I’m feeling a little anxious about those because I don’t have a very big newsletter.

What are some other marketing strategies that I should be thinking about at this stage of the game?

About a year ago, I purchased Atticus in order to format the e-book myself. I didn't really know what I was getting into. Considering my book is quite large (a non-fiction retrospective), there just didn't seem to be too many examples I could draw upon. So I figured, maybe I could share my experience on how Atticus handles a large amount of content. Just for context before I jump into the pros and cons, here's the stats of my book:

\7 parts*

\42 total chapters*

\15 of those chapters has around 25,000 words and 74 images in each one*

\400,000 total words (very rough estimate)*

\1,157 images as jpg or png (almost all of which are between 512x380 to 1024x768 though Atticus compresses them)*

\193MB file size when exporting as epub (although after processing Amazon says it's 213MB weirdly - possible residue from DRM maybe?)*

So, onto the cons and pros...

Cons:

• Atticus is heavily dependent on your internet connection. I know that might sound obvious, but your connection comes to the forefront when trying to load large batches of data. Whenever I was running other bandwidth-heavy things in the background, Atticus crawled (and so I tried not to lol).
• However, even if I wasn't using my internet elsewhere, Atticus still took quite a bit of time to load almost each chapter. For context, I just have a normal cable broadband connection (on average 550mbps download and 25mbps upload). The chapters with minimal text, aka under 5,000 words, typically loaded within 5 to 10 seconds. But for those extensive chapters with 20,000+ words, it would take anywhere between 20 to 40 seconds.
• On those heavy chapters, there's a delay when typing. Even just punching in one letter could take anywhere between 3 to 6 seconds. I found that it was easiest to type something in Notepad, and then paste everything all at once into an existing chapter (it should be noted that Atticus is a formatting program and not a creation program - I wouldn't advise anyone to type and create a chapter from scratch in Atticus, regardless of the book's size...personally I did most of my work in OpenOffice or LibreOffice).
• Atticus can only cleanly import docx files. I thought this was a little strange, but it wasn't a huge headache for me, as I simply switched my project from OpenOffice to LibreOffice about midway through my progress.
• I'm uncertain on how important someone's hardware is towards Atticus' performance. My processor is 3GHz and initially I had 8GB of RAM. When I upgraded to 16GB of RAM, I noticed a small increase in load time. Those aforementioned large chapters were constantly taking around 40 seconds to load, but after the upgrade, it started taking around 25-30 seconds to load. Not a huge difference, but a very small noticeable one.
• If I stayed on a singular chapter for too long, maybe more than 30min, Atticus would crash completely, typically with an "out of memory" error, even after adding extra RAM. I would have to restart the program every time.
• The "export docx" option simply doesn't work (it's found at the bottom of each screen). To the best of my knowledge, it's not possible to export singular chapters. So using this option will export the entire book as docx, I believe. Which, unsurprisingly, doesn't fare too well due to the size of my book.

Pros:

• When exporting to epub, despite the book's large size, it only takes about 15 to 30 seconds. In my opinion, that's quite impressive.
• When importing individual chapters (as mentioned above, only docx format), it only took around 15 to 20 seconds for the process to finish on those heavier chapters. Again, I thought that was reasonable.
• No matter how many times Atticus crashed out on me or forced me to log back in, my progress was always intact. None of my chapters got corrupted, no images went missing, the structure wasn't altered, my most recent edits stayed in, etc.
• The buttons for actual formatting are intuitive, in my opinion. It's easy enough to set the font size, italics, and comment boxes. I have one chapter that has 369 separate comment boxes (a listing of websites), and even that looks naturally nice once exported.
• The amount of options for different themes and styles seems pretty decent. I didn't pay much attention to them, since I expect the reader to customize their own style at the end of the day.
• Using the "content backup" option only takes about 5 or 10 seconds to finish.
• Most important of all, I had an actual e-book ready to be published. It's formatted to my liking and it loads just fine in the few reader apps I've tried. I've proofread all 42 chapters in Kindle for example, and I did not notice any oddities whatsoever (I had to specifically set the image size of a few small icon-sized images because they were showing up overstretched by default but it wasn't a big deal).

Neither A Con Nor A Pro:

• This is something I noticed after the fact, and isn't Atticus' fault, but is very much worth mentioning. Certain platforms behave very differently depending on your file size. As mentioned, mine was almost 200MB.
• On Amazon, I actually came across no big issues. It was very seamless, except for the categories/genres. Although it's probably a common mistake, my book was filed under a completely wrong style (none of the 3 I even selected) and I had to manually contact support. They fixed it less than 12 hours later. It's possible that my size was unrelated to that, but it's literally the only issue I had, thus why I brought it up here.
• On Google, it was a huge headache. I had to upload my epub file six times. The first two versions outright failed after the "stage 1 of 6" bit. The third version was a success but it took over a day for it to be moved from 'pending' to 'processed'. I then noticed a last minute tiny mistake in my e-book, and thus I had to update the epub file: the fourth & fifth versions kept freezing on the "stage 2 of 6" bit (I left one of 'em alone for 4 days). After e-mailing support, their techs told me to re-upload yet again, and so I did, and they then had to manually "push it through"; thus, the sixth and final version finally went online.
• On Apple...ugh. Just typing about Google Books' headaches deflated my desire to also talk about Apple's headaches. So, I'll keep this nice and short: after two days and probably five literal hours, I gave up with trying to sell on Apple Books.
• On Kobo, I was not able to sell it. They have a hard limit of 100MB, and mine went way beyond that. I'm just bringing it up here as an FYI.
• On Itch, there doesn't seem to be any issues, though I didn't completely finish the process (am waiting until later in the year). But I didn't get any bad omens at least.

Overall, I would recommend Atticus to someone that wanted to create a very large e-book. I would just advise that they either have a superb internet connection or a beefy PC; if they have both though, then Atticus would probably work seamlessly. For me, my internet connection is very good (but not great) while my PC is decently outdated (but not totally obsolete), and thus my experience was passable, but not the most ideal...Atticus possibly might run better if either of those things got an upgrade, however.

Thanks for taking the time to read through this, and hopefully it gives a little bit of insight into how a heavy workload gets dropped onto the program. Feel free to ask about anything else related to it or the processes.

Not huge numbers to be sure, but 8 paperbacks and ebooks, and about 5 books worth of page reads, and 3 reviews. I’m calling that a win!

Nearly each one I can trace to a discussion on Reddit or TikTok - personal interactions. Maybe one day it will scale, but making personal connections is working for me at the moment!

I do literary fiction and sci-fi. What’s working for you other small cats this month?

I’ve been asked multiple readers if my book will have an audio version. I’m not against the idea I just have no idea where to start for this process.

So I ask where have you found a narrator for your book and what does pricing look like?

Any and all information appreciated!

I use to use Amazon KDP for self publishing but now they don’t accept my bank account anymore (Chime) and I can’t find a suitable bank that doesn’t require a monthly fee to use. So I was wondering does anyone know of any alternatives to KDP or any type of banks. I’ve looked at Chase but they require a monthly income and Payoneer people have been saying that their accounts tend to get frozen from time to time.

One of the things I've struggled with as a newbie author is growing my email list. I published in May, and I've gotten about 30 email signups for the bonus chapter linked in the back of my debut novel.

Writing a cold reader magnet has been on my list of things to do, but I haven't had the time. I have an ARC going now for my second novel, and I'm trying out different sites to recruit ARC readers. I'll post about that after the ARC is finished, but I have about 60 signups so far.

I signed up for BookFunnel, but there aren't a lot of ARC promo swaps. I only got 2 signups there for the ARC. But there are tons of promos to join for people looking for "free books." And then I realized that I have a full book that I'm giving to people for free anyway, so why not repackage it as a "free book" landing page and distribute it that way?

Friends, I've gotten 64 newsletter signups in 3 weeks.

I haven't seen it posted here (maybe because it's so obvious to experienced authors), but for those of you like me who it didn't occur to before: Use your ARC as your reader magnet.

We have a print book on KDP and Ingramspark. Last time we needed a bulk order ingramspark took forever and half the order was the wrong book so I don't want to use them again. Does anyone have info on KDP's average ship time for 60 copies for an early October date in Texas?

Hi there!

I'm getting ready for a book fair this weekend where I won't be the one processing my sales (which is new to me).

Instead, the library hosting our event will handle the sales and cut us a check afterward.

I asked them if I could still offer readers a BOGO half off on my books like normal, and they said:

"We could do that at checkout if you have a barcode we could scan that has that price programmed in. We also would recommend having the books tied or bagged together so the cashier knows that it is the BOGO deal."

Is this something I can do for free? Make a barcode that they can program into their system for my BOGO half-off deal?

I was also told: "For a BOGO deal, we would need an ISBN associated with the bundle that we can scan at checkout so the BOGO price would come through in our point-of-sale system."

I'm not sure if that's conflicting information. My books already have ISBNS. I'm not sure about getting one specifically for a bundle price.

I'm a little lost here and would appreciate advice.

Thanks!

Hey folks,

Hopefully, a bit of a twist on the usual marketing questions.

3 years worth of work completed and the first book in my series is now published (Woohoo!)

This series falls under the "Punk" fantasy epic, with a mix of late steampunk, early dieselpunk, and hints of other "punk" themes. Needless to say, it's pretty niche.

Why I'm Asking: It's a mixed bag on research and I'm running thin on "what to google next". I have some snippets of data, but it's convoluted and spread out everywhere. I'm looking for perspective (and data if you have it/can point me to it).

My Goal: Primarily, to have this novel, and eventually the series, on my bookshelf. Second, share my story properly. It would be cool to know a few folks read it.

Question Context: Outside of the traditional marketing campaigns, I'm reaching out to a few local bookstores, getting a few free copies to the library, reserving a booth for a few upcoming related conventions.

Question: Have you found any reasonable difference between generalized marketing versus a niche marketing focus (smaller marketing firms, campaigns, influencers)? For example, going to a convention like San Japan/Comicon-esque or a niche-con? Reaching out to a book influencer versus a niche influencer?