I am efficient. Let’s get that clear right now. Efficient. Not lazy, no sir-ee-bob.
Okay, you caught me. Despite being perfectly capable of formatting ebooks all by myself, I’m a little lazy. I don’t want to have to type out all the code and figure out how to get fonts in there and whatever else. And I don’t want to shell out the cash for Vellum just yet. Naturally, I am willing to give any formatting program a shot, especially if that program:
- Is web-based, so I can access it from whatever device I have around at the moment,
- Doubles as a word processor that I can type my draft into directly, and
- Is FREE, are you kidding me?!
Let me tell you, my lazy efficient little heart skipped a beat when I realized how powerful Reedsy was as a formatting tool.
I first discovered Reedsy, a website that now seems impossible to describe when I think about all it does, when I was looking for a formatter for my magnum opus (pro tip: don’t ever call a book that), Earhart & Noonan’s Last Grand Adventure. There, I found the editor of my dreams, and I soon turned more and more frequently to their blog and tools to enhance my writing life. I found it odd at first that what called itself a marketplace for author services had a place to house the actual book, but it did not take long for me to fall hopelessly in love with it! Not only do I use Reedsy to write and format all of my new books, I’m also in the process of transferring all of my old books to Reedsy because that just makes sense to me.
Below, I’ll walk you through Reedsy’s features from your first word to your first sale.
Before I get to the good stuff, I have a disclaimer. That disclaimer is that I actually recommend, if you have the funds, that you hire a professional formatter—either a friend of WA like L.E. Perez or Angelique’s Designs, or a freelancer you find right there on Reedsy. They know how to handle your book to make it shine, and they are sure to deliver something that fits your branding. It adds a polish books made with works-out-of-the-box software like this will never have. But I don’t have the funds for that right now, so it’s a Reedsy life for me!
Tracking My Goals
This is a newer feature of Reedsy, and I absolutely adore it. If you like how NaNoWriMo or Pacemaker tracks the progress of your book, you will love this!
If you click on the arrow and target in the upper right while looking at your manuscript, a sidebar pops out that invites you to set a word count goal and a deadline. Reedsy will then calculate how many words a day you should write in order to finish on time, as shown in the picture on the left (or above, depending on what device you’re reading this on).
What might not be so obvious in the picture (because this is a manuscript I’m not supposed to look at—don’t tell my critique group) is that Reedsy will chart your progress as you go and adjust your words per day suggestion in accordance with your progress.
Even better, if you click on Settings within the sidebar, you can choose which days of the week are your writing days and off days, and Reedsy will adjust the words per day suggestion to fit those new constraints, too!
Isn’t that nifty? Too bad I never listen to the words per day suggestion!
Important Stuff Accounted For
What might be my least favorite part of getting a book together might be the copyright page. It’s such a small thing, but something I have absolutely no interest in doing. My copyright pages were very sparse in my first few books for exactly this reason! Luckily, Reedsy’s copyright page is fill-in-the-blank, with prewritten clauses and space to write your own.
But you know what I also forget or simply never added because my old formatting software made it needlessly confusing? Dedications. Epigraphs. Acknowledgments. I still rarely include those because I am efficient lazy, but all it takes is the flip of a virtual switch to include them in my books.
WYSIWYG Formatting
As I’ve mentioned, Reedsy’s formatting tool doubles as a word processor (complete with spell check!), so all the rich text formatting you’re used to doing—bolding, italicizing, adding links and images, et cetera—works and looks exactly how you’d expect it to work and look. No messing around with code!
Organizing the guts of your book is also easy. Just drag and drop chapters into place if you need. Splitting chapters also has its own button, so you won’t need to copy and paste manually.
Formatting Styles
You can make a few adjustments—hide chapter numbers, add drop caps—but one downside to using Reedsy is that there are only three styles of formatting, and they’re pretty standard-looking. There’s the Classic, which utilizes a single, Times New Roman-esque font; the Reedsy, which has an Arial-esque non-serif font for chapter headings and a Lucida Fax-esque font for the body; and the Romance, which has Dancing Script for chapter headings and that same TNR-like font for the body.
The upside? There are three entire styles of formatting that wouldn’t look out of place in most genres! I am completely satisfied with only the three, though I would love to have more and eagerly await additions. I stick with Classic almost all of the time, though I would probably choose Reedsy or Romance if the fonts used in them happened to play nicely with my cover.
Easy Exporting (and Importing)
Reedsy can export your book to .EPUB (the one you want for ebook), .MOBI (no longer useful), and PDF (the one you want for paperback) files.
Trim Sizes
Reedsy can spit out four paperback sizes: Trade (6″ x 9″), Digest (5.5″ x 8.5″), Reedsy Standard (5″ x 8″), and Pocket (4.25″ x 6.87″). Most of these will look familiar to you if you’ve ever published a paperback, and Amazon’s book cover calculator/template creator can generate templates for all of those sizes now that they’ve finally added a custom trim size option to the calculator.
I choose the Reedsy Standard size for all of my books with the exception of my short stories, which are Pocket-sized and adorable. That’s all I need, frankly, though I may one day export a Trade size if I ever decide to do a hardcover edition.
Which size is right for your book? The conventions of your genre can answer that question for you. Peruse the bestsellers in your genre and check out the dimensions they use.
.DOCX Friendly
Come now, you didn’t really think you’d make it through a Megan Fuentes post without a single mention of Google Drive, did you?
My critique partners and I use Google Drive to share WIPs with each other. Since Reedsy’s sharing function (which I’ll get to next!) doesn’t allow for adding comments, I thought I’d be stuck copying and pasting my chapters into a fresh Google Doc. Not so! If you scroll to the bottom of the page when you’re looking to export, you’ll see that you can back up your book as a .DOCX file. It’s smart to do this anyway for a plethora of reasons, but it also allows you to upload the file to Google Drive and share it with your critique partners as you would any document.
And, as if that weren’t already awesome, you can also import .DOCX files. Reedsy will “read them” and, if you’ve made proper use of headings and subheadings, will automatically split up your book into chapters. So even if you prefer the writing experience of another word processor, using Reedsy to format is still effortless.
Beautiful Sharing with Readers
This was the most unexpected and delightful surprise! Reedsy now allows you to share either your full book or selected chapters. With Amazon kissing the .MOBI file format goodbye and general frustration over uploading foreign files to e-readers and their apps, figuring out how to painlessly deliver your reader magnet to newsletter subscribers can be tricky. This is doubly difficult if you’re a new writer or if you just plain don’t like using BookFunnel, ProlificWorks, or StoryOrigin.
But if you share directly from Reedsy, not only will readers be guaranteed to access what you send (as long as they have access to the Internet, which they’ll need to check their email in the first place!), but they’ll also be able to change the font and several characteristics, switch to dark mode, and navigate with a table of contents, just like they’d be able to do on any e-reader!
Is Reedsy right for you?
I can’t answer that. Only you know what’s best for you and your art/business/hobby. But what I do know is that it works like a charm for me. I may one day upgrade to something with more bells and whistles, but for now, if you’re a writer like me with lots of dreams and very little money, Reedsy’s formatting tool is a great option.
Now, wait until you hear about the book blog index and the plot generator…
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