Reedsy has become synonymous with connecting indie authors who care about quality with editors and professionals who know how to provide it. Now it has relaunched Reedsy Discovery to provide indie authors access to high-quality editorial reviews that can be used across platforms. The program, which costs $299, will provide a 350-word review within 30 days of the submitted text being picked up by a reviewer (the $299 is only charged at the point of pickup).
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
A New Rival to Kirkus
Reedsy Discovery is clearly intended to compete with and offer a similar service and prestige to Kirkus Reviews, the highest-profile review site for a long time. It aims to compete on price and match quality. To quote the press release: “Discovery gives indie authors access to the same critical voices that traditionally published authors have always had. A professional editorial review shouldn’t depend on who your publisher is.”
Of course, you should do your own due diligence as always. And full disclosure, Reedsy is an ALLi Partner Member, but I am covering the story because it’s newsworthy.
AO3 Offline After Security Breach
We end the week with much less positive news, with thanks to Jane Friedman for the tip. You will know that I talk a lot in this column about some of the larger platforms where readers congregate in loyal communities around characters and stories they absolutely adore, platforms that are among the largest in self-publishing but which many don’t think of as such. This week the most beloved of them all, Archive of Our Own (AO3), has gone offline as the result of a security breach.
AO3 is a hugely popular fanfiction site with 11 million users. And as well as serving superfans of anything and everything, it is influential. In this article you will find some very high-profile books that started as AO3 fanfiction.
It seems that the site may be down for four weeks as the owners seek, they say, to get the restoration right and safe rather than quick. You can read more in Book Riot’s coverage of the outage.
Thoughts or further questions on this post or any self-publishing issue?
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