Episode 092 - Finding a Crew for Your Creative Voyage with Ricardo Fayet
August 10, 2021
Ricardo Fayet, one of the founders of the resource marketplace Reedsy, discusses FINDING A CREW FOR YOUR CREATIVE VOYAGE. He discusses what signs might tip off authors that they have reached the point where investing in this kind of help makes sense, how authors can decide what to outsource, best practices for finding a good match between needs and resources, and how to work effectively with these professionals to make it the most productive and creatively energizing experience for both parties.
Ricardo Fayet is one of the four founders of Reedsy, a marketplace connecting authors to the world's top publishing talent--from editors to cover designers, book marketers, or literary translators. He's the author of several Reedsy Learning courses on marketing and a regular presenter at several prestigious writers' conferences, including NINC, RWA Australia, and The Self Publishing Show Live. He recently released his first book, “How to Market a Book: Overperform in a Crowded Market.”
Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!
Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Ricardo Fayet. Hey Ricardo, how are you doing?
[00:00:07] Ricardo: Hi, Matty, I'm very good and you?
[00:00:08] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Ricardo Fayet is one of the four founders of Reedsy, a marketplace connecting authors to the world's top publishing talent, from editors to cover designers, book marketers, or literary translators. He's the author of several Reedsy learning courses on marketing and a regular presenter at several prestigious writers' conferences, including NINC, RWA Australia, and The Self-Publishing Show Live, and he recently released his first book with, as he called it, the unimaginatively titled HOW TO MARKET A BOOK: OVER-PERFORM IN A CROWDED MARKET.
[00:00:41] And the reason I asked Ricardo to join us today is that I wanted to talk about this idea of the marketplace connecting authors to talent. And I'm titling this episode, Finding a Crew for Your Creative Voyage because my listeners will know that I love the nautical metaphor for the writing craft and the publishing voyage.
[00:01:00] So Ricardo, I wanted to start out by asking, what did you see in the author community that led you and your co-founders to found Reedsy?
[00:01:11] Ricardo: Yeah. So early on, we're seeing the early days of self-publishing, right? This was back in 2013, 2014, there were some names that are already self-publishing to some success like Hugh Howey, Bella Andre, Barbara Freethy, in the U.S., where the movement started.
[00:01:27] And self-publishing was growing. We were seeing the numbers growing as well. We didn't know much about the publishing industry, but we did know that there was a lot more to publishing a book than just writing it. We knew that there was an editing process that happened in stages when you, that the book had to be designed, formatted, printed, and then marketed.
[00:01:45] And so we were wondering who was doing all that for the authors. And so we soon learned that most of these authors that were working with an editor or a cover artist or both, and yeah, we decided to create a marketplace to make things easier for new authors looking to publish their books, to find their editor, the proofreader, the cover designer.
[00:02:02] And then we started adding more services for more established authors, like author website design, and book marketing. Literary translation is the last one we added. And we also have ghost writing in there, for people who have a story to tell but feel like they cannot write it themselves. So, our goal now is to more or less have all the resources that any author would need at any point throughout their writing career, and they're really the cream of the crop of the freelancers for each service.
[00:02:27] Matty: What is your vetting process for the freelancers? ...
[00:00:07] Ricardo: Hi, Matty, I'm very good and you?
[00:00:08] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Ricardo Fayet is one of the four founders of Reedsy, a marketplace connecting authors to the world's top publishing talent, from editors to cover designers, book marketers, or literary translators. He's the author of several Reedsy learning courses on marketing and a regular presenter at several prestigious writers' conferences, including NINC, RWA Australia, and The Self-Publishing Show Live, and he recently released his first book with, as he called it, the unimaginatively titled HOW TO MARKET A BOOK: OVER-PERFORM IN A CROWDED MARKET.
[00:00:41] And the reason I asked Ricardo to join us today is that I wanted to talk about this idea of the marketplace connecting authors to talent. And I'm titling this episode, Finding a Crew for Your Creative Voyage because my listeners will know that I love the nautical metaphor for the writing craft and the publishing voyage.
[00:01:00] So Ricardo, I wanted to start out by asking, what did you see in the author community that led you and your co-founders to found Reedsy?
[00:01:11] Ricardo: Yeah. So early on, we're seeing the early days of self-publishing, right? This was back in 2013, 2014, there were some names that are already self-publishing to some success like Hugh Howey, Bella Andre, Barbara Freethy, in the U.S., where the movement started.
[00:01:27] And self-publishing was growing. We were seeing the numbers growing as well. We didn't know much about the publishing industry, but we did know that there was a lot more to publishing a book than just writing it. We knew that there was an editing process that happened in stages when you, that the book had to be designed, formatted, printed, and then marketed.
[00:01:45] And so we were wondering who was doing all that for the authors. And so we soon learned that most of these authors that were working with an editor or a cover artist or both, and yeah, we decided to create a marketplace to make things easier for new authors looking to publish their books, to find their editor, the proofreader, the cover designer.
[00:02:02] And then we started adding more services for more established authors, like author website design, and book marketing. Literary translation is the last one we added. And we also have ghost writing in there, for people who have a story to tell but feel like they cannot write it themselves. So, our goal now is to more or less have all the resources that any author would need at any point throughout their writing career, and they're really the cream of the crop of the freelancers for each service.
[00:02:27] Matty: What is your vetting process for the freelancers? ...
click here to read more
[00:02:31] Ricardo: Really good question. It's a secret. No, no. We make them fill out profiles, similar to LinkedIn profiles, basically. Where we make them list. It's a little bit different for each service, but basically their work experience and their portfolio, all the books that they've worked on, the genres that they specialize in and mostly that's information that we look at.
[00:02:49] Then we do a little bit of a background check. Like we make sure that they've worked on the books that they say that works on. We checked like the credentials in the books, or if they see that worked five years, and Penguin Random House and all the books in their portfolio have been published by Harper Collins, we start asking questions. Things like that.
[00:03:03] And for marketers, for example, for author website design, we have project section where they can highlight specific projects and give actual metrics of, like, 'I ran Amazon as for an author for two months, this is the ACOS we achieved, the number of sales, et cetera, with screenshots.'
[00:03:19] So every profile is a little bit different, but we basically judge each professional based on what they have input within their profile. If we see some value, we work with them to get them to finish a profile. And if we feel like they're not going to meet our selection criteria, then we would just let them know.
[00:03:36] Matty: I have to say I'm a happy client of Reedsy for my cover design. So was super happy to find the cover designer I found. And I'll also say having used a couple of platforms that are sort of like Reedsy, is that the user interface is very nice. I've actually had good luck on some other platforms, but it's always a bit of a thrash because sometimes these the user interface is not that nice, and I really like Reedsy.
[00:03:59] Ricardo: I'll let our designer know.
[00:04:00] Matty: Yes. Thank you.
[00:04:02] So if you put yourself in the place of the authors who are thinking about using Reedsy services, there are some things that an author, if they decide to pursue it, is not going to be able to do themselves, like translation probably. There are other things that they could do themselves if they prioritize it, had the time, maybe took some online courses or whatever. How do you advise authors to judge when they've reached a point where they should be outsourcing some of the work that they're now doing themselves?
[00:04:33] Ricardo: Yeah. I think first you need to know what your skills are and what you enjoy doing. I know some authors who do really, really well without hiring editors. Because they're used to writing in their genre. They know their stories, they know their plots and they're really good at copying and proofreading, even if it's their own words. These are outliers, same as people who design their own covers because they have a graphic design background, they've really researched their genre, they know what covers should look like in that genre and they're able to create that themselves and they're great typographers as well. And they do it themselves. So they're outliers as well.
[00:05:08] So, if you want to take on one of these skills, which is entirely different from writing, whether it's design even translation, author website design, things like that, then you need to, I think first have this some skills and enjoy the idea also of learning more to further your skills.
[00:05:22] So let's say you love illustrating, or you're really good at that design in general, and you want to do your own covers, starting to create the cover out of what you think your cover should be. You research your genre are very well and start taking courses on Photoshop or Sketch. If you want to do your own formatting, then take courses on InDesign. If it's like a complex interior formatting, for example, for a children's book, for simpler layouts, then you just need to purchase Vellum or use a free Reedsy book editor, there are other tools for formatting.
[00:05:49] But yeah, I think you need the skills, you need the will to learn, and you need to really like doing that stuff. And also needs to get to the point that you're able to do both things. You're able to write the next book and at the same time do the cover for the next book. And if that becomes too difficult, it will usually be much easier and much more effective to hire someone to do the next cover, rather than hire someone to write the next book and you do the cover for it.
[00:06:13] Matty: Yeah, it's a very difficult calculus. And my approach was totally different when I was doing my writing and publishing as a side gig to my day job. I assess things differently than now that I'm doing it full-time and I'm trying to make eventually a living wage from it. Now, I wouldn't say I'm making a living wage yet, but fortunately I'd saved enough from my corporate job that I have some runway in order to make that transition. But when it comes right down to it, and I think let's say running ads, that I'm trying to weigh the value of my time, basically. The value of my time between doing it myself or outsourcing it. When people are trying to apply those very objective criteria, any different advice you have for people in that situation?
[00:07:00] Ricardo: Yeah. It's really hard. Basically, it's really hard to find someone to do your marketing for you, whatever kind of marketing it is. So marketing is a bit of a special service. We have book marketers on Reedsy. We have some people running ads, but they're always at maximum capacity, because I think there are a lot more authors looking for ads people than there are ads people with a capacity of working with authors, at least right now.
[00:07:24] But it's definitely a case of first you need to understand the ads yourself. So I definitely encourage authors to take courses, there are a bunch of free resources. We've got free courses on Reedsy. Bryan Cohen has got a free Amazon Ads Challenge. Dave Chesson on Kindlepreneur has free Amazon ads courses as well. You can go a long way with a bunch of free resources, blog posts, videos, et cetera, to learn about advertising. Once you have that knowledge, you try to implement it yourself. If you see that it's working relatively well, let it show its promise, then you can think about outsourcing it to a professional was going to not only do it for you for a few months, but teach you how to do it long time.
[00:07:57] I do think that working with a professional advertiser on the long run, like over several years, you need to be selling a lot of books, like making maybe six figure income or more in order to justify that because advertisers are not particularly cheap. Professional book marketers who specialize in advertising, they're not cheap. So if you need to pay for the advertising costs plus their fee, you need to be selling a lot of books to be able to afford that.
[00:08:25] Matty: I really like the idea of dipping your toe in it or wading in a little bit first because I'll use a book cover design as an example. So all my book covers except one have been professionally designed. And the one that hasn't is my most recent non-fiction book, THE INDY AUTHOR GUIDE TO PODCASTING FOR AUTHORS. And the approach I took with that is that I'd had my other non-fiction book, TAKING THE SHORT TACK, the cover of that professionally designed. And the designer who did that had picked fonts and a layout that I would never have come up with if I had been trying to do it myself. But once I had the general idea, I could go to Canva and make something that was sort of based on that design use the same fonts, kind of the same layout, put the elements in the same place.
[00:09:07] And I did that because I was following J. Thorn's advice about trying out a minimum viable product and seeing if there was interest. And then if there was interest taking sort of the next step. So now, I'm at the step where I'm now looping back with a professional designer and say, can you just tidy this up a bit? Cause I know a professional is going to bring a different eye to it.
[00:09:28] But what I found was valuable about that is that, in addition to this testing approach, is that it gave me a sense of what a professional designer was going through. Like now, I kind of had a sense about different elements and what you could and couldn't do with them. What was an easy change in what was a hard change. And I'm never going to do it in InDesign or Photoshop, but if I did it in Canva, it at least gave me a little bit of a language, a little bit of common ground to talk about that with the professional when I got to that point. So I like that idea of having some understanding of what you're asking the professional to do, and what's involved in that.
[00:10:07] Ricardo: No, absolutely. I think that's a really good, that's a really good approach. Because if you're going to have a long-term relationship with someone, it's important to understand what the basics of their job are and be able to communicate exactly your expectations. I think, for cover design it's probably simpler cause you see the end result. For other collaborations like marketing, it's a lot. You definitely need the knowledge, because you want to be following what the marketer is doing. For example, if you hire someone to do your Amazon ads, but you know nothing about Amazon ads after two weeks, the marketer tells you, 'Hey, your ACOS is 50% so we're doing a great job.'
[00:10:42] If you don't know what ACOS says, if you don't know what your royalty is, if you don't know whether the campaigns are for your print book or the ebook or both, You don't know whether that's actually a good result or not. Like 50% ACOS could be ' eh' or it could be terrible. It all depends on how much actual royalty you're making on the sales.
[00:10:58] So it's definitely important, I think, for these types of collaborations to you to have a strong understanding of at least the basics of advertising and of the targets, the metrics. How are you going to evaluate the performance of the professional?
[00:11:13] Matty: Another interesting way that collaborating is both good and tricky is that, of course the author knows their book better than anybody, but that can be a pro and a con. You know, you get so locked into something that maybe you're not seeing the forest for the trees. And so if you go to a platform like Reedsy and you're looking for a book cover designer with experience in a certain genre, which you can do on that platform, then they have a sense of, like right now in historical thrillers, I know that the big rage is a woman dressed in red from the back with World War II airplanes in the sky and either Paris or London in the background with Big Ben or the Eiffel Tower or whatever it is. And you might not know that if you've had your head down in the book you're writing and not looking across the scope of what's out there.
[00:12:03] Are there guidelines that you can offer in terms of, and let's talk about book cover design specifically, if someone is looking for a book cover designer, are there specific things they can look for to indicate whether that designer in fact does understand the tropes of that genre?
[00:12:19] Ricardo: Yeah. First, you need to search by genre, as you mentioned. So we've got a drop down of genre you can search within it and there are sub genres as well. So I think there is historical fiction. There won't be for example, World War II. So if you've written a World War II historical fiction and you really want someone who's done covers for that very specific kind of book before, then you can use a keyword search. I think in a lot of authors are not taking advantage of that on Reedsy, but it works pretty well. So you type in World War II or WW2 and that will pull up more profiles, of historical article fiction cover designers who've done covers for World War II books in the past.
[00:12:57] And then you just check out their portfolios, see which books are similar to yours, whether you like their covers or not, and check how they're selling. You know, if they're best sellers in your genre, then gave him, this guy has designed a best-selling World War II historical fiction book, and so he's probably a good person to reach out to. That's how I would go about it.
[00:13:17] I also always encourage authors to check the top hundred books in their category on Amazon before reaching out to cover designers, and then matching the general idea of that top 100 to the cover designer’s portfolios. If you see, okay, this person has done the exact style of the books that tend to do well in this category, then that person's probably a good person to reach out to for a cover design.
[00:13:41] Matty: Another thing that one needs to assess when going to a platform like Reedsy or others like it is obviously cost. And so I think on a platform like Reedsy, where my impression is that the professionals on there are quite heavily vetted, then I think you get more on the upper end of the spectrum because they've gotten past that vetting process. You can go to a platform like Fiverr, and although you're not necessarily spending $5you could probably get a book or to sign on Fiverr for five bucks.
[00:14:11] So even within the narrower scope of Reedsy professionals, do you have any guidance for people when they're seeing, oh, this person would do the job for a hundred dollars, but this person would do the job for a thousand dollars. What factors should people weigh to understand whether it's worth going for the higher one or a better idea to go for the lower one?
[00:14:30] Ricardo: Yeah, it's a really good question. The thing is that it's a relatively new market, right? What's with author services that are relatively new market and that before 2012, 2013 it didn't exist. So it's very much non-transparent. If we take the example of editing, most of the editors on Reedsy was professional editors out there, they come from somewhat of a traditional publishing background, right? So they were an acquisitions editor at Harper Collins and then they left for whatever reason, and they became freelance, and they don't necessarily know how to set their rates because they're going from a monthly salary to, 'I need to charge per project, probably per word or pre-paid, or hour worked.'
[00:15:08] So when we came in, we saw very big variety in terms of quotes. And we started creating a blog post, which we update yearly called THE COST OF SELF PUBLISHING, which is actually just the cost of editing and cover design, really. And we pull the averages of quotes on the marketplace for the different types of services. And what we see when we pull those averages is that they're very much averages, but you can get people who charge almost double the average and people who charge half, depending on, you know, where they're based genres, et cetera.
[00:15:36] What we've also found is that authors rarely go for the cheapest option. They generally go for either the higher one or the one in between. Maybe it's psychological. But if you're faced with like different quotes, I would try asking very politely and very nicely to the highest, the person offering the highest quote, and if you're interested in working with them, tell them, ‘Look, you’re the highest quote out of four people I have contacted on Reedsy, can you tell me a little bit more about that?' Or like, 'why would you justify it?' And see what they come back with.
[00:16:03] In the case of cover design, it's often obvious. The ones who charge most upwards of a thousand dollars, they have the capacity to do custom photo shoots. They do like custom digital painting, and they have very big clients. The covers tend to look a little bit better than all the covers that are maybe $250 or $500 or $700. So again, you're going to see the difference, but it's basically based on the resources that they have to put into doing it.
[00:16:27] So generally, there are pretty simple reasons for why someone's going to charge more. Sometimes down to experience, they've done this for 30 years and they feel they can charge more. Sometimes it's based on like, especially around editing, we have service called editorial assessment and that's obviously going to be different for every type of editor.
[00:16:44] Some editors are going to charge $1,500 or $2,000 for an editorial assessment, but they're going to come back with a 30-page report plus notes in the manuscript. All those are going to charge maybe $700 for an editorial assessment that they've gone on to come back with a 15-page report. So always ask exactly what the deliverables are going to be. And that's going to be much more helpful than just dollar numbers when comparing quotes.
[00:17:07] Matty: Yeah. Over time, I've assembled a fairly detailed list of what I need from book cover designers. So I need a cover for KDP. I need to cover for Ingram. I need print and eBooks. I need audio books. I don't need the social media extras that they can provide. And that's been very helpful.
[00:17:25] And the other experience I've had, and this was on Reedsy when I was looking for my book cover designer, is to be able to set an expectation for the professional about what the ongoing need will be. So I was doing an overhaul of my Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels, and once somebody came up with the initial design, then each book was going to be that same font, that same layout, it was going to have one central image that was different, and then some professional adjustment of that, darkening at, or brightening it, or clipping out distracting details or something like that. And so when I made the quote, I said, 'I'm expecting this series to go on for a while.' And so each book cover might be a little bit of a back and forth to get the first one, but one once we've got the first one, the other ones are going to be much faster. And most of the people who responded, did say, oh yeah, that's good, then it would be this much for the first one, and then it would be this lower amount for the follow-on ones. So if they understand what the long game is then they can respond more appropriately with their quotes.
[00:18:25] Ricardo: Yeah, absolutely and I think that's a great idea to save on costs, and to ensure a consistent branding for cover design is reaching out. If you're just planning a series of six or seven books, even if you've only written book one, you have an idea for the broad outlines and the characters in the following books, we can commission all covers at once. And that's an asset you can use in your marketing afterwards.
[00:18:47] Matty: Another thing that it didn't occur to me to ask as part of my vetting process is what system they were going to be using. And so when I got the covers done for my Lizzy Ballard Thrillers, I got the design, loved, it, loved everything he did. He was super responsive, but I found that when it got to text, it wasn't so good. So I thought, okay, fine. I'll pay this guy to do the artsy stuff. And then I'll just pay someone else a small amount to do the text.
[00:19:15] And it turned out he was working in, I don't know, CorelDRAW or something like that. Something that honest to God, I didn't think was even available anymore. And so the person who picked it up, basically I had all the bits and pieces, but they had to reassemble it into an actual modern design package. So it's actually worth asking a designer if they're working in a program that is relatively common, because as part of my contract, I always do ask for the native files so that if they, you know, win the lottery and decide they're going to not do this anymore, that I won't be stuck.
[00:19:49] Ricardo: Yeah, that's a great point to ask for the raw files, and to make sure in terms of the rights as well that they give you, worldwide reusable license, where you can do pretty much whatever you want with a cover. That's included within our terms on Reedsy. So if you reach out to someone, you basically, unless the attached different terms with someone, you automatically get the rights to whatever they produce.
[00:20:10] But if you're reaching out to someone else, to someone outside Reedsy, then make sure that you get your contract language rights when asking for the rights. Especially if you're reaching out to a famous illustrator, for example, and then they will generally work with very specific sets of licenses, and you'll need commercial license. And so you'll need to research a well of licenses a little bit more.
[00:20:30] But in terms of, yeah, the programs. I'd say, yeah, you probably were unlucky to land a designer who didn't use Illustrator or Photoshop. There's a bit of everything out there. And it's true that for very custom illustration or digital painting, we're talking about was like creating a dragon from scratch, for fantasy or like a spaceship for sci-fi. Some might use apps on their iPad or all their illustrator apps that I don't even know off myself. So it's always worth asking what they're using and what the raw file that they deliver is going to be.
[00:21:04] And I think it's a great point you make that in hiring someone for the art and hiring someone for the text. A lot of times, and we see that at Reedsy as well, there are really great illustrators, but they're not great at typography. And these are two different skills. And in order to be a really good cover designer, you need to have both. You need to be able to create a great image and to place the text effectively on it with a font that matches the genre that is legible at thumbnail size, et cetera.
[00:21:31] And for some genres, again fantasy, sci-fi, for example, it can be a good idea to hire someone amazing to do an amazing digital painting exactly how you want it, but then hire someone else to place the text on it because that illustrator in particular is not great at placing text.
[00:21:50] Matty: So now we're at the point where we've chosen the professional we want to work with and we've signed the contract with them via whatever platform we're using. To make it the best experience possible for both the client and the professional, what are some guidelines you have for how to work with the people that the author finds on a platform like that?
[00:22:10] Ricardo: I think communication is key to any kind of collaboration, and it remains true here. You want to communicate with them regularly, make sure that you deliver everything, and they ask on time. Most of the delays generally they're caused more by the author than by the professional or it's started by the author in that I'm delivering the manuscript one-week early, but yeah, that week delay causes another week delay on the professional side because they had another client at that time, so they had to skip a week. So it's another week and yeah. So make sure that you stick to the timelines that you promise a professional. So make sure you said realistic timelines to start with.
[00:22:44] And communicate often, but without obviously without harassing the designer. If they say that, 'Yeah, I'm going to come back to you with a five cover concepts on Friday', don't message them on Thursday asking, 'Hey, so tomorrow you're sending me five cover concepts, right?' They'll be like, ' yes, they'll be coming tomorrow.' If on Friday or Saturday, you haven't gotten anything can say, 'Hey, do I know things can be busy. When you think we will have those five cover concepts for me?' And that's obviously naturally fine.
[00:23:11] And then it depends on the type of collaboration. For cover design, the communication happens mostly when you get the first run of concepts, you can say, 'Okay, I like this one, but I'd prefer this character in this corner instead, or maybe I think this element is missing. Maybe I like this bit about concept two but applied to concept three.' And so you give a little bit of feedback to the designer and then they go by, they produce another round of concepts and then you take it from there.
[00:23:36] So I think there's an element, especially when it comes to design and element of knowing what you want mixed with leaving the professional enough creative freedom to come up with their own concepts. So don't tell them 'I want a blonde woman on the cover with a dog, a sailboat, a lighthouse, and then a chameleon and that has to be in the guard because all these elements are important in my book.'
[00:24:02] That kind of work, you tell them, okay, it's in a tropical island. There's obviously a strong protagonist who is a blonde woman, that a dog plays an important role, but we might have it or not on the cover. And we need to talk more about the feelings that cover should evoke rather than elements that should be on it. I wanted the cover to make people feel like they can take a mojito and go down to the beach. That's the feeling I want to convey, and there's going to be a bit of adventure and thrill and let the designer run with that and create something that matches that, that feeling.
[00:24:30] So I think, yeah leaving creative freedom is really important because they might surprise you. You might have a very strong idea of the cover in your mind. But all of the times we see that on Reedsy, we see clients who come in with a very clear idea and then the designer creates something completely different. They're like, wow, that's so much better. So leave the room for that to happen.
[00:24:47] Matty: Yeah, one of the episodes is going to go out shortly before yours is Episode 88, which is Tiffany Yates Martin talking about how to receive and give critique. And this was focused on textual critique. And one of her pieces of advice was absorb the critique and then let it sit for a little bit. And I think the same is true certainly if you're working with an editorial professional, but even with cover design, when you get it, your reaction might be, oh my God, that's so much better than I even imagined. Or it could be, that's nothing like I imagined. And you have to balance that, you know, don't sit with it for a week thinking about it, but at least sit with it for a couple of hours. Don't immediately respond to what you're seeing.
[00:25:24] And the other practice I've tried to follow myself is that I'll have a document where I'll start writing down my reactions like, oh, it's too dark or I don't want to see that much of the protagonist's face, and the font is wrong. I'll just do this sort of stream of consciousness and then I'll go away for a couple of hours and then I'll come back, and I'll go, 'No, I don't think it's too dark after all.' So I'll scratch that one off. And so after a couple of hours or maybe a day, now I have my boiled down, summarized, yes, this is my, more well thought out response to it. And that's what I then send to the creator. Which I think avoids a lot of thrash of saying 'It's too dark', 'No, it's not too dark', 'No, maybe it's too dark after all'.
[00:26:06] Ricardo: Yeah, that's a really good point. And what I love to do as well as sticking the cover that they sent or the concept that they send, the one that you like and not looking at it on a blank page with nothing around it, but you go on Amazon, and you open the top hundred in your category and you substitute one of the covers there for the cover of sent to you. You look at it, whether it fits naturally in there. It could be among all these best-selling titles or not. Maybe there you see that, yeah, it is too dark because all the other ones are much brighter. Or there you see that it's the right, it's the right amount of darkness. So it's a horror book, so it shouldn't be dark. But that's a great way of seeing whether it fits well within your genre.
[00:26:45] Matty: I really like that advice. And that would have saved me a rebrand of my first Lizzy Ballard book because I loved the design, and because it was the first in the series, I was advertising it a lot. But I realized it was so dark and subtle that in a page like that, it totally got lost. And you didn't see the little bits that I had loved about it. And so I got it redone a bit brighter and with more motion in it and things like that. So I love the idea of faking it in there to see how it looks in a bunch of thumbnails.
[00:27:16] Ricardo: Yeah, and the great thing about covers is that they can be different for ebook and paperback. There's a fantasy author, epic fantasy, indie author whom I really liked Michael Miller, and he had initial covers for his trilogy that were very much illustration, black and white and another color, something very simple, and I love his covers. But then he created different, or he had another type of cover commission that is working a lot better for him that is more the kind of cover for epic, fancy nowadays with the proper character, scene of war, flags, et cetera. And that's working much better for him to drive digital sales and Kindle Unlimited page reads. But he's keeping the old covers for the paperbacks and the hardbacks, because like his fans tend to like those covers more.
[00:28:02] And there are covers that, as you mentioned, they work much better in print. Because you see it in big and you can appreciate all the details and you spend more time looking at the cover when you have the book in your hands. When you're browsing through Amazon, you don't really click on the cover even. You don't make the cover bigger. You'd click on the Look Inside, but you don't scroll back up to look at every detail in the cover. No one does that. So yeah, you can have different covers for ebook and paperback and it can actually be a really strong strategy.
[00:28:27] Matty: That's very interesting. I never thought about that, but it makes total sense, especially if a fan is getting the set and they want book five to look like book one did so there's that consistency.
[00:28:38] I think that another, this is jumping back a little bit to something you had said earlier, that the idea of breaking down the deliverables into smaller bits can help move the schedule along. So rather than saying, now it's January 1st and I want to have my finished book cover by the end of February or whatever, say I want to have the initial design by January 15th, and then I want to have round two by January 20th or whatever. Does that work with a platform like Reedsy?
[00:29:06] Ricardo: Yeah, you can ask that. Generally the designers are like the professionals, they quote per project. So in their quote, they're going to give you a timeline and the time is going to be defined by the start of the project and the end of the project. So you need to agree on a date when you'll have your final cover, basically.
[00:29:21] But within the brief, you can mention the different steps. You can say, 'Okay, I'd like the first round of concepts on that date, et cetera' with the goal of having the final cover by the end date. And what that does, it also shows the designer that you know about the process, that first and initial round of concepts and there's an iteration, et cetera, and that makes them want to work with you. Like it makes them more likely to send you a quote, because they know that you're going to be less work than a brand-new indy author who knows nothing about the process of cover design and they're going to ask them about how to upload the cover afterwards, what to do with the cover, what is KDP, et cetera.
[00:29:55] So showing that you understand the process, you've done this before, et cetera, or you've researched it, it definitely makes professionals want to work with you. Which is actually important if even if you're paying them, it's important to make them want to work with you, so that first they work better. Second, they might give you a little bit of a discount, they feel like it's going to take them a lot less work to work with you than with other authors. They might charge you a little bit less. And then a lot of professionals are booked in weeks and months in advance at least the professionals on Reedsy, there far in advance and they don't have a lot of slots in their calendar. So if there's a really popular designer you absolutely want to hire, you want to make it as attractive as possible to work with you.
[00:30:32] Matty: I'm kind of sticking with book cover design because we're going down this path, but if someone wants to make sure they have a slot with a designer, how early in the process can you solicit that work? You know, if you're saying I'm anticipating that I'll be done with it in a month, and at that point, I'll know for sure whether I want a dragon on the cover or not. Can you book them ahead even before you have your spec for them?
[00:30:58] Ricardo: Yeah, you definitely can. You definitely can. I'd say maybe two, three months in advance tops, because otherwise, they might forget, and you might forget. But you can definitely do that. I think it applies even more to editing because for design, they can generally get started quicker and they do need more elements to get started. Like they need the final title. You're not going to create the cover until you have the final title, for example.
[00:31:19] For editing, you can definitely book people up to six months or a year in advance. And editors, they very much had their own calendars with, like, these two weeks we're going to be dedicated to developmental edit for this author. At the end of that week, I'm going to start the editorial assessment for another author. So there are a lot more organized like that. And the best developmental editors are booked up to three months in advance or even six, sometimes.
[00:31:44] So the authors who work regularly with them, they have an understanding of 'If you're going to be done with your book and with the revisions by December, reach out to me now, reach out to me in August. ‘You’re telling me, 'Okay, I'm booking you for a developmental edit for that book' and comes December, you book them, you generally pay a little bit of an upfront fee just to get on their calendar again, on the schedule. December comes, you send them the manuscript and they do the developmental edit for you. So yeah, it becomes easier once you have a relationship with the editor, obviously.
[00:32:14] But if this is your first book, make sure you take your time. I see too many authors rushing the publication because you know, a lot of months, a lot of years writing that book. It's been a lot of effort and you want to get it out as soon as possible. We'll get people to read it, and see the fruits of your labor, but it's actually can help to wait even started writing on book two and then take your time to hire the right people to work on the book. Take your time to develop a nice marketing plan, build your street team, send out some advance review copies, take your time to know the pre-marketing, the pre-launch marketing of a book. Because when the book launches, that's the right moment to market it, that's the 30, 90 days after the book launches are where you should concentrate your marketing activity.
[00:32:53] And if you launch the book, but then you realize, oh yeah, but it doesn't really have the right cover. But it doesn't have reviews and I don't know anyone who's going to review it. It's not too late at that point because you can always republish a book afterwards, but you've yeah, you wasted the launch, basically.
[00:33:08] Matty: Great, I also liked that because it's a cautionary note to the people who are doing the hiring to not change your schedule once you set it. You had described the kind of slotting that an editor for example is doing. So recognize that if you authors don't meet your deadline, then you're making life difficult for the person who had that time allocated to you in their schedule.
[00:33:31] Ricardo: Absolutely. Yeah.
[00:33:32] Matty: So I wanted to finally ask, you just had your first book released, HOW TO MARKET A BOOK: OVER-PERFORM IN A CROWDED MARKET. So was there anything about your experience there as an author that made you look differently at the services that Reedsy offers?
[00:33:47] Ricardo: I think I was surprised by the copy-editing part because it was the first time I had a copy edit done on the full manuscript. I didn't hire anyone to do the developmental edit because we knew what we were writing about basically. And I didn't feel the need for a developmental edit. Also it's very much niche. But I had a copy edit performed on it and yeah, I was shocked at the amount of changes. And the consistency you achieve. I realized that I wrote 'pre-order' in maybe three or four different ways in the book: one hyphen, space, no space, no hyphen. So, yeah, I think you really realize the value of a service once you hire someone really good at that, and you see the value and the difference.
[00:34:25] But other than that, we work in the house for the cover design, and it was a fun process because we have an illustrator within Reedsy, and there were definitely a bunch of rounds of different concepts. And I wrote the book but I'm not alone in publishing it. It's a Reedsy effort. So we got a bunch of different feedback for the cover, which was really good. And it's true that the first ones of concepts I liked, I was going to run with them. But the rest of the team especially our designer, Matt, they were not convinced. And by taking more time on the cover, we actually produce something that's much, much, much stronger, and that's definitely worked well.
[00:34:58] Yeah. The advice of taking your time, not rushing things, just because we want to see the book out there. I definitely wanted to see that book out there, but I'm glad that we took our time and make sure that it could look as good as it could have one coming out.
[00:35:11] Matty: Great. Well, Ricardo, thank you so much for spending the time talking about helping authors find the crew for their creative voyage. Please let listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and Reedsy online.
[00:35:22] Ricardo: For sure. So you can find more about Reedsy at reedsy.com and you can see all the services. There's a services tab where you can see all the different kinds of edits, design, illustration, and all the services that you can hire for at Reedsy.
[00:35:38] And for me personally, you can find me on Twitter, you can find me on Clubhouse, but the easiest way to reach out to me is by email. [email protected]. Very simple. And I check my email inbox a lot more often than I check my Facebook, Twitter, Clubhouse, or whatever feed. So yeah, any additional question, don't hesitate to drop me a line.
[00:02:49] Then we do a little bit of a background check. Like we make sure that they've worked on the books that they say that works on. We checked like the credentials in the books, or if they see that worked five years, and Penguin Random House and all the books in their portfolio have been published by Harper Collins, we start asking questions. Things like that.
[00:03:03] And for marketers, for example, for author website design, we have project section where they can highlight specific projects and give actual metrics of, like, 'I ran Amazon as for an author for two months, this is the ACOS we achieved, the number of sales, et cetera, with screenshots.'
[00:03:19] So every profile is a little bit different, but we basically judge each professional based on what they have input within their profile. If we see some value, we work with them to get them to finish a profile. And if we feel like they're not going to meet our selection criteria, then we would just let them know.
[00:03:36] Matty: I have to say I'm a happy client of Reedsy for my cover design. So was super happy to find the cover designer I found. And I'll also say having used a couple of platforms that are sort of like Reedsy, is that the user interface is very nice. I've actually had good luck on some other platforms, but it's always a bit of a thrash because sometimes these the user interface is not that nice, and I really like Reedsy.
[00:03:59] Ricardo: I'll let our designer know.
[00:04:00] Matty: Yes. Thank you.
[00:04:02] So if you put yourself in the place of the authors who are thinking about using Reedsy services, there are some things that an author, if they decide to pursue it, is not going to be able to do themselves, like translation probably. There are other things that they could do themselves if they prioritize it, had the time, maybe took some online courses or whatever. How do you advise authors to judge when they've reached a point where they should be outsourcing some of the work that they're now doing themselves?
[00:04:33] Ricardo: Yeah. I think first you need to know what your skills are and what you enjoy doing. I know some authors who do really, really well without hiring editors. Because they're used to writing in their genre. They know their stories, they know their plots and they're really good at copying and proofreading, even if it's their own words. These are outliers, same as people who design their own covers because they have a graphic design background, they've really researched their genre, they know what covers should look like in that genre and they're able to create that themselves and they're great typographers as well. And they do it themselves. So they're outliers as well.
[00:05:08] So, if you want to take on one of these skills, which is entirely different from writing, whether it's design even translation, author website design, things like that, then you need to, I think first have this some skills and enjoy the idea also of learning more to further your skills.
[00:05:22] So let's say you love illustrating, or you're really good at that design in general, and you want to do your own covers, starting to create the cover out of what you think your cover should be. You research your genre are very well and start taking courses on Photoshop or Sketch. If you want to do your own formatting, then take courses on InDesign. If it's like a complex interior formatting, for example, for a children's book, for simpler layouts, then you just need to purchase Vellum or use a free Reedsy book editor, there are other tools for formatting.
[00:05:49] But yeah, I think you need the skills, you need the will to learn, and you need to really like doing that stuff. And also needs to get to the point that you're able to do both things. You're able to write the next book and at the same time do the cover for the next book. And if that becomes too difficult, it will usually be much easier and much more effective to hire someone to do the next cover, rather than hire someone to write the next book and you do the cover for it.
[00:06:13] Matty: Yeah, it's a very difficult calculus. And my approach was totally different when I was doing my writing and publishing as a side gig to my day job. I assess things differently than now that I'm doing it full-time and I'm trying to make eventually a living wage from it. Now, I wouldn't say I'm making a living wage yet, but fortunately I'd saved enough from my corporate job that I have some runway in order to make that transition. But when it comes right down to it, and I think let's say running ads, that I'm trying to weigh the value of my time, basically. The value of my time between doing it myself or outsourcing it. When people are trying to apply those very objective criteria, any different advice you have for people in that situation?
[00:07:00] Ricardo: Yeah. It's really hard. Basically, it's really hard to find someone to do your marketing for you, whatever kind of marketing it is. So marketing is a bit of a special service. We have book marketers on Reedsy. We have some people running ads, but they're always at maximum capacity, because I think there are a lot more authors looking for ads people than there are ads people with a capacity of working with authors, at least right now.
[00:07:24] But it's definitely a case of first you need to understand the ads yourself. So I definitely encourage authors to take courses, there are a bunch of free resources. We've got free courses on Reedsy. Bryan Cohen has got a free Amazon Ads Challenge. Dave Chesson on Kindlepreneur has free Amazon ads courses as well. You can go a long way with a bunch of free resources, blog posts, videos, et cetera, to learn about advertising. Once you have that knowledge, you try to implement it yourself. If you see that it's working relatively well, let it show its promise, then you can think about outsourcing it to a professional was going to not only do it for you for a few months, but teach you how to do it long time.
[00:07:57] I do think that working with a professional advertiser on the long run, like over several years, you need to be selling a lot of books, like making maybe six figure income or more in order to justify that because advertisers are not particularly cheap. Professional book marketers who specialize in advertising, they're not cheap. So if you need to pay for the advertising costs plus their fee, you need to be selling a lot of books to be able to afford that.
[00:08:25] Matty: I really like the idea of dipping your toe in it or wading in a little bit first because I'll use a book cover design as an example. So all my book covers except one have been professionally designed. And the one that hasn't is my most recent non-fiction book, THE INDY AUTHOR GUIDE TO PODCASTING FOR AUTHORS. And the approach I took with that is that I'd had my other non-fiction book, TAKING THE SHORT TACK, the cover of that professionally designed. And the designer who did that had picked fonts and a layout that I would never have come up with if I had been trying to do it myself. But once I had the general idea, I could go to Canva and make something that was sort of based on that design use the same fonts, kind of the same layout, put the elements in the same place.
[00:09:07] And I did that because I was following J. Thorn's advice about trying out a minimum viable product and seeing if there was interest. And then if there was interest taking sort of the next step. So now, I'm at the step where I'm now looping back with a professional designer and say, can you just tidy this up a bit? Cause I know a professional is going to bring a different eye to it.
[00:09:28] But what I found was valuable about that is that, in addition to this testing approach, is that it gave me a sense of what a professional designer was going through. Like now, I kind of had a sense about different elements and what you could and couldn't do with them. What was an easy change in what was a hard change. And I'm never going to do it in InDesign or Photoshop, but if I did it in Canva, it at least gave me a little bit of a language, a little bit of common ground to talk about that with the professional when I got to that point. So I like that idea of having some understanding of what you're asking the professional to do, and what's involved in that.
[00:10:07] Ricardo: No, absolutely. I think that's a really good, that's a really good approach. Because if you're going to have a long-term relationship with someone, it's important to understand what the basics of their job are and be able to communicate exactly your expectations. I think, for cover design it's probably simpler cause you see the end result. For other collaborations like marketing, it's a lot. You definitely need the knowledge, because you want to be following what the marketer is doing. For example, if you hire someone to do your Amazon ads, but you know nothing about Amazon ads after two weeks, the marketer tells you, 'Hey, your ACOS is 50% so we're doing a great job.'
[00:10:42] If you don't know what ACOS says, if you don't know what your royalty is, if you don't know whether the campaigns are for your print book or the ebook or both, You don't know whether that's actually a good result or not. Like 50% ACOS could be ' eh' or it could be terrible. It all depends on how much actual royalty you're making on the sales.
[00:10:58] So it's definitely important, I think, for these types of collaborations to you to have a strong understanding of at least the basics of advertising and of the targets, the metrics. How are you going to evaluate the performance of the professional?
[00:11:13] Matty: Another interesting way that collaborating is both good and tricky is that, of course the author knows their book better than anybody, but that can be a pro and a con. You know, you get so locked into something that maybe you're not seeing the forest for the trees. And so if you go to a platform like Reedsy and you're looking for a book cover designer with experience in a certain genre, which you can do on that platform, then they have a sense of, like right now in historical thrillers, I know that the big rage is a woman dressed in red from the back with World War II airplanes in the sky and either Paris or London in the background with Big Ben or the Eiffel Tower or whatever it is. And you might not know that if you've had your head down in the book you're writing and not looking across the scope of what's out there.
[00:12:03] Are there guidelines that you can offer in terms of, and let's talk about book cover design specifically, if someone is looking for a book cover designer, are there specific things they can look for to indicate whether that designer in fact does understand the tropes of that genre?
[00:12:19] Ricardo: Yeah. First, you need to search by genre, as you mentioned. So we've got a drop down of genre you can search within it and there are sub genres as well. So I think there is historical fiction. There won't be for example, World War II. So if you've written a World War II historical fiction and you really want someone who's done covers for that very specific kind of book before, then you can use a keyword search. I think in a lot of authors are not taking advantage of that on Reedsy, but it works pretty well. So you type in World War II or WW2 and that will pull up more profiles, of historical article fiction cover designers who've done covers for World War II books in the past.
[00:12:57] And then you just check out their portfolios, see which books are similar to yours, whether you like their covers or not, and check how they're selling. You know, if they're best sellers in your genre, then gave him, this guy has designed a best-selling World War II historical fiction book, and so he's probably a good person to reach out to. That's how I would go about it.
[00:13:17] I also always encourage authors to check the top hundred books in their category on Amazon before reaching out to cover designers, and then matching the general idea of that top 100 to the cover designer’s portfolios. If you see, okay, this person has done the exact style of the books that tend to do well in this category, then that person's probably a good person to reach out to for a cover design.
[00:13:41] Matty: Another thing that one needs to assess when going to a platform like Reedsy or others like it is obviously cost. And so I think on a platform like Reedsy, where my impression is that the professionals on there are quite heavily vetted, then I think you get more on the upper end of the spectrum because they've gotten past that vetting process. You can go to a platform like Fiverr, and although you're not necessarily spending $5you could probably get a book or to sign on Fiverr for five bucks.
[00:14:11] So even within the narrower scope of Reedsy professionals, do you have any guidance for people when they're seeing, oh, this person would do the job for a hundred dollars, but this person would do the job for a thousand dollars. What factors should people weigh to understand whether it's worth going for the higher one or a better idea to go for the lower one?
[00:14:30] Ricardo: Yeah, it's a really good question. The thing is that it's a relatively new market, right? What's with author services that are relatively new market and that before 2012, 2013 it didn't exist. So it's very much non-transparent. If we take the example of editing, most of the editors on Reedsy was professional editors out there, they come from somewhat of a traditional publishing background, right? So they were an acquisitions editor at Harper Collins and then they left for whatever reason, and they became freelance, and they don't necessarily know how to set their rates because they're going from a monthly salary to, 'I need to charge per project, probably per word or pre-paid, or hour worked.'
[00:15:08] So when we came in, we saw very big variety in terms of quotes. And we started creating a blog post, which we update yearly called THE COST OF SELF PUBLISHING, which is actually just the cost of editing and cover design, really. And we pull the averages of quotes on the marketplace for the different types of services. And what we see when we pull those averages is that they're very much averages, but you can get people who charge almost double the average and people who charge half, depending on, you know, where they're based genres, et cetera.
[00:15:36] What we've also found is that authors rarely go for the cheapest option. They generally go for either the higher one or the one in between. Maybe it's psychological. But if you're faced with like different quotes, I would try asking very politely and very nicely to the highest, the person offering the highest quote, and if you're interested in working with them, tell them, ‘Look, you’re the highest quote out of four people I have contacted on Reedsy, can you tell me a little bit more about that?' Or like, 'why would you justify it?' And see what they come back with.
[00:16:03] In the case of cover design, it's often obvious. The ones who charge most upwards of a thousand dollars, they have the capacity to do custom photo shoots. They do like custom digital painting, and they have very big clients. The covers tend to look a little bit better than all the covers that are maybe $250 or $500 or $700. So again, you're going to see the difference, but it's basically based on the resources that they have to put into doing it.
[00:16:27] So generally, there are pretty simple reasons for why someone's going to charge more. Sometimes down to experience, they've done this for 30 years and they feel they can charge more. Sometimes it's based on like, especially around editing, we have service called editorial assessment and that's obviously going to be different for every type of editor.
[00:16:44] Some editors are going to charge $1,500 or $2,000 for an editorial assessment, but they're going to come back with a 30-page report plus notes in the manuscript. All those are going to charge maybe $700 for an editorial assessment that they've gone on to come back with a 15-page report. So always ask exactly what the deliverables are going to be. And that's going to be much more helpful than just dollar numbers when comparing quotes.
[00:17:07] Matty: Yeah. Over time, I've assembled a fairly detailed list of what I need from book cover designers. So I need a cover for KDP. I need to cover for Ingram. I need print and eBooks. I need audio books. I don't need the social media extras that they can provide. And that's been very helpful.
[00:17:25] And the other experience I've had, and this was on Reedsy when I was looking for my book cover designer, is to be able to set an expectation for the professional about what the ongoing need will be. So I was doing an overhaul of my Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels, and once somebody came up with the initial design, then each book was going to be that same font, that same layout, it was going to have one central image that was different, and then some professional adjustment of that, darkening at, or brightening it, or clipping out distracting details or something like that. And so when I made the quote, I said, 'I'm expecting this series to go on for a while.' And so each book cover might be a little bit of a back and forth to get the first one, but one once we've got the first one, the other ones are going to be much faster. And most of the people who responded, did say, oh yeah, that's good, then it would be this much for the first one, and then it would be this lower amount for the follow-on ones. So if they understand what the long game is then they can respond more appropriately with their quotes.
[00:18:25] Ricardo: Yeah, absolutely and I think that's a great idea to save on costs, and to ensure a consistent branding for cover design is reaching out. If you're just planning a series of six or seven books, even if you've only written book one, you have an idea for the broad outlines and the characters in the following books, we can commission all covers at once. And that's an asset you can use in your marketing afterwards.
[00:18:47] Matty: Another thing that it didn't occur to me to ask as part of my vetting process is what system they were going to be using. And so when I got the covers done for my Lizzy Ballard Thrillers, I got the design, loved, it, loved everything he did. He was super responsive, but I found that when it got to text, it wasn't so good. So I thought, okay, fine. I'll pay this guy to do the artsy stuff. And then I'll just pay someone else a small amount to do the text.
[00:19:15] And it turned out he was working in, I don't know, CorelDRAW or something like that. Something that honest to God, I didn't think was even available anymore. And so the person who picked it up, basically I had all the bits and pieces, but they had to reassemble it into an actual modern design package. So it's actually worth asking a designer if they're working in a program that is relatively common, because as part of my contract, I always do ask for the native files so that if they, you know, win the lottery and decide they're going to not do this anymore, that I won't be stuck.
[00:19:49] Ricardo: Yeah, that's a great point to ask for the raw files, and to make sure in terms of the rights as well that they give you, worldwide reusable license, where you can do pretty much whatever you want with a cover. That's included within our terms on Reedsy. So if you reach out to someone, you basically, unless the attached different terms with someone, you automatically get the rights to whatever they produce.
[00:20:10] But if you're reaching out to someone else, to someone outside Reedsy, then make sure that you get your contract language rights when asking for the rights. Especially if you're reaching out to a famous illustrator, for example, and then they will generally work with very specific sets of licenses, and you'll need commercial license. And so you'll need to research a well of licenses a little bit more.
[00:20:30] But in terms of, yeah, the programs. I'd say, yeah, you probably were unlucky to land a designer who didn't use Illustrator or Photoshop. There's a bit of everything out there. And it's true that for very custom illustration or digital painting, we're talking about was like creating a dragon from scratch, for fantasy or like a spaceship for sci-fi. Some might use apps on their iPad or all their illustrator apps that I don't even know off myself. So it's always worth asking what they're using and what the raw file that they deliver is going to be.
[00:21:04] And I think it's a great point you make that in hiring someone for the art and hiring someone for the text. A lot of times, and we see that at Reedsy as well, there are really great illustrators, but they're not great at typography. And these are two different skills. And in order to be a really good cover designer, you need to have both. You need to be able to create a great image and to place the text effectively on it with a font that matches the genre that is legible at thumbnail size, et cetera.
[00:21:31] And for some genres, again fantasy, sci-fi, for example, it can be a good idea to hire someone amazing to do an amazing digital painting exactly how you want it, but then hire someone else to place the text on it because that illustrator in particular is not great at placing text.
[00:21:50] Matty: So now we're at the point where we've chosen the professional we want to work with and we've signed the contract with them via whatever platform we're using. To make it the best experience possible for both the client and the professional, what are some guidelines you have for how to work with the people that the author finds on a platform like that?
[00:22:10] Ricardo: I think communication is key to any kind of collaboration, and it remains true here. You want to communicate with them regularly, make sure that you deliver everything, and they ask on time. Most of the delays generally they're caused more by the author than by the professional or it's started by the author in that I'm delivering the manuscript one-week early, but yeah, that week delay causes another week delay on the professional side because they had another client at that time, so they had to skip a week. So it's another week and yeah. So make sure that you stick to the timelines that you promise a professional. So make sure you said realistic timelines to start with.
[00:22:44] And communicate often, but without obviously without harassing the designer. If they say that, 'Yeah, I'm going to come back to you with a five cover concepts on Friday', don't message them on Thursday asking, 'Hey, so tomorrow you're sending me five cover concepts, right?' They'll be like, ' yes, they'll be coming tomorrow.' If on Friday or Saturday, you haven't gotten anything can say, 'Hey, do I know things can be busy. When you think we will have those five cover concepts for me?' And that's obviously naturally fine.
[00:23:11] And then it depends on the type of collaboration. For cover design, the communication happens mostly when you get the first run of concepts, you can say, 'Okay, I like this one, but I'd prefer this character in this corner instead, or maybe I think this element is missing. Maybe I like this bit about concept two but applied to concept three.' And so you give a little bit of feedback to the designer and then they go by, they produce another round of concepts and then you take it from there.
[00:23:36] So I think there's an element, especially when it comes to design and element of knowing what you want mixed with leaving the professional enough creative freedom to come up with their own concepts. So don't tell them 'I want a blonde woman on the cover with a dog, a sailboat, a lighthouse, and then a chameleon and that has to be in the guard because all these elements are important in my book.'
[00:24:02] That kind of work, you tell them, okay, it's in a tropical island. There's obviously a strong protagonist who is a blonde woman, that a dog plays an important role, but we might have it or not on the cover. And we need to talk more about the feelings that cover should evoke rather than elements that should be on it. I wanted the cover to make people feel like they can take a mojito and go down to the beach. That's the feeling I want to convey, and there's going to be a bit of adventure and thrill and let the designer run with that and create something that matches that, that feeling.
[00:24:30] So I think, yeah leaving creative freedom is really important because they might surprise you. You might have a very strong idea of the cover in your mind. But all of the times we see that on Reedsy, we see clients who come in with a very clear idea and then the designer creates something completely different. They're like, wow, that's so much better. So leave the room for that to happen.
[00:24:47] Matty: Yeah, one of the episodes is going to go out shortly before yours is Episode 88, which is Tiffany Yates Martin talking about how to receive and give critique. And this was focused on textual critique. And one of her pieces of advice was absorb the critique and then let it sit for a little bit. And I think the same is true certainly if you're working with an editorial professional, but even with cover design, when you get it, your reaction might be, oh my God, that's so much better than I even imagined. Or it could be, that's nothing like I imagined. And you have to balance that, you know, don't sit with it for a week thinking about it, but at least sit with it for a couple of hours. Don't immediately respond to what you're seeing.
[00:25:24] And the other practice I've tried to follow myself is that I'll have a document where I'll start writing down my reactions like, oh, it's too dark or I don't want to see that much of the protagonist's face, and the font is wrong. I'll just do this sort of stream of consciousness and then I'll go away for a couple of hours and then I'll come back, and I'll go, 'No, I don't think it's too dark after all.' So I'll scratch that one off. And so after a couple of hours or maybe a day, now I have my boiled down, summarized, yes, this is my, more well thought out response to it. And that's what I then send to the creator. Which I think avoids a lot of thrash of saying 'It's too dark', 'No, it's not too dark', 'No, maybe it's too dark after all'.
[00:26:06] Ricardo: Yeah, that's a really good point. And what I love to do as well as sticking the cover that they sent or the concept that they send, the one that you like and not looking at it on a blank page with nothing around it, but you go on Amazon, and you open the top hundred in your category and you substitute one of the covers there for the cover of sent to you. You look at it, whether it fits naturally in there. It could be among all these best-selling titles or not. Maybe there you see that, yeah, it is too dark because all the other ones are much brighter. Or there you see that it's the right, it's the right amount of darkness. So it's a horror book, so it shouldn't be dark. But that's a great way of seeing whether it fits well within your genre.
[00:26:45] Matty: I really like that advice. And that would have saved me a rebrand of my first Lizzy Ballard book because I loved the design, and because it was the first in the series, I was advertising it a lot. But I realized it was so dark and subtle that in a page like that, it totally got lost. And you didn't see the little bits that I had loved about it. And so I got it redone a bit brighter and with more motion in it and things like that. So I love the idea of faking it in there to see how it looks in a bunch of thumbnails.
[00:27:16] Ricardo: Yeah, and the great thing about covers is that they can be different for ebook and paperback. There's a fantasy author, epic fantasy, indie author whom I really liked Michael Miller, and he had initial covers for his trilogy that were very much illustration, black and white and another color, something very simple, and I love his covers. But then he created different, or he had another type of cover commission that is working a lot better for him that is more the kind of cover for epic, fancy nowadays with the proper character, scene of war, flags, et cetera. And that's working much better for him to drive digital sales and Kindle Unlimited page reads. But he's keeping the old covers for the paperbacks and the hardbacks, because like his fans tend to like those covers more.
[00:28:02] And there are covers that, as you mentioned, they work much better in print. Because you see it in big and you can appreciate all the details and you spend more time looking at the cover when you have the book in your hands. When you're browsing through Amazon, you don't really click on the cover even. You don't make the cover bigger. You'd click on the Look Inside, but you don't scroll back up to look at every detail in the cover. No one does that. So yeah, you can have different covers for ebook and paperback and it can actually be a really strong strategy.
[00:28:27] Matty: That's very interesting. I never thought about that, but it makes total sense, especially if a fan is getting the set and they want book five to look like book one did so there's that consistency.
[00:28:38] I think that another, this is jumping back a little bit to something you had said earlier, that the idea of breaking down the deliverables into smaller bits can help move the schedule along. So rather than saying, now it's January 1st and I want to have my finished book cover by the end of February or whatever, say I want to have the initial design by January 15th, and then I want to have round two by January 20th or whatever. Does that work with a platform like Reedsy?
[00:29:06] Ricardo: Yeah, you can ask that. Generally the designers are like the professionals, they quote per project. So in their quote, they're going to give you a timeline and the time is going to be defined by the start of the project and the end of the project. So you need to agree on a date when you'll have your final cover, basically.
[00:29:21] But within the brief, you can mention the different steps. You can say, 'Okay, I'd like the first round of concepts on that date, et cetera' with the goal of having the final cover by the end date. And what that does, it also shows the designer that you know about the process, that first and initial round of concepts and there's an iteration, et cetera, and that makes them want to work with you. Like it makes them more likely to send you a quote, because they know that you're going to be less work than a brand-new indy author who knows nothing about the process of cover design and they're going to ask them about how to upload the cover afterwards, what to do with the cover, what is KDP, et cetera.
[00:29:55] So showing that you understand the process, you've done this before, et cetera, or you've researched it, it definitely makes professionals want to work with you. Which is actually important if even if you're paying them, it's important to make them want to work with you, so that first they work better. Second, they might give you a little bit of a discount, they feel like it's going to take them a lot less work to work with you than with other authors. They might charge you a little bit less. And then a lot of professionals are booked in weeks and months in advance at least the professionals on Reedsy, there far in advance and they don't have a lot of slots in their calendar. So if there's a really popular designer you absolutely want to hire, you want to make it as attractive as possible to work with you.
[00:30:32] Matty: I'm kind of sticking with book cover design because we're going down this path, but if someone wants to make sure they have a slot with a designer, how early in the process can you solicit that work? You know, if you're saying I'm anticipating that I'll be done with it in a month, and at that point, I'll know for sure whether I want a dragon on the cover or not. Can you book them ahead even before you have your spec for them?
[00:30:58] Ricardo: Yeah, you definitely can. You definitely can. I'd say maybe two, three months in advance tops, because otherwise, they might forget, and you might forget. But you can definitely do that. I think it applies even more to editing because for design, they can generally get started quicker and they do need more elements to get started. Like they need the final title. You're not going to create the cover until you have the final title, for example.
[00:31:19] For editing, you can definitely book people up to six months or a year in advance. And editors, they very much had their own calendars with, like, these two weeks we're going to be dedicated to developmental edit for this author. At the end of that week, I'm going to start the editorial assessment for another author. So there are a lot more organized like that. And the best developmental editors are booked up to three months in advance or even six, sometimes.
[00:31:44] So the authors who work regularly with them, they have an understanding of 'If you're going to be done with your book and with the revisions by December, reach out to me now, reach out to me in August. ‘You’re telling me, 'Okay, I'm booking you for a developmental edit for that book' and comes December, you book them, you generally pay a little bit of an upfront fee just to get on their calendar again, on the schedule. December comes, you send them the manuscript and they do the developmental edit for you. So yeah, it becomes easier once you have a relationship with the editor, obviously.
[00:32:14] But if this is your first book, make sure you take your time. I see too many authors rushing the publication because you know, a lot of months, a lot of years writing that book. It's been a lot of effort and you want to get it out as soon as possible. We'll get people to read it, and see the fruits of your labor, but it's actually can help to wait even started writing on book two and then take your time to hire the right people to work on the book. Take your time to develop a nice marketing plan, build your street team, send out some advance review copies, take your time to know the pre-marketing, the pre-launch marketing of a book. Because when the book launches, that's the right moment to market it, that's the 30, 90 days after the book launches are where you should concentrate your marketing activity.
[00:32:53] And if you launch the book, but then you realize, oh yeah, but it doesn't really have the right cover. But it doesn't have reviews and I don't know anyone who's going to review it. It's not too late at that point because you can always republish a book afterwards, but you've yeah, you wasted the launch, basically.
[00:33:08] Matty: Great, I also liked that because it's a cautionary note to the people who are doing the hiring to not change your schedule once you set it. You had described the kind of slotting that an editor for example is doing. So recognize that if you authors don't meet your deadline, then you're making life difficult for the person who had that time allocated to you in their schedule.
[00:33:31] Ricardo: Absolutely. Yeah.
[00:33:32] Matty: So I wanted to finally ask, you just had your first book released, HOW TO MARKET A BOOK: OVER-PERFORM IN A CROWDED MARKET. So was there anything about your experience there as an author that made you look differently at the services that Reedsy offers?
[00:33:47] Ricardo: I think I was surprised by the copy-editing part because it was the first time I had a copy edit done on the full manuscript. I didn't hire anyone to do the developmental edit because we knew what we were writing about basically. And I didn't feel the need for a developmental edit. Also it's very much niche. But I had a copy edit performed on it and yeah, I was shocked at the amount of changes. And the consistency you achieve. I realized that I wrote 'pre-order' in maybe three or four different ways in the book: one hyphen, space, no space, no hyphen. So, yeah, I think you really realize the value of a service once you hire someone really good at that, and you see the value and the difference.
[00:34:25] But other than that, we work in the house for the cover design, and it was a fun process because we have an illustrator within Reedsy, and there were definitely a bunch of rounds of different concepts. And I wrote the book but I'm not alone in publishing it. It's a Reedsy effort. So we got a bunch of different feedback for the cover, which was really good. And it's true that the first ones of concepts I liked, I was going to run with them. But the rest of the team especially our designer, Matt, they were not convinced. And by taking more time on the cover, we actually produce something that's much, much, much stronger, and that's definitely worked well.
[00:34:58] Yeah. The advice of taking your time, not rushing things, just because we want to see the book out there. I definitely wanted to see that book out there, but I'm glad that we took our time and make sure that it could look as good as it could have one coming out.
[00:35:11] Matty: Great. Well, Ricardo, thank you so much for spending the time talking about helping authors find the crew for their creative voyage. Please let listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and Reedsy online.
[00:35:22] Ricardo: For sure. So you can find more about Reedsy at reedsy.com and you can see all the services. There's a services tab where you can see all the different kinds of edits, design, illustration, and all the services that you can hire for at Reedsy.
[00:35:38] And for me personally, you can find me on Twitter, you can find me on Clubhouse, but the easiest way to reach out to me is by email. [email protected]. Very simple. And I check my email inbox a lot more often than I check my Facebook, Twitter, Clubhouse, or whatever feed. So yeah, any additional question, don't hesitate to drop me a line.
Links
What did you think of this episode? Leave a comment and let us know!
