The Manuscript Goes Through
Reedsy flagged me this summer for sharing personal contact details with a professional working on my book.
The detail was my own book's website.
I should explain how I got there. Reedsy's messaging strips links, and my editor needs that address, because it goes in the back matter and on the cover brief. So I had taken to writing it out as "readthechain dot com," which is how you end up talking when a tool will not let you talk normally. I thought I was being helpful. Their system thought I was being sneaky, and honestly it had a point, because that is exactly what somebody being sneaky would type.
That irritated me more than it deserved, and once I started pulling at it the whole thing came apart in my hands.
The part that makes the rule pointless had been sitting in my sent folder the whole time. A few days earlier I sent my copy editor the entire manuscript. Four hundred pages, in a Word file, because Reedsy will not accept markdown, which for a book production platform still amuses me. And yeah, real live editors prefer Word anyway. The manuscript has my name on the title page, and the website is in the back matter, where it belongs, because that is where a reader goes looking for it. That file has to go through. It is the work. You cannot run a platform for book production and then refuse to transmit books (with links).
So the address I am not allowed to type into a message went down the same pipe, in the same week, inside the document the whole service exists to move.
And if I genuinely wanted to take a relationship off Reedsy, I would need four words in a footer, once. Nobody is finding that in ninety thousand, and no scanner is going to catch it without blocking manuscripts, which would end the company. The rule cannot reach anyone who means to break it. It reached me, because I was not hiding.
Underneath that, I think they are charging for the wrong thing.
What Reedsy actually sold me was discovery. I would not have found my copy editor on my own. The vetting is real, the shortlist is real, and I was happy to pay for it. They also delivered all of it in the first week. What they charge is ten per cent from me and ten per cent from her, on every payment, for as long as we work together. So the thing they sold and the thing they bill for drift further apart every month a collaboration runs, and that gap is the entire reason anyone is reading my messages.
They could take a finder's fee at the match, or a subscription, or a large cut of the first contract and a small one after. Any of those would price what they actually do, and none of them would need a scanner. They picked the model that obliges them to damage their own product in order to defend it.
What got under my skin, though, was the wording. The notice told me this "helps protect your collaboration" and keeps me "fully covered by our Project Protection policy," then thanked me for "helping us keep the platform safe and professional."
I would have taken the honest version fine. Twenty per cent is a lot of money to leave on the table, this is how we stop people walking off with it, please do not. I would have grumbled and complied like everyone else. It is being told that the fence around their revenue is there for my benefit.
Anyway. I have stopped writing "dot com." The address lives in the cover brief now, as copy, and in the back matter of the file I send, which is where it was always going to end up.
I wrote a novel about people who get past a review process without once breaking it. It still took me a week of being annoyed before I noticed the same thing happening to me from the other side.