Biweekly newsletter number four! In the past two weeks we had our first user from Warsaw, Poland, which is exciting. Then after much back-and-forth with one user in Stellenbosch, South Africa, we finally determined her profile couldn’t be published because Stripe, our payments processor, is not yet available there. Here’s hoping it’s soon on the way. We also coincidentally heard from someone from Stripe Press, their publishing arm, and very much worth checking out.
We also talked to a coach in Brighton, England, who is a licensed psychotherapist (in Germany) and it was one of those great conversations that slashed through mental knots with a surprising economy of effort. The gist was that she believed, rightly so, that we’d been looking at a problem too narrowly—and the best solution had a wider scope than we’d been considering. All this to say: We will change the name of the “Therapy” service category, but it’s not a matter of switching it to “Coaching,” because many people will assume we’re talking about writing coaching, and what we’re aiming at is something deeper, something that could speak to the person making the book as a thinking, feeling, sometimes hurting person, not just as craftsperson, professional, or artist.
By way of illustration: When I handed in the manuscript of my last book to my publisher, and was semi-enjoying those months of waiting for editor’s comments and page proofs, my publisher wanted to talk about publicity and social media strategy, and I wasn’t ready for it. I needed to have a conversation far further upstream. I needed to have roughly five conversations about other matters before I could talk about self-promotion. But those aren’t conversations you can easily have with your publisher. They literally don’t have time for it. So my thinking with EDITH was that we needed to make it OK for an author not to be totally together, poised to conquer the world. We should acknowledge that not everyone comes to the point of publication with the support they need, and sometimes their need has more to do with mental or emotional health than with financial resources or having enough hours in the day in which to tweet effectively.
In other EDITH news:
- We are making small improvements to the listing wizard. It’s incredible the number of tiny things that have to go right for a web page not to look a bit “off.” Just so, so many. But we’re getting there.
- A few of you have questions about pricing, which underscores the need to revamp the How It Works and About pages, and perhaps add another. It’s something we’ve wanted to do for a while, and your suggestions are most welcome. Just a reminder here that the EDITH commission fee is 6% as opposed to the 10% and even 20% seen elsewhere.
- The project manager on our technical team, Kate, is leaving us to work on sites built on the WordPress “tech stack” (this is developer-speak for “you don’t know what I’m talking about”). We’ll miss her but have confidence we’ll cross paths again.
- On the horizon: gift-card integration. Would it be fun to receive, say, a book cover design as a present? It’s one way to sidestep the supply chain breakdown we’ve been promised in time for the holidays.
Mood around the office lately:
Thanks for reading, and please be in touch with any questions or concerns. If some aspect of EDITH is not working for you, let us know. If there’s a feature you want to see, let us know that also.