Fooled! Beware!
Attention writers looking to book promotions for their novels or are considering paying for one or more of the thousands of marketing opportunities out there, watch out for booksandauthors.com. They solicited me without my having any previous knowledge of them and I decided to try it. I know, I know, at this point I should have been smart enough to know better.
Having had a particularly bad sales day, their gmail ad caught me at the worst time, somehow getting passed my spam folder. They claimed to have a Twitter account with 180,000 eager readers and followers. They have several author’s blurbs on their site claiming how the tweets took their ebooks to the top of the bestseller lists and, like I said, having had a bad day I thought to myself for $150 bucks, the site tweets my blurb for DROP OUT (After overcoming incredible personal tragedy Nathan Cruz meets a terminal, young woman who helps him find the strength to piece his shattered life back together. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005FX0K7U three times a day for a month. Seemed like a good deal to me.
Well, it didn’t go well from the start and after I realized that somehow the site had gained and lost tens of thousands of followers each day, anywhere from 120,000 to 240,000 followers in any given twenty-four hour period (I don’t even know how that is possible) I realized something was amiss. I emailed the site and asked to stop the promotion immediately and refund my money. I did this several times over the next two days, and each time an answer was given to just be patient and wait and see the results. I didn’t want to wait and they refused to refund!
It was right then that I realized I was f**ked. It just wasn’t worth the emotion and mental effort to pursue legal action so I gave up and swallowed my pride realizing that I had been had. The tweets to a hundred thousand ghost followers continued and my sales remained about the same as they did before the promotion.
Now that this Twitter promotion is ending and the wasted money is behind me, I will say one more thing to all writer’s out there desperate to do almost anything to get noticed: Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.
Read all about my marketing and promotional endeavors on my blog, ALWAYS WRITING: http://www.neilostroff.blogspot.com
Again, I try to warn everyone I know, that most POD publishers are only interested in an author's money. By self-publishing through Lightning Source (the only service that creates POD books) or by reading up on how these so-called publishing companies suck you in with specials and false promotion pitches through good sources like writers weekly.com, almost everyone is getting ripped off.
Ron