Predatory Publishing Practices to Watch Out For

Recently, a client of ours was told that his book was poorly edited and had a bad layout. This understandably made him very mad at us. The thing was, the company that told him this was trying to sell him. Guess what? Editorial services and layout. There are some pretty gross practices in the self publishing industry. So if you want to know some of the ugly things companies do to get your credit card, stick around because this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the book Broad, founder of Book Launchers, a fabulous self publishing services company. At Book Launchers, we take our work very seriously. We spend a ton of time hiring, vetting and training our team members and our editors are all trained, experienced and talented. And every book goes through at least three different kinds of developmental or content edits, copy edits, and proofread. Sometimes we do two content edits or two proofreads. We also have team members do quality checks in between. Do I need to tell you how much more money the company would make if we skipped some of this? A lot. But quality is critical to us. So you can imagine my horror when I got the email from a client saying he was told his book was not up to industry standards and that he was irate about this fact. The company had sent back a sample edit of chapter one, correcting the book. They made style changes, not edits. Like changing the word someone today and adding in words like of course. And they made the whole, whole tone more casual than our client had set it up to be in the first place. I went through the edits line by line and only found two things that were potential issues. The one was a missing word. Now the sentence worked without it, but it was better with it. The other was a choice to capitalize a phrase he was using in several places and capitalize it consistently. It was better capitalized, but it wasn't wrong. Not capitalized. So as I looked through this, I smelled something was off and I. I asked him if this company had. Oh dear, sorry, solicited him. Solicited him. There you go. I asked him if this was a company that had solicited him for some promised result. And it turns out that was in fact mostly the case and they were selling him services with a big promise and this was their hard sell tactic. It's pretty gross. Of course, that's not the only ugly practice we've seen used to sell services in this industry. So let me share a few others so. So that you know what to look out for. Number one, the submissions process. Hello, we're open for submissions. Welcome. We're taking submissions. One of the people on our team used to work for a company that did this call for submissions process and she said it was really embarrassing because they took every book, every single book. The only criteria to give somebody a book contract was that the credit card cleared. She said that her job was literally to call 100 plus people a day about their submission and sign them up for services. No quality control required. Just because a self publishing or hybrid company does a call for submissions doesn't mean it's a scam, but it's a common practice for companies that are just in it for your credit card. These companies often hide the fact that they're a paid service until you're accepted and really excited. Part of the salesperson's role is to convince the person to send in their manuscript for a free publication review. Then they get this big congratulatory letter telling them they were chosen to be published and that they would soon receive a contract with the details. Still no mention about it being a charge. Once the author was super excited, then they found out the price. The whole process is effective because their conversion rate was 30%. That's really high because we at Book Launchers end up working with less than 5% of the people who contact us to work with us. Sometimes people get mad at us because we turn them away, but we've done that because we're not the right company for them. It makes us feel terrible that some authors get upset at us, but it's in everyone's best interest that we work with. Only authors were a great fit to serve. When I heard this story from my team member, I felt great about our process. Our prices are on our website, our process is transparent, and even if someone doesn't like being told we're not a fit, I know it's the right thing to do. 2. Solicitations of most kinds this offer can be anything from foreign publishing to bestseller promotion to marketing services. The thing that I've found is our authors have sent us the variety of offers. Offers that they get is that it's extremely rare that a legitimate, honest business is soliciting you. Now, I did say rare, not never. Because occasionally that email asking about publishing your book in a different country is legit. And sometimes the pursuit of a license to use your book for some other purpose in a school, for training, or for reprint is also legit. I've also seen some companies that are looking for audiobooks and that's a legit thing. A quick Google search of the company name will be A good place to start getting a lawyer to help navigate the process would be a secondary action step. But before you do anything, any company soliciting you and promising a big result, like a bestseller or a number one result on Google, I get that one every day. They're not legit, so if you're curious, look at their promise. Does it sound too good to be true? Investigate their website, search the company name + reviews and look at the Ally Watchdog list. Some legitimate companies do make solicitations, but they're not making big promises when they do. If book launchers were to solicit, it would be something like this. Tobias Berger, YouTube Bestie I know you're working on a book and you haven't set up a call to talk with us yet. Let's get you published and make sure it's a book you're proud of for years to come. Okay? I just use that because you've openly disclosed that many times. But I know you're a do it yourself kind of guy and that's totally fine. But that's how I would solicit or I would say the Remmert method. Your story and advice. Fantastic. Let's get it into a page turning book. Can we chat? Okay. We already are and it's shaping up wonderfully. I'm really excited. But while I'm in the name dropping mood, let's give my YouTube besties a big shout out. When you comment on the videos the day they come out, which is every Tuesday and Friday, you get entered to win some of our sweet book launcher swag like our journal or our hashtag NoBoringBooksMug. And if you comment enough, then I get to know you as a big supporter of the channel and its visitors. Then you become a bestie. And it's an elite group of folks like Efren Delgado, Mike Herd, Rachel Robertson, I.J. king, Melissa Cook, Easy Graphics, and so many more. Thank you so much for your likes, shares and comments. You are the best besties a book launcher can ask for. Okay, the final practice of some of these predators in the publishing space is this number three, playing on your emotions with the promises. My team member that had the experience working with another company said this of her sales role. These are her words. We were basically encouraged to lie and talk about the potential the book had. Though we never made guarantees, we we were careful not to do that. But we would always say something like we can't guarantee sales success, but we'll do everything in our contract to help give you the best chance of Making your author dream come true. It was a lot of bait and switch that worked because a lot of these people weren't familiar with the industry and they thought they wrote something amazing. So they believed what we said. We played a lot on the whole idea that self publishing lets everyone be an author and anyone can become a best selling author. So why not you? The problem is is that the company she worked for did nothing to really help the author. Book marketing is hard and the best book marketing plans start when the book is in writing or editing, not a year after the book is out. Some companies that have big marketing packages promise you listings on major lists, press releases, and marketing materials that aren't doing things that will actually help you sell books or grow your brand. They're giving you the easy things that cost them very little and do even less. Anyone who tells you that they will handle all the marketing is not being honest because book marketing is a team sport. You, the author, must be on that team for it to work. And as much as I wish I could find one, there is no magical easy button when it comes to book marketing. Even if your book is amazing, book marketing is a marathon and it's hard work. You have to use your network, build one. If you don't have it, build an author email list, use targeted media pitches to get on media, personally connect with influencers, submit speaking pitches to event organizers, run Amazon ads, do ebook sales, leverage promotional sites and more. You keep trying new things to see what works and then you do more of that while still trying new things. You build momentum. You can do this with the help of a company like Book Launchers, but there's no easy wins. But these companies, they sell you on the idea that there could be. These things aren't easy wins, but I know you want it to be. And so do those companies that sell you those expensive marketing packages. If you want more details on the marketing we do for clients and how to do it yourself, make sure you hit that subscribe button and turn notifications on because I have an eight part video series coming out in the fall about pre launch and post launch book marketing. Phew. Okay, now you do need to know about author websites because that is something you do need as an author. So check out this video you if you don't have one yet and if you already have one of those, this is the video YouTube thinks you really should watch next. Either way, I would love to see you again. So please click on over to one of them cause I'm waiting for you.