The Dangers of Authorship

 

So when you’re a nobody writer like me (or Indie author, for short,) everyone wants a piece of you. It’s not exactly a Charles Lindburg thing where people kidnap your children and ransom them (although I did grow up within fifty miles of his MN home). But when you’re an Indie everyone is trying to jack you for money. It’s a good thing I became a writer because I wanted to make millions and be a celebrity who gets to party with rockstars. (This is why we need a universal sarcasm font.)

The only way Indie authors have a chance to get read/discovered (and all in the hopes of making a buck fifty each time for a book sale) is to have people see our titles… I tried a new ad venture recently. I thought, heck, email is great–even if ten percent of the recipients open a message I’ve gotten some exposure. Mailchimp lets me stay a free user so long as i keep my addressed subscribers at under 2,000. I’d take ten percent on that for targeted leads–especially since you can a list of buyers for book resellers for under $100 nowadays.

Right?

Wrong. Lesson learned.

I always knew personal contact was the best way to approach book sellers and ask about being carried on their shelves. I just wanted it to be easier than it was and be able to fire blindly into a flock and score a few random hits. This is my story.

I found this nifty website called listsyoucanafford.com while searching specifically for targeted lists of Christian bookstores in my state. They had lots of clergy lists, churches, etc. I suppose that blinds us marks to the fact that the operator is a scammer by gaining some positive association. For fifty bucks they claimed they would sell me a list of about a thousand emails of buyers and purchasing agents for Christian bookstores. After an initial email they said they’d give it to me for free if I bought a general bookstore list for an extra twenty bucks which would give me an additional two thousand addresses, so I bit on that. I’d seen the site around for a while when doing some fundraising and ministry promo in the past. Plus the site puts their phone number and address on their main page–that sort of thing breeds confidence, right?

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So I get my list and don’t notice that the reciept lists some company called “a dramatic touch.” Come to think of it later, my wife did ask me about a charge I made when she saw it… in retrospect she probably thinks I visited an asian massage parlor or something. (I find out later that it’s listed as a karate dojo when I’m trying to file a complaint with the BBB and get my money back.)

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It turns out the list can’t be used at all. I stated that their “list triggers an omnivore warning making it useless/unuseable. List was supposed to be 90% deliverable or better, but it’s 0%. I’d like my money back, please. I can verify the unuseability of it with a screenshot if necessary.”

I politely requested a refund. The response came from an Alan Marshall who admitted that he knew the list can’t be used by most people and they would not issue a refund. I’m sure they get a lot of that. His winner of a solution is to offer to sell me another service at a discounted rate. “What we can do is offer you a discount on our outgoing email service. The cost to send a message to 5,000 or fewer contacts normally costs $49. We can make that service available to you for $29.”

If this was a farmer’s crop transaction it would look like this:

Vendor: you need ten thousand bushels of corn. I will sell you what you need for a thousand dollars.

Me: perfect. here’s my money.

Vendor: here is ten thousand bushels of pebble sized rocks.

Me: I can’t use that! please give me my money back.

Vendor: no. it’s the same size as corn and these were taken from corn fields. For an additional five hundred dollars we will feed these rocks to your cattle for you.

I made a hard pass on the offer and told him I’d contact the BBB.I’m sure he laughed that off. Whois/ICANN lists them behind a security shield so you can’t actually find them. They aren’t registered and I can’t find anything about them, despite a supposed track record of positive transactions for 16+years. That address? It belongs to the “Taco Factory.” But hey, they’ve got 4.6 stars and specials on horchata.

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I didn’t bother checking the phone number–it would probably ring to Google Voice if it worked at all. Instead I called my credit card company to dispute the charges. I use Chase Sapphire as a preferred member. I didn’t recognize the cool perks having good credit until now. The customer service line went straight to real human being. I almost crapped myself in surprise–but that also meant I had to explain to a few service reps that I was not actually purchasing cheap asian handjobs but had been scammed by some fake company operating out of a taco pit. Thank God they believed me.

Lesson learned. Be very careful with your marketing dollars. There’s a lot of shady people out there making empty promises and delivering unhappy endings.