Book Tango Week 1 Review: 3.5/5
For those of you who don’t know, almost exactly a week ago today my first book, The Grey Heir, went live and I couldn’t be more excited! (though I suppose you wouldn’t know it from my lack of blog activity – that very inactivity was due in part to other promotional pushes).
I chose to publish with a site called Book Tango. Regular readers might remember I did a review of the site – or at least the idea for the site – earlier in an “author’s resources” post.
Basically, Book Tango offers four features (at least for free): they have an eBook creation tool that can help you take your book from a Word doc to a formatted eBook, they publish your book to ALL the major eBook retail stores, and they help you track your sales.
In theory this sounds like a great service. In practice it has a few rough edges.
The Services:
Let’s go through what Book Tango really offers (including the things I didn’t find out about until after publishing with them).
The Creation Tool: At first I found the creation tool extremely frustrating. It didn’t have the font I had used for my book originally (Georgia), and it wouldn’t let me keep my drop caps.
However, I think most of my annoyance came from the fact that my internet is fairly slow in my current home and it was late at night. When I revisited the project the next day I found out that I had made a lot more progress than I thought and I appreciated the fact that it had made the table of contents automatically.Overall, I would rate the creation tool a 4/5. It was relatively intuitive but I’m still bitter about my missing drop caps.
Publishing to all distributors: Right now my book is only available through Amazon and the Book Tango store. This isn’t actually Book Tango’s fault. They sent it to Barnes and Noble, iBooks, Kobo, Sony, and all the others, Amazon is just MUCH faster than they are.
When I published, they said it would take one day to four weeks for my book to appear in all the outlets. Again, not their fault, but that doesn’t stop it from being irritating. I reserve my star judgement on this one until the four weeks are up.
Sales Tracking: One of the features I was most excited about was the ability to track sales in real time. After I signed up I found out that it actually had a 72 hour delay. I sighed and waited for three days for my sales to start appearing. Then I waited four days. Then 6 days.
Finally, today I live-chatted with one of their service reps (genuine cudos for having that) and they got me to read the part above the sales report page that said it was a 72 hour delay for sales made in the Book Tango store. Sales made outside the Book Tango store would be recorded after each month. Face palm. Although technically this service will still be useful, I don’t remember them mentioning that kind of lag. 3/5 for the time lapse on a useful service.
Payday: This is one of their primary selling points: 100% royalties. What that actually means is that they don’t take any more on top of what Amazon or Nook or Apple take. I already knew that. In fact it’s one of the reasons I chose Book Tango over services like Smashwords, who offer similar distribution services but take 10% for their trouble.
What I didn’t know was that they only pay once a quarter. That hurts, especially when compared to something like KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing), which pays once a month. Again, I don’t remember anything about this in their promotional video. It’s in their FAQs, but a little buried and certainly not given any more light than absolutely necessary. 2/5 for both the slightly sub-par service and the nasty surprise.
In a Nutshell…
Here’s the thing: I want to like Book Tango. I really do. It was easy to set up an account, once I got used to the creation tool it was intuitive and useful, they don’t charge anything for their amazing distribution abilities, and they genuinely seem to want to be offering a good service.
I think they’ll get there. It just makes me sad that I’ve gone through so many unpleasant surprises with them.
I think this problem could be solved with just a little more transparency. I know it’s not the best marketing strategy to advertise paying authors once a quarter, or the lag in sales data, but I think saving authors the surprise would be worth it in customer satisfaction.
Or they could, you know, fix the problems – pay us once a month and update sales data more frequently.
Just sayin’.
