I’m not normally one to write a post about a negative experience with a website, it’s not in my nature, but on this occasion I feel I need to.
I was dubious the moment I saw the booksbutterfly.com site, it has a lot of packages available, most of which offer a guarantee of a certain number of sales, a number that is likely to result in a profit, a small one, for anyone using the package. My scam alert started going off as a read the details of the packages, none of which gave any information on how the sales are guaranteed.
After thinking about it for a short while I decided to do some research, which wasn’t very helpful – I found an equal number of negative posts about the site as positive with the result that I was undecided about giving the site a try. Ultimately I decided, by virtue of having a bit of money that I could afford to lose (not that I liked the idea) to take the risk, figuring that if I didn’t get the indicated guaranteed number of sales I would know not to use the site again, and I wouldn’t have risked money that I might need for something more important, like food.
It didn’t take long to discover that I should have gone with my instincts and ignored the site. Communication was limited, and I had to send an email to chase up and find out when my book, Where There’s A Will, was going to be promoted for their new release package – I was told that it would be promoted over three days and that sales could take a couple of days longer to show up, unfortunately I saw no sales that I could definitely attribute to booksbutterfly (I had 2 sales over the course of a week but had another long term promotion running that might have been responsible) and when I searched for my book on the sites where it was apparently posted it was either absent or incredibly hard to find.
I have emailed the company, asking for either a refund or an explanation of why I didn’t get the sales they guaranteed. When I get a response, assuming I get one, I’ll let you all know what they say; in the mean time, I would advise against promoting with this site.
ARC Books 