“I paid this company $4,347 initially, plus an additional $1,550 later, for a total of $5,897. The issues ranged from extreme incompetence in production to what are outright fraudulent business practices and theft. Within 24 hours of purchasing the service, I realized the salesperson had been dishonest about what was included. I asked for a refund, which the company refused to provide. My book had reached #1 out of 10,000+ books in its category on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback, so it should have been an easy book to market for audio. The company's promised marketing was mostly limited to posting solicitations on my defunct Instagram and Facebook accounts (which I hadn't used in 5 years) and which I told them were useless, but they refused to listen. Since these posts were free, it was essentially zero-effort, zero-cost marketing for them. After about 10 months on the market with their "substantial marketing," my total royalties for the audiobook amount to $12.50. I'm not exaggerating. Also, I chose to narrate the book myself and provided them with clean, near professional-quality chapter recordings. Their job was the engineering/post-production. Their final engineered versions for roughly 25 of 30 chapters were vastly inferior to my original submissions. Their audio included annoying echoes, slurred sentences, background humming that wasn't in my audio files, and even the deletion of entire passages from the book. I spent hundreds of hours struggling to get them to produce competent recordings. Despite their contractual marketing promises (from the initial $4,347), they continually badgered me to buy additional marketing. I finally paid an extra $1,550 after they offered a "50% reduction." A few months later, an employee admitted in written communication that the company had never spent a single penny of the extra $1,550 I paid. It was pure theft. They never had any intention of extra marketing. I demanded the $1,550 back. The manager agreed but only on the condition that I remove a negative review I'd posted on another platform. Although they had no right to withhold my money for services they did not provide, I reluctantly agreed to remove the review in return for a refund of the money they admitted defrauding me out of. They then repeatedly lied about sending the money: 1. They said they credited my credit card, but I checked with the card company, and no attempt was made. 2. They said they wired the money to my bank, then claimed it was already in my account. My bank confirmed no wire attempt was ever made. 3. I suggested they simply overnight a check, which they agreed to but never sent.
All promises to return the money they openly admitted to defrauding me out of were purely an attempt to trick me into removing my review first. This experience cost me nearly $5,900 and hundreds of wasted hours, all for a catastrophically engineered audiobook. The vast majority of the employees I dealt with sound like they are based overseas (India).
Additionally, the little marketing they did on Amazon required that I give them my Amazon login information which they used to purchase ads with my credit card for which I also had to provide them with login information. They promised me that the expensive marketing agreement I'd agreed to included paying for the ads they were purchasing and that they would immediately reimburse me. They DID NOT. I showed them my invoices for the ads that I paid for. I repeatedly requested they pay me back. They repeatedly said they would but they never did My strongest warning is this: RUN. Any positive reviews you see for this company are highly suspect. Legitimate publishers don't charge high upfront fees for no-effort services, nor do they endlessly badger customers to spend even more money on marketing which they do not provide and then, months later, openly admit to having lied strictly to steal the money. Again, they ripped me off for almost $6,000. The company uses the lure of audio publishing to steal your money. Almost every employee I spoke with (I spoke to at least ten) sounded like they were from India even though they all had common American names, probably fake names in an attempt to hide from the suckers who purchase their services that they are an Indian company with a front in the US.”
