“In April I invested $4,200 with Frontline Writers to publish and market my new book. They agreed to market all 10 of my books. It was a four-month support contract. After more than nine months of effort they helped me sell maybe 20 books, generating revenue of about $60, a net loss to me of about $4,140. This was a terrible investment.
Below I share some of the good and the bad of their services.
The good
They eventually published my book on Amazon and Ingram spark. They produced a nice looking book cover. They created a quality website for me. They created new Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter author sites and they posted over 30 impressive graphics on each of them. They provided some performance reports at my request.
They delivered many of the things that were in our contract, but not all.
They communicated a lot, timely, and mostly through email.
The bad
Even after many requests, they never provided a plan for any deliverables. When deliverables were generated, requests were often made in an urgent manner, rushing to have me produce or provide something.
After more than nine months of efforts, they were able to generate one follower on Facebook and Instagram, and nine Twitter followers.
They don’t appear to have the knowledge or skill to market a book to new audiences. Many times I asked general marketing questions about standard promotional activities that I had used with my other nine books and they appeared clueless about what I was talking about.
I had to provide edits of my manuscript multiple times. The edits wouldn’t be made in the next manuscript draft they returned to me.
Many of the things that were delivered were based on my prompting. There is lot more that I could share about my frustration, but these are some of the key points.
I do not recommend using them.”
“I contacted Frontline to help edit my latest novel. They wanted to do everything for me including publishing and gave me a prohibitive cost. I decided just to have them edit my 84,000-word novel for $650. All I asked them to do was to fix spelling and punctuation. They said 2-3 weeks. It took 2 months and the results were pathetic. I should have asked a high school student to do it. I had to fix so much it seemed a waste of my time and money. Then they asked if I wanted to present my last published novel (not the one they had attempted to edit) at the London Book Faire in early March 2024. It sounded good. The cost was $1050. One week after the faire ended, I asked for results. They told me they had sold the 5 copies I had mailed them for $20 each. They sent me the $100 as a credit to my Visa (BIG DEAL HUH? $100 for a $1050 investment!!!). They also said there was a request for another 20 copies. I told them I didn't see any purchases on Amazon, where my book was self-published and also, I had not received any emails for these additional 20 copies (my Amazon URL and my email address had been given out at the London Book Faire. I got a call from one of their reps saying they wanted to print my book themselves and sell those 20 copies for me. I said for an addition 20 copies it wasn't worth my time. So now, they have completely gone GHOST.
I highly recommend NOT USING THIS publishing company as they don't seem to know what they are doing.”
