Published by deborah.woehr on 30 Mar 2008 at 02:13 pm
BookSurge: The Good, The Bad, and The Downright Ugly
I decided to do a little research on BookSurge to see what authors can expect, should Amazon prevail. What I read did not sit well with me at all. I’ve been a loyal customer of Amazon since 1996 because they’ve provided an excellent service. You would think they would have revamped BookSurge to match the reputation of their online bookstore. Nope.
The Good
A Review of BookSurge, by Website Publisher Blog
The Bad
Self Publishing with Booksurge: This forum has a great comparison between BookSurge, Lulu, LSI, and Kyodo
The Downright Ugly
Quoted from the Self Publishing with Booksurge thread, post dated 12/9/07:
BOTTOM LINE: Whatever you do, do NOT publish at BOOKSURGE. It is a pain and (in the short-run as well as the long-run) outrageously expensive! They will make more mistakes that you can count (including pricing, royalty, affiliate etc.) and that will hurt you not only financially but also your reputation when your customers see that the prices are changing everyday for your books. I don’t know why things are so bad with them, but based on my experience and everyone I personally know who has published through BookSurge, we all were left feeling pissed off by their lack of customer service, lack of responsiveness, and lack of interest in helping their authors succeed. They are only committed to one thing: short-term profits for themselves rather than building long-term mutually rewarding relationships with their authors (and customers!). After all the negative comments, feedback and remarks, you would think they would improve, but what is weird is that they have only gotten worse. Very unfortunate, because their basic business model was good (close relationship with amazon.com), but their execution has been terrible. From what I hear this has to do with the leadership (founders/owners/ceo) of the company, but I do not know this for a fact. All I know that the ceo could not give a damn when I complained about getting ripped off by his salesperson. Neither he nor his salesperson had the courtesy to apologize or to clear up the misunderstanding (if there was one). They could not care less, and as a result they lost me and about 4 other people who I personally know who were looking at BookSurge vs others. Where did we all go after BookSurge? We ended up going to different POD publishers (some of which have been listed here) as a result of this horrifying experience. While none of them are perfect, at least we get treated with respect and are not finding ourselves with poor quality books (incorrect types/fonts, poor binding, terrible paper etc.) as we did with some of our BookSurge experiences.
Big warning about POD sales (Booksurge, etc.) and Amazon etc., by Writers Net
Another Lawsuit Against Amazon: Author April McDonald Sues Amazon for $10.5 M
A Mixed Bag
Absolute Write Water Cooler - BookSurge You’ll find some good testimonials as well as bad ones on this forum.
Based on everything I’ve read, I have no desire to publish my future books via BookSurge or CreateSpace (which is free). What alternatives does this leave me, if Amazon decides to disable the “buy” button for my books’ listing? I’m looking into that right now.
fred charles on 31 Mar 2008 at 4:58 am #
This is really annoying. I hate when big companies squeeze out the smaller companies with a less superior product. Microsoft did the same thing back in the 90s when they crushed Wordperfect and Lotus with their lame knock offs that lacked the same functionality.
From the reviews, Booksurge sounds inferior compared to Lulu, which I’ve heard mostly positive things about. This sort of thing makes me want to avoid self-publishing. The whole idea behind POD is that you get to do it your way!
Cheryl Pickett on 31 Mar 2008 at 5:21 am #
Hi,
I just wanted to comment as far as what to do without Amazon. While Amazon did help small independent and subsidy publishers a lot by opening up easy internet distribution, they aren’t the only game in town by far.
If you are going to sell books successfully in today’s market, you’ll be driving the interest and traffic for your book. This means you send buyers wherever you want, be it to purchase directly from your site/publisher or any of the other sites that also sell books.
Also, if you go subsidy/POD publishing, most companies work with Lightening Source which distributes through Ingram. This means a book is available, at least to order, from a wide variety of outlets far beyond Amazon.
Are there shoppers who always think of Amazon first or possibly as the only place they’ll buy? Probably. But if they’re sold on you the author, have a desire for your book and it’s made clear why they can’t get it on Amazon, I’d think most will consider other alternatives as long as they are secure.
And a quick note for the comment above, the great thing about self-publishing is exactly what you said. You can still do it your way, you just might have to change tactics a bit, so don’t let this situation discourage you in the least.
Cheryl Pickett
http://www.publishinganswers.com
deborah.woehr on 31 Mar 2008 at 4:49 pm #
Fred: I loved WordPerfect and was quite disgusted when they discontinued it for the Macs. Yes, BookSurge is inferior, based on the majority of the reviews I’ve read online. I wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole. That said, I still plan to self-publish my way.
Cheryl: Great points. Thanks for stopping by.