My debut novel Making A Difference (amazon link) was finally on electronic bookshelves. But before I could hop to social media promoting the hell out of it, I encountered one weird problem after another.
I don’t know how many of these problems are due to Mill City Press. But I do expect them to help me fix it.
So far, with the weekend in between, customer service hasn’t exactly been fast, but if this week things don’t get done, I might officially regret my choice.
Here are some of the problems:
– It’s available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but only people from certain countries could manage to buy it so far.
I live in Turkey. The company is American, and my novel is in English, and I have friends and audience all over the world. So far, friends and family haven’t been able to buy the book. We tried Barnes and Noble, as we had the same problem. My customer rep hasn’t offered any solutions up to now.
Amazon suggested I changed my address to an American one. Which worked. I can buy my own book, yay? But this is obviously a temporary and narrow-reaching fix. If you have ideas, I’m happy to hear them.
What’s the point of releasing a digital book if it can’t easily be accessed worldwide?
– The customer service is slow to respond, and they want a phone call to go over the issues.
I get that my book is not their only problem, and I’m not their only customer. But my whole reason to involve a company was to be able to bypass technical issues and potential problems.
While anything can go wrong at any time in this world, I expect more from a company in this digital day and age. Them being available on weekdays on a normal 9-to-5 schedule wreaks havoc in my life because there is a considerable time difference between Florida and Istanbul. And making International phone calls are expensive, and apparently, they don’t do Skype.
Wait, what?
In 2018, after paying a hundred of bucks (just for the website, formatting/distributing the book has a different cost that I paid) I have to pay to fix problems?
Why isn’t there a way to chat with their authors online?
That doesn’t sit very well with me.
– They forgot to email me about some big news.
Writers tend to be obsessive about certain things, such as waiting to hear from their editor and checking their email about a million times a day. It is worse when you have an author account, and you are checking expectantly if they formatted your book so that you can more or less estimate your launch date.
Then you read that you will get an email notification with important updates so you relax (a bit) and go about your days. Then you don’t get an email notification when the book is ready and already on Amazon.
Ouch.
– My supposed $99/year (if I choose to renew it later) author site is a big nothing.
Imagine just an image picture of my book. But instead of the book, it just says image not available. You can’t click on it. There is no writing. You can’t find my name or my book among the collection when you search. And the most popular categories have got nothing to do with mine. Lovely.
Below is the screenshot of my author website.
100 bucks might not sound like a lot of money to some, but I could get hosting, find a theme and make a website myself with that. Hell, I could just spend it on ads or improving my writer website and sell it here.
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After these major cons, let’s include some pros:
- The formatting looked good.
- The package was affordable. They are fast responding to your questions/concerns prior to making the investment.
- They work with authors from all over the world.
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Do I recommend them? It’ll all depend on how/whether they fix the existing problems. Stay tuned. And while I can’t see my sales at the moment, you can always help me out by buying the book and leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads.
Have you published your novel yourself? What problems have you encountered?
