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Report: #1476707

Complaint Review: Author Marketing Experts -

  • Submitted:
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  • Reported By: Books Butterfly — Montreal Quebec Canada
  • Author Confirmed What's this?
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  • Author Marketing Experts United States

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We're Books Butterfly, a book promotion company that has sold $1.5 million of book promotion packages

We have a super low dispute rate   2018 - https://www.booksbutterfly.com/images/2018_LowDisputeRate1.png only 12 disputes out of 3,920 book promotion packages (and 2 of those are by Author Marketing Experts)   2017 - https://www.booksbutterfly.com/images/LowDisputeRate_2017.png   ***** WE found out in Dec 2018 that this company, Author Marketing Experts, was buying $150 book promotion packages from us, combining them with other services (such as emailing bloggers asking for reviews) and reselling for $3,700.

We had only 12 disputes out of the last 3,920 book promotion packages sold. 2 are from this company We are glad that they filed disputes and we found out that they are resellers who are marking up $150 packages to such a high amount.

   We will be sure to not sell them any more packages as it's really wrong that they are marking up  our $150 packages to such a high amount   It would be great if authors  

1) STopped paying $3,700 to this reseller when they can just purchase the package straight from us for $150  

2) Found out more about the multiple complaints about this company  

        A) http://3tpath.com/news/how-to-market-your-book-my-experience-with-penny-sansevieri-and-author-marketing-experts-ame/  

        B) https://www.bbb.org/us/ca/san-diego/profile/publicity-service/author-marketing-experts-inc-1126-171996738  

        C) https://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/author-marketing-experts/-/author-marketing-experts-penny-sansevieri-pure-scam-san-diego-california-1198863   

*** Their purchases from us:  https://www.booksbutterfly.com/images/AuthorMarketingExpertB.png   Please be wary of resellers and anyone offering you very high price packages. Whether it is someone offering you $25,000 packages to sell 1,000 hardcovers or someone asking you to pay $3,700 for a mix of promotion and getting reviews   in most cases they are just going to book promotion sites that work (such as us), purchase $150 and $250 packages and marking them up massively.   Please do some research and see facts (such as screenshot of low dispute rates we have provided) 

This report was posted on Ripoff Report on 04/07/2019 11:31 PM and is a permanent record located here: https://www.ripoffreport.com/report/author-marketing-experts/aexpertdotcom-penny-buying-1476707. The posting time indicated is Arizona local time. Arizona does not observe daylight savings so the post time may be Mountain or Pacific depending on the time of year. Ripoff Report has an exclusive license to this report. It may not be copied without the written permission of Ripoff Report. READ: Foreign websites steal our content

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REBUTTALS & REPLIES:
1Author
0Consumer
1Employee/Owner

#2 Author of original report

We will stick to the facts - This company is buying packages from us for $150 and reselling them for $3,700

AUTHOR: Abhi - (Canada)

POSTED: Friday, April 19, 2019

1) You can see from the complaints from Authors we linked to in our original post that Author Marketing Experts is selling them packages for $3,700 and similar very high amounts

Here on Rip Off Report itself: https://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/author-marketing-experts/-/author-marketing-experts-penny-sansevieri-pure-scam-san-diego-california-1198863

BBB - https://www.bbb.org/us/ca/san-diego/profile/publicity-service/author-marketing-experts-inc-1126-171996738

Author Blog - http://3tpath.com/news/how-to-market-your-book-my-experience-with-penny-sansevieri-and-author-marketing-experts-ame/     

2) You can see from the screenshot that we attached above, and also here, that they are buying packages from us for $150 and reselling them, after bundling them with some other services, for $3,700

3) We were not aware they were doing this. We only found out when they did disputes (wrongful disputes) on two packages they had bought

We have a very low dispute rate

Only 12 disputes from 3,920 book promotion packages sold in Jan 2018 to Feb 2019 - https://www.booksbutterfly.com/images/2018_LowDisputeRate1.png 

And only 6 disputes from 3,183 packages sold in April 2017 to Dec 2017

https://www.booksbutterfly.com/images/LowDisputeRate_2017.png

When we got 2 disputes on Dec 22nd and 24th, making inaccurate claims, we researched and found out what was going on - that Author Marketing Experts was a marketing company and not an author, and they were marking up our packages massively and bundling a few other items to it and reselling for $3,700

3) They claim to have bought only 2 packages from us. Please see attached screenshot which clearly shows 4 packages bought in 2018. These are packages we know about

4) They claim that we did a report on them when they did dispute. That is not the case. They did a dispute in December.

Please see attached where the bank decided a dispute in our favor

And see attached where for the other dispute bank did not even do a dispute, just an Enquiry (which means the bank did not think there was grounds for a dispute)

All we did was make sure to not sell them any more packages so they could not mark up and resell to authors at high prices

****************************

 

5) We are providing screenshots of the disputes and the purchases, which are facts

6) Author Marketing Experts are posting a thread from the Owner of a Book Marketing Company, where he falsely claims we make threats against authors. That has absolutely nothing to do with

Author Marketing Experts buying $150 packages from us

Bundling them with other services, and massively marking them up to $3,700, and selling to authors

7) Please see the ripoff report by an author, and the author blog post and the BBB reports

AS far as we are concerned, please see the very low dispute rate of just 12 disputes out of the last 3,920 book promotion packages sold i.e.

Only 12 disputes from 3,920 book promotion packages sold in Jan 2018 to Feb 2019 - https://www.booksbutterfly.com/images/2018_LowDisputeRate1.png 

And only 6 disputes from 3,183 packages sold in April 2017 to Dec 2017

https://www.booksbutterfly.com/images/LowDisputeRate_2017.png

 

8) Our main concerns are

A) Author Marketing Expert is massively marking up our packages and reselling them, without prior consent from us (which we would never give)

B) They are then turning around and doing wrongful disputes

So they are taking advantage of both authors and book promotion sites

It does not make sense for authors to be paying $3,700 for a bundled package from Author Marketing Experts when they could get the marketing package for $150 from us, and the remaining parts for $100 to $200 (even as low as $37 for lists of reviewers)

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#1 REBUTTAL Owner of company

This Company is Known for Online Bullying/Threats When Someone Complains About Their Service

AUTHOR: Author Marketing Experts, Inc. - (United States)

POSTED: Thursday, April 18, 2019

This complaint from Booksbutterfly is unwarranted and largely due to the fact that we filed a complaint with our credit card company against them. As you’ll see from the information below, this is their MO. If you dare complain about them, they will attack you online.

Booksbutterfly would have no idea how our campaign work, since we’ve only engaged with them only two times in the past year (both time with dismal results). This firm would have absolutely zero idea how we charge for our work, or the innerworkings of my firm. That said, do we sometimes buy ad space for authors as part of their campaigns? We do and we make mention of that in all of our proposals. However their inference here is that we charge in excess of $3000 for a single strategy, which is absolutely not the case.

We did file a complaint with our credit card company, to which, as you will see in the uploads, Booksbutterfly responded by citing a book campaign which was *not* the one I filed a complaint on, so their documentation and tracking leaves a lot to be desired. The biggest issue we had with this firm was their lack of transparency, they changed their terms of service on us and then insisted that we fell under their new guidelines (despite the fact that a program was purchased prior to this change) – they offered no campaign update, despite the fact that we were promised this. And then, because we filed a complaint with our credit card company, they decided to go onto this site and file this erroneous complaint about us. I have shared our complaint with our credit card company, as well as their response - wherein you will see they submitted a bunch of documentation related to another book NOT the book we were questioning. 

There is a precedence for this – as we’ve found in a variety of discussion groups online. This firm bullies authors and anyone who dares to complain about them. You can see that in the link below, here is an excerpt of this discussion. Frankly this is scary stuff, as is such an unwarranted and unvalidated complaint as what they posted here. If you read this, you’ll also see some of the same issues raised in this complaint “we have so few complaints from authors” etc. No doubt because if an author does complain, they are threatened.

**********

"Books Butterfly is threatening website owners and authors with legal action if they don't remove negative reviews about their service.

Long Story short (or not so short):

I own a small promo site and a few years back I decided to have a small review section on my site, featuring various promo services on the web - just to help the author community a bit in figuring out which site produces the best results, has good customer support etc. I never fully finished this project and out of a planned hundred sites to review, I put up like a dozen and then kinda forgot about it. Books Butterfly was one of those.

During those two years, Books Butterfly received about 10 negative reviews, all criticizing their poor communication and results, with some going so far as calling them a scam.

A few days ago, their representative contacted me and demanded I remove the negative reviews and share the private e-mails of the reviewers so that they could contact them. If I refused they threatened with legal action, saying they will 100% sue me for defamation and libel, and for damages dealt. (To note, they asked nicely in the first e-mail, but once I said no to sharing private e-mails of my users, they lost it and started the threat chain)

They wrote a good dozen e-mails in an hour, harping on about how great their service is and how unfair the reviews were and how it's illegal for me to support such defamation. They kept threatening to sue me and quoting numbers like 350,000 fines and so on.

To paraphrase, they wrote things like: "we'll 100% sue you for defamation and libel if you don't remove the reviews or take down the whole page about Books Butterfly" and "we'll sue you for triple damages and the mental damages and anguish caused by them having to worry over the livelihood of their employees because of the damages I had done to their business".

I eventually removed the whole review section because I had pretty much forgotten my review section even existed and I had better things to do than argue with this nut case. But even after I had removed it, they still kept hounding me with e-mails. I had to block their e-mail completely.

Now, today, I received an e-mail from one of the people who had written their review. They asked me to remove it because they were being threatened with legal action by Books Butterfly.

I literally cannot believe this [crap].

I have never heard of a company so insecure in the service they offer that they feel the need to straight up harass people over their negative opinions about the service. One would think that if these reviews keep popping up year after year that something is wrong with their service, but no. Apparently that concept is foreign to them, instead of fixing their service - whether it's communication issues or negligence - they spend their time trying to silence critics and threaten people.

And let me say it again - I already removed my whole review section days ago. The page literally doesn't exist anymore. But apparently that's not enough either. 

A company that keeps harping on about how they've serviced thousands of people with almost no complaints, how they help authors for free even, and then they pull this [crap] and harass people over their negative opinions, and act like a handful of negative reviews on a small site that maybe got 5 visitors a month to the review site is damaging the livelihood of their employees and causing mental stress and anguish...

Acting like I'm part of some grand conspiracy against their site. Like holy [crap], how big is that persons ego? Thinking people care enough about their site to collectively take part in some defamation campaign. Jesus. It's like they cannot accept the fact that maybe, just maybe, their service isn't quite as grand as they make it out to be and some people are p*ssed off for losing their hard earned money for no results or communication. 

If your service is good, the word of mouth will be good and nobody would bother to write bad reviews nor take them seriously. 

Whomever owns Books Butterly, let me just say that your representative is probably the sole reason why your promo site has such a horrible reputation. I suggest you fire them. And if that person is also the owner of the site, well, let me just suggest you leave the daily workings of the site to your team and go do something else that doesn't require human interactions, because you really suck at it."

 

Link to full complaint is here: https://www.kboards.com/index.php?topic=270085.0

 

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