As a green, new author, I fell victim to one of these publishing services. They are called KDP Publishers posing as being affiliated with KDP. They were not scammers, per se, they did the work, but they were a bunch of unprofessional, incompetent people with a gigantic turnover. They made so many mistakes and I was constantly fighting with them. I learned my lesson but my first book suffered and the final product was extremely disappointing.
THIS is why I do videos like this. I wish I could've intercepted you before you fell for that. But, at least you're on the other side of things and can build awareness about it. I'm pinning this comment because more authors need to know they're not alone. Thanks so much for sharing this with me; I'm sure it's not easy reliving that frustrating experience.
KDP Publishing, AMZ Publishers House, Astros Digital, and Amazons Publishing Pro, etc are all scammers! they have defrauded my family member out of $25,000! granted they "did what they said they would" for an agreed $10k (ie. they put the book on Amazon-- which is free!), but they've also charged an additional $15K without their permission!!!
It blows my mind how many people I've had to steer away from these KDP scams. I'm also blown away by the sheer amount of scams in general out there targeting vulnerable budding authors!
Thank you for sharing the video Dale that is great information. I had noticed that most of the scammers are the ones claiming to be from Amazon. When I check my SPAM folder most of them are supposedly coming from Amazon.
There's certainly a lot of them out there. It would be great if you could do a video, if you haven't already, about publishers who try to scam authors for thousands of dollars to publish their book, only to not get anything from them.
That's a tough area to break into because if I accuse a company of wrongdoing, it opens me up to litigation. Writer Beware does a great job exposing some companies. I highly recommend reading through their site.
KDP is really bad. They do always leave out 10 pages smack right in the middle of the book and they do not pay me for all my sales. I lknow because people would tell me they bought my book and even sent me a photo and I was never paid for those books.