As I said in my last post, a well-established writer of children’s Bible stories reached out to me via messaging, and we chatted back and forth. I thought it was odd of her to want to contact me, but maybe she did because I wrote children’s books to help kids going through life and family challenges.
Anyway, I started to feel comfortable with her, and I asked her how she became so successful in marketing her books. She replied that she had a wonderful marketing team, and they helped her a lot. I asked for the name, and she gave it to me. I contacted them via e-mail and asked them what it would cost to market all three of my books that had been published at the time. They sent me back an e-mail with their structured pricing.
I thought about it for a while before I made the decision to go with them. It was $600 bucks for them to do everything that I wanted. They right away sent me some mock-ups, and they were good, but the kids reading my books in them were too young. I wrote to tell them that they needed to be older. Nothing. Then, they wanted access to my advertising campaign because they were going to test different targets and what worked and what didn’t. None of theirs worked. They were stupid.
They asked me to set up an account with a mail service, so I did. They suggested that I go on All Authors, so I did. They were supposed to market my books through social media and in other ways. They did not. They did nothing for weeks.
I knew at that point in time that they were scamming me so I played dumb with them for a while to see what they would do. I told them that the author I had been messaging with stopped suddenly, and I wanted to know why because after all, she was their client. All of a sudden, “she” started messaging me again, so I decided to have some more fun with them. I looked her up, and she lives in England, so I asked “her” where she lived. She said California. Hmmm. Now that was just dumb.
I locked them out of my advertising campaign and told them that I wanted my money back. They pleaded for more time. Meanwhile, I found out where they were located. They were in Hawaii, in a sad-looking apartment. They had been stupid enough to give me their address…
So, I went to American Express, and they went to their third party payment service and I got my money back. Their Internet site is gone, or maybe they have changed their name. Who knows? I reported their hacking of this author’s site to FB, but I’m not sure if they did anything about it.
Beware of scammers. They are everywhere, and apparently there are a lot of “book marketers” out there that use pretty much the same format to scam people. There is actually a list of the ones that have been found out. Unfortunately, they were not on the list, but I hope they are now.
Sheryl Hunting, Author of Children's Books 
Leave a comment