Are these commercials about getting your book published the real deal?

If you’re like me and have spent any amount of time watching late night cable TV, you have no doubt run across an advertisement like the one from Page Publishing or similar companies, where they claim they will publish your book.

For a share of your profits plus some cash up front payable in only ten easy monthly payments, Page Publishing offers you an ISBN, book cover design, and editing. But is it really worth giving up all that money plus a percentage your earnings for this deal?

First and foremost, this automatically means that you will only earn 35% from Amazon for every book sold instead of 70% for offering your book exclusively on Amazon because Page Publishing puts your book in other stores, even if those stores don’t really earn you many (or any) sales.

So now you are earning less per sale of every book, and you still have to share some of that money with them, and they are still charging you thousands of dollars up front, even if they do accept payments.

I’ve been publishing books since 2012, and I’ve tried about every sales channel out there – Smash Words, iBook’s, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Google Play and so on. Love them or hate them, you can’t argue that the majority of every sale you’ll probably ever make will come from Amazon.

So, if you know almost every sale Is going to come from Amazon, doesn’t it make far more sense to go exclusive with Amazon e-books and earn 70% per eBook sold than the 35% they offer everyone else? You can still offer your print books everywhere, but if you go exclusively with your e-books, they’ll pay you 70% instead of 35%. Not an option if you go with Page Publishing.

But maybe it will be worth it. Maybe Page Publishing has some secret marketing formula that can skyrocket your sales and make it worth doing business with them and giving up all that extra money on your sales, plus all the extra cash they want you to pay them up front.

I decided to check them out, based on actual books they have published on Amazon. Because what better way to know how well a company works than to see it for yourself and not just from their sales pitch?

Page Publishing released ‘From Revolution to Revelation’ which was written by Patti Nicolette Critchfield. They are offering the Kindle for $9.99, well over the average e-book price of $2.99 to $3.99. So automatically the book is at a disadvantage because it’s overpriced.

In the three weeks the book has been out it has received zero reviews. It’s also not getting many sales. We know this because it’s ranked at around 725k on Amazon’s Best Sellers Rank. That means in the last few weeks, since its release it has probably sold less than ten copies, maybe even as few as five. Think of the thousands of dollars this poor author spent to get Page Publishing to “publish” their book. All for a measly 5 to 10 sales. Really?

But that’s just one book. Let’s look at a few more and see if there are other books from Page Publishing that are doing better. I mean in all fairness it’s not like memoirs really sell all that well in the first place. So what about a fictional fantasy about vampires?

This one is called ‘Vampire's Tale’ by Cynthia Wooten. This is a 388-page full-length novel released on April 19, 2018, with the paperback being released the month before on March 19th.

Sadly, at the time of this posting the book doesn’t seem to have made a single sale, so there is no registered sales rank. Something else that caught my attention is that they didn’t place the book in the proper category. Page Publishing listed the book as a Science Fiction and Fantasy novel instead of the proper category of Paranormal Romance > Vampires.

As you might imagine, because of the popularity of books like Twilight and Vampire Academy, this is a very popular genre. Pricing your e-book at $9.99 when everyone else is offering theirs for $1.99 to $3.99 puts you at a huge disadvantage.

Moving forward, I thought. Next, we might look at a Historical Romance novel. These are very popular books in general so about ‘Caty Maclean’ from author Beverly Ferebee Heyde? I’m sorry to say this is yet another Page Publishing failure.

In the two months, the book has been for sale, it doesn’t seem to have sold a single copy, giving it no sales rank whatsoever. They’ve also misclassified the book, listing it as a >Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction book, while obviously, it’s a Historical Romance.

So really what are you getting for your money? What I’ve been able to figure out from reading their website is they offer an ISBN, which you can get for free from CreateSpace or Amazon’s KDP program. So that’s not anything special.
They offer you a design for your book cover, but you can just head on over to Fiverr.com and get on yourself there for next to nothing. If you don’t know how to format your book, you can get that at Fiverr.com as well for $5. There are a ton who will offer you formatting services for this price. However, I should mention that Amazon’s KDP program now offers an all-new e-book formatting tool that you can use for free, so there’s that.

The only thing they seem to offer of remote value Is editing services, but you too can get that at Fiverr.com or through sites like upwork.com. If your book is a full-length novel you’ll probably get a better deal for an editor at a site like upwork.com but for a few chapters here and there, Fiverr.com works too. Yes, editing will be your most expensive investment, and it’s absolutely necessary but is it really worth giving up money you make forever on your book plus thousands of dollars in cash up front, just for a few hundred dollars’ worth of editing services? NO WAY!!

From what I understand Page Publishing wants about $300 up front and then monthly payments over the next ten months totaling $3,200 in cash.

Why in the world would you pay $3,200 to publish a book with them? What dot hey offer you that you can’t do for yourself for way less?

They are not a legit publishing company as real publishers don’t ask you for money up front. So please if you have a book you want published, just do it yourself at kdp.amazon.com.