So, the wife writes many different genres, mostly horror, but other things as well. She’s even written some children’s stories. And that’s where the problems come in.
As with many good kids books, she has illustrations for her stories. That makes formatting the books more complicated and takes it out of my skill set. I can format a standard novel, but I can’t do the pictures and text required for a children’s book.
The wife has been looking for someone to do the formatting for her. She was speaking to one person, but their final quote came out to way more than we expected or could afford.
It was then that the wife contacted kdpselfbookpublisher.com. I didn’t get involved until one of their salespeople called the wife.
These folks offered to upgrade the images she has for her kids books, format everything, then do all the work to publish the book on Amazon. All for a modest fee, of course.
The problem is they try to make you think that they are 1) associated with Amazon (they’re not), and 2) they are charging for things the author can do themselves, for free.
It seems there are many scammers out there that do similar things, trying to bilk money out of naive authors. They put Amazon and KDP in their domain names. By using the words in their domain name they are trying to get the unwary author to think thay are affiliated with Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program, when they really aren’t.
I checked with several writing groups I’m a member of and the replies were pretty universal against this type of ‘help’. Everyone said they are a scam, that the wife would most likely be charged for the services and may get nothing for her trouble. Or if they did do anything, the work would most likely be shoddy and subpar.
Unfortunately the wife submitted her contact information to them so they’ve been calling us and emailing her, trying to move forward with her ‘project’. We’re not responding to them so hopefully they’ll get tired and go away.
The world is full of scams, my Hordeling. Let’s be careful out there.
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