Description

The company website represents themselves as Barnes and Noble Publishing offering services to publish a book. There were multiple packages to choose from ranging from $299-$1800 after talking with the 'sales person' and deciding on a package he sent a Stripe Payment link for the amount. He said the link would expire within 24 hours. He also said that I would receive a contract or invoice after payment - which did not happen. He then passed me to another person who was the 'Project Manager'. The project manager reviewed the information in the package over the phone but no written services where ever sent or agreed to. After that, the project manager sent me an email and text message. We had several conversations and I sent over my work. He created a book cover using a free site - Heyzine. This was basically a copy of the information I sent him as I had included a mock-up I had made on my shutterfly account. A day or so later, he sent the first preview of the book - again a recreation of the mock-up I had made except all the words and pictures were mixed up. I told him this and he said he would make revisions and then we needed to talk about copy write and marketing as a next step - which both would come with an additional charge. He also mentioned creating profiles on Amazon and Barns & Noble. After our conversation I looked up copy writes and found that this was something i should do on my own through the US Copy write website. Then I went to Barns & Noble to see how to create an account and thats when I realized the company I was working with was not affiliated with Barns & Noble at all and that Barns & Noble was actually warning people about companies like this one - They have a pop-up banner on their website. After talking with my bank I discovered that they had tried to charge the card 3xs for the package amount but the bank only allowed the one charge through. I dont know what this company would have actually done for me if I had continued with them, but the misrepresentation of who they were and the tripple charge left me not wanting to proceed. All that this company did for me was recreate a mock-up of what I originally sent them.