*Note: no sugar coating here. Just complete honesty in the hopes it helps others make good decisions on their investments. I wasn’t going to share this story, but after recent developments, decided I would be doing every indie author a disservice if I remained silent. Believe me, don’t believe me, call me a liar, I don’t care. This is my story and it’s the truth.

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You work hard for years writing your first book. You decide to go indie because that what makes you comfortable and happy. You pay for editing services, design services, get all your friends and family to give you feedback and then the day comes when you’re finally brave enough to hit publish.

Next comes marketing and advertising. A daunting, yet necessary task. Most people have no clue where to begin, and others like myself have worked in professions where marketing and advertising is a huge part of our careers. Regardless of your knowledge, do yourself a favor and learn!

There is only one certainty in marketing and advertising: there are no guarantees. Any one who gives you a guarantee is full of shit and you should run as fast as you can in the opposite direction. Putting guarantees aside, however, when you spend money, you will make some money and you will see some results. They may not be as great as you hoped, you may not make your investment back, but you will see some movement. Law of averages demands something will happen when you pay for action.

But what happens when you pay for action and nothing happens? Literally nothing…

It means you paid for fancy words and false promises and just gave your money away without proper execution of any of the services you paid for.

I decided to outsource my marketing, promotions, and advertising not because I didn’t know how to do it, but because I wanted to focus on writing. Marketing is a lot of work and requires hours and hours of time. I needed to prioritize. So, I hired Penny Sansevieri and Author Marketing Experts. I met Penny a few times at conferences and really thought she knew the business. I was wrong.

I could go on and on about how unhappy I am with Penny’s services. I read positive feedback from other clients and I’m baffled because their comments and positive words are so far from my experience. Maybe they only hired Penny and her team for the services that I can’t complain about. There are a few things she and her team did right, but I hired Penny to go beyond her basic campaign and take my book promotion to higher levels and that is where she failed and failed miserably.

Let’s get one thing straight, when I decided to hire Penny Sansevieri and Author Marketing Experts to take over my marketing and advertising campaign, I never expected to make my full investment back. At least not with the first book. I assumed the benefit of my investment would really hit with the launch of book 2 in this series. I did expect to see modest book sales from the various marketing campaigns and promotional items I hired her to manage for me. I’ve done several email promotions on my own and typically see anywhere from 10 to 30 ebook sales within the first 3 days of a promotional blast I’ve paid for. It is a reasonable expectation to see some sales from this type of effort. There have been a couple runs where I saw less than 10 sales, but 10 sales still get my book out there. I did one email promo that blew my mind. It resulted in over 1600 ebook sales and turned my book into an Amazon best seller in three categories. I even saw a huge bump in print sales as result. If I can do that on my own, I could only imagine what a real expert in marketing and advertising could do for me.

So, what did that expert do for me. Nothing.

I realize nothing isn’t enough for most of you, so I’ll explain. Among many other things (more below), I paid Penny to do two email promos within a month for my book. When the first one ran (she told me the date) I saw zero sales. I waited for three days, still no sales. Naturally, I reached out to her and asked to confirm the date. I thought for sure I must’ve written down the wrong date. Nope, they confirmed the promo and sent me the link to the posting. A $200 posting on a single website (email promo???) and it generated zero sales. I was expecting an email blast approach to multiple sources, not a single source. I had done several blasts with great success prior to hiring Penny and spent around $100 each blast. Something wasn’t right and I knew it.

I immediately asked them to reevaluate this promo/approach and to discuss different options for the next promo scheduled in a couple weeks. I was ignored and in two weeks they did the exact same thing and my book was posted on same website for $200. Guess what, I saw zeros sales. Clearly, that was a promo that did not work and was not worth the investment. When I pay an expert to manage my promos, I expect more. I expect them to know which promos will work and which ones will not. Massive fail on this one Penny.

Full disclosure, I paid Penny Sansevieri and Author Marketing Experts $4,890 in May of 2018. This included a custom marketing campaign to do that so called ebook promo I described above, Amazon book reviews (this worked!), blogger pitch (complete joke, reach out to bloggers you like and ask them yourself, its free), Amazon optimization (this may be the only thing they know how to do, but completely doable yourself. Just buy Kindle Rocket and you’re all set), ebook giveaways to increase my reach (not sure if this ever happened. The only communication I got what it was delayed by nearly six months from when my campaign was set to run), and one on one management (joke, Penny disappeared and went on vacation to a foreign country after I paid them in full). This also included $100 for buying ebooks to gift to readers. She could only produce receipts for half that.

Additional services I added on included a national book campaign, local and national media outreach, and even more Amazon book reviews. I had to send them 10 print copies of my book for this and they asked me to write up a few media blurbs. I’ve no clue what they did or if they did anything. For all I know, all the books I sent them were donated or recycled in the garbage. She refused to give me the list of who she sent the books to. She sold me on this by using big name sites like Huffington Post and Washington Post. Joke was on me…

I also added on a key-word driven blog tour. I may have been the most excited about this one. She made it sound like I would be connected to influencers in the book world. Nope, guess again. For this one, they created a bunch a fake names (at least that’s my assumption until she produces proof otherwise) and spammed my book on other people’s blog posts. Most of the blogs were inappropriate for my book, which made it even worse. One I was particularly upset about, and she chose to ignore my complaints rather than work towards a correction. I write sci-fi fantasy, minimal to no romance. One of the blogs was focused on erotic romance (and I mean erotic). Needless to say, I was upset and asked that all these outlets be run by me first because I did not want my book associated with that genre, nor was it an appropriate outlet for my book. I also didn’t like that it was spammy. I hate spam and the last thing I wanted was to be associated with spammy behaviors.

Lastly, AMS ads. Save your money, look up Brian Meeks on Facebook, join his Mastering Amazon Ads group and go to town learning from those who’ve figured it out! Penny didn’t even know how to make Amazon run my ads to get a single sale.

Ultimately, I asked for a partial refund on services she failed to execute. I really wanted all my money back, but I was trying to be fair. I only asked for my money back on services that were not executed in a manner as described or presented to me. When I called her out on these services, she had no clue what I was talking about because she was not involved in my campaign at all. Remember, she went on vacation. She left me in the hands of her team and was completely uninvolved.

Her team was unresponsive and often ignored me and treated me like I was ignorant. I voiced my concerns about the poor performance of the campaign very early on. I asked that we try something different because whatever they were doing with MY MONEY was not working. They ignored me. They failed at communication. If you’re in the business of marketing and promotion, excellent communication skills are vital. Their communication skills are some of the worst I’ve ever dealt with in my entire career. When I asked for a partial refund, Penny had the audacity to blame the poor performance on me and tell me I had no business being an author. Apparently, because it’s always the client’s fault.

After a couple of months of back and forth, Penny resorted to ignoring my emails. There are services that I paid for that were never executed, I was over charged for books they never purchased, and my book was spammed on websites, by Penny and her team with fake accounts. These concerns and complaints have gone unanswered. I had hoped we could come up with an amicable solution to resolve this, but that is not the path Penny chose. She chose to ignore me and refused to refund my money for services she never rendered.

I feel like a real fool and I’m embarrassed to admit that I paid this woman that much money. But if I don’t speak out, she’ll do this to more indie authors like me. I can honestly say; I cannot contribute a single book sale to Penny and her effort (or lack thereof). Not one. Sadly, I am not alone. There are others out there with the same story. Check out Giridhari’s story here. Be sure to read the comments to see the others impacted by Penny.

We indie authors need to stick together, support each other, and make sure no one else ever loses out to Penny Sansevieri and Author Marketing Experts or any other predator out there. I’m sure there are a few good ones, I wish I knew who they were, but the harsh reality is, no one will market and promote your book better than yourself. No one will care as much as you care, no matter how much money you pay them.