I now have seven e-books published on Amazon, and I can use all the free promotion I can get. BookDaily offers free promotion to authors. All they have to do is sign up as an author, and provide a few details about their books, including an excerpt, and the books will be listed on the site under whatever category or genre you choose. Visitors can then peruse the categories and read the first chapter or excerpt of your book. If they like what they read, BookDaily provides a nice little "Buy it now" link. So you can see why I was interested.
BookDaily looked like a fairly well designed, professional site. As quoted from the BookDaily about us page:
"BookDaily is owned and operated by ArcaMax Publishing, Inc. ArcaMax.com publishes more than 300 of the most popular syndicated features and 700 classic books. This content is sent to 1.5 million subscribers by email -- all free of charge."So the parent company has been around awhile, and BookDaily is a spin off of it, being geared towards modern books and emerging authors. Of course there has to be some kind of gimmick, there always is. In order to gain the full benefit of the BookDaily site's promotional prowess (as an emerging author) you have to pay a fee of $49 a month. For this fee, they guarantee to expose your book to 25,000 new readers per month by sending your book details and excerpt by email to readers that have signed up for this by adding books to their book shelf. Further, they go on to say:
"Typically 1000 or more open and read their daily email from us. Your title will also receive featured placement during the month on BookDaily.com and ArcaMax.com, driving additional exposure and readership."I get it. It's a professional site and obviously they're a profit oriented business. I don't have a problem with that, though I do feel $49 a month is a bit steep. However, they still do have the free promotion, and it is up to you as an emerging author to go the free route and hope readers will see your book offering (where apparently it is listed at the very end of the list in whatever genre you post it in, not alphabetically but by the date posted) or, you can pay the fee. Paying the fee also gets you a special icon in the top right corner of your listing indicating that you are an 'Emerging Author'.
Seriously, I don't have a problem with any of that. My problem with them is a simple one. For lack of a better word, their community relations suck. They don't have a forum of any sort to discuss problems, and repeated emails sent to them through their 'Contact Us' link have been totally ignored. They don't even send a confirmation email regarding your message like most, if not all professional sites do.
I admit, I had no intention of signing up for the $49 promotional benefit package. I did however sign up as an author and provided details of one of my books for free promotion. What gets me is that the 'Buy It Now' link is not working. It's such a simple thing to fix, it makes me wonder if you have to pay the $49 fee just to get a working link. It makes me wonder if you have to pay the $49 fee to get an answer to my email concerning the broken link. It makes me wonder if they are as professional as they appeared to be at first glance.
After posting my book, I waited several days to see if the link simply took a few days to become active. It didn't, so I emailed them through their contact page. As on many 'contact us' pages, there are six subjects you can choose from for your inquiry. The best I can tell, five of them are oriented toward those that have paid the $49 fee. After the first email, I waited a few more days for a response or to see if the link would get fixed, but it didn't. Since then I have sent two more emails, also with no response.
To be fair, there is another link in the book details that lists the book as "Kindle Edition", and that link will take you to Amazon if you want to purchase it. But it's been a week now. They said in their promo that they would provide a Buy It Now link and they haven't. I had thought that maybe in the future, I might consider paying the fee for further promotion when and if I could afford it, but I seriously doubt it now. I also thought I might provide details for a few more books too, but again I'm not so sure I'll bother.
I plan on contacting them every day, for a while at least, to see if I can get a response. As hard as it is to find exposure, I thought BookDaily.com might be a good place to gain a bit of traction, but so far it has been another example of just spinning my wheels...
Updated Thursday afternoon: I'm sure it had absolutely nothing to do with this post, but this afternoon I finally received an email from BookDaily saying they had fixed the broken 'Buy It Now' link. A week to fix a broken link is way to long IMHO, but at least it has been taken care of.
