Hey Reddit, The Author Buddy is not a scam!

Hey Reddit, The Author Buddy is not a scam! 🤣

When we launched our new website this week, Perrin was going through the site to make sure links pointing to pages on the old website were corrected to point to the pages on the new website, and in doing so, she stumbled upon this Reddit post: Has anyone tried The Author Buddy? Scam or not?

OP, if you’re reading this, we want to assure you that we’re not a scam, and we’d love to address some of your concerns! First and foremost, it’s sweet that you think we sound too good to be true. We get that a lot, actually. Our authors tell us frequently how much of an asset we were to them on their publishing journey. We love your reaction to our affordable cover designs and array of services, and if you can believe it, maintaining affordable, reliable services for authors is kind of our mission statement! 

Feel free to reach out and chat one-on-one with Rachel and Perrin if you have any more questions, but since it’s on the internet now, we wanted to go ahead and publicly address the concerns raised in the thread point by point! 

We also respectfully ask our more feral—we mean loyal—clientele *cough cough, Cassie** not to comment on the Reddit post. But feel free to fire away in the comments of this blog post instead! We love you 😘

So, buckle up, this is a long one 🤣

Is the Author Buddy a Scam?

Of course not. But admittedly, that’s probably what scammers would say. lol

We (Rachel and Perrin) started The Author Buddy in 2019, and you can read more about us and our story here. But the tl;dr is that we’re just two book lovers utilizing their unique skills to help authors on their journey (because it’s like, really hard out there), and who over the last six years have slowly and quietly built a team of beta readers, designers, and now also editors. Still don’t believe us? Meet the Team here–we’re a group of real people who love helping authors, especially indie authors, access affordable services to help them on their publishing journey, and that is always our main focus.

It all sounds incredible. But why haven’t I heard of them before?

We’ve had the incredible privilege of growing by word of mouth and haven’t had to promote in order to fill our schedule lol. And also, we’re a very small team, which means we usually have about as many projects as we can handle between our newsletter subscribers, our Facebook group members, the folks who find us through search engines, and referrals from happy authors. We don’t want to be famous or book world titans, and we’re not out to make a killing and go buy Author Buddy yachts…we just want to help authors by providing quality, affordable services, and pay our team fairly for their time. Don’t get Perrin started about her feelings on capitalism lol.

Our testimonials page is also available if you’re looking to hear from authors who have worked with us.

Their website is clean and very professional-looking, but I can’t find anything about them outside their social media. They don’t take the full payment upfront – instead, they split it into an upfront deposit and a final payment on completion. 

Why, thank you, Perrin is VERY proud of the website lol. She has worked in graphic & web design and development for over twenty years, and spends a lot of time on our web presence, making sure it looks professional and, more importantly, helps our authors find what they need.

Regarding the deposit payments, Perrin and Rachel feel strongly that a deposit and balance payment schedule is the most fair and secure way for authors to contract us for custom work. Requiring a deposit also locks in the reservation on our project calendar while also lightening the financial load a bit for our indie authors. Perrin has done billing for graphic design work like this for decades, and Rachel agreed that it follows industry expectations in the book world.

No offense, OP, but it seems like you’re just someone from the site trying to get around the “no self promo” rule, especially since you just made your account.

This made us giggle-snort. Um, no. We don’t know who OP is. In the interest of respecting that subreddit’s rule against self-promotion, we’re responding here on our blog, because we don’t even want defending ourselves within the post comments to come across as us promoting ourselves.

Never heard of them, but my guess is if not an outright scam, they are at best skeevy people who won’t be worth any amount of money.

There really aren’t any “one stop shop” places to handle the publishing tasks. No one can truly be able to control and supervise the various people that have to be used to do all these things.

Skeevy?? Seriously? It’s a little upsetting that someone would judge us so harshly without knowing anything about us, and this one did kind of hurt. But for real, if you knew us, you’d know that we’re just about the least “skeevy” people. We started this business so we could do work we love, help authors, and also stay home with our kids while dealing with our own unique situations and circumstances. Perrin is a breast cancer survivor whose chance of recurrence is high, so she’ll continue to have maintenance appointments for years, and Rachel lives with chronic illnesses that make working outside the home difficult. While we are dedicated to this business and rely on it as our full-time career, we are not in it to get rich. Our primary goal is always to help authors by making professional services affordable.

We’re not sure what to say about the one stop shop comment. We’ve built a great team who handle lots of different facets of the pre-publishing process, and our team does a phenomenal job of helping our authors navigate many of those challenges. We are a small team, and certainly can’t help with every single thing, but while we don’t claim to be able to do everything, we believe we do a pretty good job with the services we offer and we do cover a lot of what indie authors need.

If we have team members who have experience with different parts of the process and can be helpful to our authors, why would we NOT offer those services?

Premade & Custom Cover Design

It’s honestly hard to say. The covers don’t look terrible, but I wouldn’t pay near those prices for someone who is clearly at the beginning stages of doing covers. What’s suspicious it that a few of the covers they claim to have done don’t actually link to a book on Amazon, and the books aren’t listed.

Ouch. lol

Some of the books we’ve done have been unpublished, or the authors have updated their covers to new or different market trends, and it’s honestly kind of a pain to check those links all the time. So yeah, we’re sorry about the broken links, but we’re working on it!

And while The Author Buddy has only been around for six years, Kim had years of experience as a cover designer before joining our team, and Perrin has a degree in graphic design and has been a successful graphic designer for over twenty years now. Our covers may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but we are proud of the variety of designs we have available for our authors, and the quality of the work we provide them.

Covers looks like basic templates which are great to edit quick if it fits your book but they seem expensive for a template given that you might eventually see someone with the exact same cover.

It states very clearly everywhere on our website that we only sell covers ONCE. They are not templates, and we don’t sell a cover to multiple authors. We can’t control if someone copies our designs, but that’s a whole other matter. And while we do use stock imagery for most of our covers, we put a great deal of care into our designs to offer unique cover artwork.

And truth be told, it was only with lots of encouragement from our authors who flat out told us we were priced too low that we ever raised our prices. When we started, our prices were actually set so low that we made about $4/hour, and we’re comfortable with our pricing now as far as being a good balance of value for our authors, but also a reasonable compensation for our designers in the current economy and market. Not everyone will agree, and that’s ok, but we’re confident in the value we provide to our clients, many of whom come back project after project for a multitude of services and recommend us to their author friends.

Beta Reading & Story Services

Also, they offer beta reading. That is not copy and line editing or proofing—I don’t even see these listed on their site. Beta readers and editors do not do the same job and shouldn’t be treated the same either.

It does feel as if they are positioning their Beta service as something more akin to a developmental edit. But it’s worrying that OP is pitching it as line/copy editing.

This one is tough, but actually fair criticism, and something we’ve struggled with for the past few years. Let us explain…

After probably the fifth or sixth time that an author reviewed their completed project we delivered back to them and told us “WOW, this is about ten times more thorough than the editor I hired, this is a lot more than a beta read,” we started asking some questions to the authors we worked with. We were able to view the feedback provided by some editors (developmental and line edit), and honestly were surprised that our authors were getting charged thousands of dollars and delivered back manuscripts with very obvious uncaught plot holes and things like main character name typos.

Now, Rachel had been beta reading for authors for years before founding The Beta Buddy, and invested in courses to further her expertise in expanding the business at the urging of her author clients. But Rachel and Perrin do not have degrees in English or Creative Writing, nor certifications for editing, and have never claimed to be certified editors. 

HOWEVER, the services we were providing as Premium Beta Reads were obviously much more analytical than just a beta read. So, we decided to offer Platinum level reads that were a hybrid of betas and edits. We still provide reader reactions so the author can see how the story is hitting, but we also take an analytical approach to evaluate the development of the story as a whole and all of the elements of the manuscript down to the line level.

We have struggled with what to call these services, to be honest, and have tried different names through the years. The line edit service will probably be changing soon anyway because we’re about to launch a full editing service with a new team member. We don’t want to mislead anyone, and have tried our best to make clear what our services include. We’re also in the process of adding samples to the website for even more transparency.

But we believe that for indie authors who cannot afford to pay thousands of dollars to an experienced editor with years of professional training, the Platinum level read Developmental and Line Edit services we offer are a good solution. They’re much more thorough than what you’ll generally get for $50 on Fiverr, but probably not near as thorough as what you’ll get for $2,000 with an editor who has a Masters degree in creative writing and years of experience and can charge those rates. It’s entry level, like a step between doing all your editing yourself and spending thousands of dollars on it.

Have you tried their beta reading service before? Curious if the feedback quality matches their affordable pricing. Sounds like a great deal if legit – but agree with some of the comments that say that you might just be throwing away $7… not a huge loss if so, but still not much of a gain…

I think this one was confusing the beta reading services and the promotion services. The promotion services are $7. But let’s get into that.

Promotion Services

Marketing for $7? I dunno mate. Seems VERY low.

I offer help with marketing and I can’t think of anything that I would charge $7 for that I wouldn’t just give away for free.

Hey, hey! Rachel, here! The marketing section actually promotes another website, Steamy Book Bargains, which I’ve run since 2016. We post daily deals on our website and send out a newsletter to subscribers promoting romance books under $4. We charge such a low rate because we don’t guarantee clicks, we just want to be compensated for the time it takes to put everything together. We’ve spent the last nine years helping authors get their steamy romances in front of readers looking for those kinds of books. We even promote new releases and charity anthologies for free! We consider these promotions as sister sites to The Author Buddy, and we love that we’re able to make these opportunities available to our authors.

Their marketing for $7 sounds like a scam. Why does it involve time slots…? Also that page is half broken too.

The time slots are a super easy explanation. We use an automated scheduler to make sure there are only a few spaces available in the daily deals newsletter each day to make sure if you sign your book up for promotion it wont get buried. If we were a scam, we’d offer unlimited spots each day and wouldn’t care if your book was competing with fifty other books each day.

Also, sorry about the broken page, we were working on building our new website and that got messed up in the process because of the aforementioned automated scheduler’s embed. We’re working on getting it fixed.

So, is The Author Buddy a Scam?

I mean, we know we’re not. We’re certainly not out to scam anyone, and in fact, we usually end up doing the opposite…often doing extra work for free because we just love our authors so much and we feel bad charging when they ask for extra work that isn’t included in what they ordered. We’ve had to work on this for YEARS, understanding that it’s ok to be compensated fairly for our time and expertise.

We’re sure that our percentage of satisfied customers through the years isn’t 100% (that would be miraculous!), but we have tried to help all of the authors we’ve worked with to the best of our abilities.

We hope anyone who is considering working with us will check out our Portfolio, Testimonials, or reach out to us at hello@theauthorbuddy.com with any questions you may have. We would love the opportunity to work with you and show you what kind of service we provide.

And we hope Reddit doesn’t hate us lol

But before we close…

I used The Author Buddy for both of my covers. They’re definitely legit, and I found them really lovely to work with. They kept my updated every step of the way, took all of my correction requests, and I had no issues uploading either file to KDP or IngramSpark on the first shot.

We want to send our thanks to the sweet author who stood up for us 💜 We love working with you, and we appreciate you having our back in that thread more than we can say!