Streetlib Streetlib Publishing, Streetlib Pub Mislead and Robbed by a Dishonest E-Book Distribution Company Queens New York
My troubles with this company started as soon as I signed up. Sure, to begin with the problems were minor. They said you get paid a month after earning the income, which was extended a month. But I was told that it was my fault for not understanding their extremely misleading wording, and I foolishly persisted in uploading more books to their service. Then, I would notice that sales data was extremely off. I could see books rising in ranking on their respective websites, even shooting up the rankings, yet 0 sales were registering when I logged into streetlib to check what sales I got. The only data I had direct access to was Google Play, and I could see that the sales I made and what I was paid for were frequently incorrect. God knows how bad I was ripped off on other outlets sales. Then, recently, I was to be paid around $1000, only to find out that they had taken the bulk of the money and only paid $81. They said that's because they take a 10% cut of what I made via Google Play - but I checked GP and found out that not only should they have been taking that every month and not in lump sums every 5 months, but they were taking around 25%. So I confronted them, and found out that disgustingly enough they were taking not only 10% of my revenue (GP only pays out around 48% to authors) they were charging me 10% on every dollar of Google revenue as well. Meaning, even though I was only getting 48% of the money earned on Google Play, they were charging me as if I was making 100% of the money from Google Play.
I could go on and on and on, but essentially this company will mislead you to hell and back and fleece you for every extra dollar they can. Ironically, because I stopped uploading books (and I have a catalog of thousands) they've lost around 10x what they're making now from me, because if they were just honest I would of continued to upload books to their service and they would be making way more off the vastly increased sales instead of trying to nickle and dime me any way they can!
3 Updates & Rebuttals
Rick
Aurora,Colorado,
United States
STREETLIB HAS GOTTEN BACK TO ME
#4Consumer Comment
Tue, September 04, 2018
I have communicated with Streetlib and they were very appolijetic about the lack of phone service and the dificulty I had. I found them very genune and have changed my mind about the company. They really went out their way to make things right and that's the sign of a great company. Now I look forward to working with Streetlib, I believe they can make great things happen.
Rick
Aurora,Colorado,
United States
NO PHONE NUMBER FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE
#4Consumer Comment
Tue, August 28, 2018
I tried to find Streetlibs customer service number and it isn't anywhere. I have questions before I commite my illustarted audio ebook, but there is no one to talk to. You can't trust a company that doesn't list there phone number, because if something goes wrong, what then. Sure there's an email address, but what are they hiding from? I want to do business, but not through an email.
AC
Queens,New York,
United States
Communication mishap not ripoff
#4UPDATE Employee
Tue, November 21, 2017
Hi,
Our website and communication were unclear when our user first came with us with an issue. (we corrected them since) It lead this user to believe we were keeping more money than we originally announced. It isn't the case. The royalties the user received may have been lower than expected, but this is only because of the economic model of the store where the books were sold, as explained clearly on our Help Center. We tried to explain this to the user many times with no success.
Our reporting tools are working accurately but - as stated on our website and help center - depend on the data we get from stores. As it goes for any multi channel distributor out there. The same way our payment delays are explained and did fit with our explanation. We, however, saw it may not be clear for everybody so we took the time to clarify everything.
The communication could certainly have gone better and maybe the user didn't feel we understood his position. Plus, our website pricing should have been clearer from the start (to be precise: we stated we had a 10% commision on sales and failed to specify, there, that it was on the list price of the book, which is pretty standard. We have now added this information)
This is on us and we apologized repeatedly and corrected everything we could. However, at no time did we keep more royalties than our economic model states or stole anything from any user. We didn't try to hide anything or cheat anyone, we were always available to answer questions and clarify things, as we always try to be.
I'm afraid we lost the trust of the user who reported this as a "ripoff" and if there is anything we can do to gain it again, we certainly will. In the meantime, I hope other reviews and recommendations online will show this is an unfortunate incident and not our true portrait.
Thanks you,