We’re disappointed to announce that BookVenture, a book service run out of Ishpeming MI, is illegally marking up Self-Publishing Review services at extortionate rates. Despite sending a cease and desist letter, this company has not removed our products from their website or answered within the timeframe we requested. We said if they did not we would publicly reveal this misconduct.
The worst part of self-publishing is that companies like Book Venture scrape every last penny from authors by hiking up prices. What Book Venture have done here is not only hike up our prices, but they have renamed them and re-described them, and worse, taken a title from our Bestseller product and applied it to our review products.
The price of an SPR Jump Start is $75, and has been repriced as a “Rowling” at $299.
The price of a SPR Classic Review is $139, and has been repriced as a “Tolkien” at $499
The price of a SPR Lead Story Review is $299, and has been repriced as a “Dickens” at $999.
The price of our Bestseller Book Review is $899 and has been repriced as a “Bestseller” at $2799!!
We did not give permission for BookVenture to use our products like this and we do not allow any company to advertise our products as their own under any circumstances. We are disgusted by this blatant disregard for our products and reputation and have not ever entered into a contractual agreement with BookVenture.
You can compare prices at our Get Reviewed page here
This page shows BookVenture prices that rip off clients [Now removed following our complaint three days later. Here is the screengrab of the page showing the three review products (unfortunately not the bestseller package, which was lower down) that was up on the website for nearly a year before we discovered it:]
Some time back, Michael Spelling and Marie Rice contacted us to discuss a partnership. We agreed to 10% off for all BookVenture customers. This agreement has not been honored, and instead of giving a 10% discount clients are being charged up to $1700 more than we charge at SPR!
So from today, we will not be fulfilling any orders from BookVenture.
[Update] Michael Spelling wrote to us to say that he was in Asia, their email was broken, had been for a few months, and clients were complaining, and that the member of staff who created this page had been fired some time back and he wasn’t aware of the page, and that he hoped we would keep up the partnership, and to apologize. Of course, we have not accepted any of this and can only hope clients will be comforted we have detached SPR from this company entirely with immediate effect. We also suggested they refund the difference back to clients who bought products from this page.
If you would like to support Self-Publishing Review (and indie authors everywhere), please send your opinion to media@bookventure.com and tell them why it’s not fair to mark up prices for indie authors.
We are available for discussion with any BookVenture client who has purchased these products.
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