I recently had an experience working with Buck Books in which I was not paid the full amount owed for my company's participation in their Buck Books Bundles.
My publishing company offered to have one of our authors be part of their Buck Books Bundles promotions. We were a bit hesitant at first because we had never heard of this company, but after several polite email exchanges, felt it would be okay to give it a try. It seemed to go very well for us, and we were able to accumulate $140.50 cents in commissions using Buck Books. This transaction occurred on February 24th. We weren't told up front, but we were required to wait until June 6th to be paid these commissions. That wasn't a problem at all.
So on June 6th, we were paid a total of $62.00 only for our involvement in the promotion. When we asked about the $78.50 still owed to us, we were accused of sending the company fake emails to collect the commissions. How the promotions work is that Buck Books included one of our books in a package bundle sale of books that go out to their mailing lists and our mailing lists.in order to protect our own mailing lists, we privatize the emails using a simple masking code for each email. We also hide the ip addresses of each person who responds from our own mailing lists. We are able to do this because we funnelled all the people interested in this promotional deal that were from our email lists directly into the back end of our website, where we were able to then mask the emails before sending them out. The reason for this is because we've dealt with promotional companies before that ended up being nothing more than email farmers. Live and learn, as they say.
When I tried to explain this to the Buck Books representative who was our handler for the whole promotion, we received this email from Matt Stone, the founder of Buck Books:
Hi (my name)
Todd (this is our agent who handled us) passed along his exchange with you regarding your affiliate account and payment, and upon close review, I'd like to, on behalf of the whole Buck Books team, extend you a firm middle finger.
Please fu* off.
I hate you. I wish you were fu*ing dead. And I'll never pay you another nickel the rest of your miserable excuse for a life.
-Matt Stone
To say I was in shock with such a strong reaction is an understatement. What my company did was protect our email subscribers who responded to this promotional deal, nothing more. I tried to reason with Matt, explaining that the amount of time to make up over a hundred fake email addresses all for the purpose of collecting a few dollars was asinine. It wouldn't be worth our time to do something like that, and also, if we WERE going to do something like that, wouldn't we want to shoot for a much higher amount? This is the part that baffles me that Matt could even begin to think we would be interested in ripping off his company, especially when everything went well with the promotion and we were very happy with the results. We even wanted to put more of our books into their promotional deals. Why on Earth would we want to scam Buck Books and potentially ruin a great thing?
Not only did Matt not listen to this, he also ignored my attempt to explain about the masking process. He claims his "web developer" said it wasn't possible. It is. I am a computer programmer and coder who went to school for coding. I've designed over 200 websites and even a popular iphone app which was number 1 on Itunes the week it made its debut. I think handling a simple masking procedure with an email list is kind of elementary stuff, but Matt jumped to the worst possible conclusion about this and instead, now has refused to pay what we are still owed by him and Buck Books.
Me and Matt exchanged two more emails. The second email from him was his deference to his "web developer's" advice. The third email was Matt saying this to me, which I found actually kind of funny because it was so immature as to be laugh out loud:
Man. I'm sending out over $20,000 in affiliate payments next month. Shame you won't get any of that.
As you can see, Buck Books seems to be in the business of ripping off publishing houses that employ safety measures when working with their brand new, as yet established company (his associate Todd's words, not mine). Not only that, but when faced with the idea that somebody out in the world might know a bit more about coding than either Matt or his "web developer" does, Buck Books and Matt Stone will not listen to you, but rather devolve into childish antics and avoidance of the facts. I can prove very easily what I did, and even offered to show Matt how it was done, but he instead sent me those aforementioned email exchanges.
BOTTOM LINE: If you are a publisher, please avoid BUCK BOOKS at all costs. I don't think they set out to not pay us, but I do believe that when faced with a situation they didn't understand, their reaction was to be insulting, hateful, and make it personal. Just ask yourself if you have an issue with Buck Books and them paying you, would you want to get an email where somebody wishes you were dead? And even worse, you are told you won't get paid for your hard work at promoting the Buck Book's offer? I think just for this reason alone, it's important to know there are better, more professional companies out there that help authors and publishers get their names out there in the world. Buck Books, unfortunately, isn't one of them. Please avoid them at all costs.
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