My elderly mother (artist by trade) had put together a memoir - a book made up of pictures and stories of her life and experiences. She lives on a small island and cannot travel very well. I am her daughter, I live in the city and was doing was research to find a cheapish way to get her memoirs printed. She provided me with the name of a company in Washington, she was told this company provided prining services lower than any we had found. I contacted Chad Lilly in September and asked if he provided printing and delivery his response was
"While this is not a service we generally provide... It is something I can do... And prob for a lot less than anyone offering it as one of their services. How many scanned chapters do you have? And can you send me one of them via email so I can get a better idea of what we are looking at... And what will need to be done to combine your existing pdf's into one file to our printer's specs.
The coil binding and printing is something we can offer directly, with or without world-wide distribution."
After visiting his website and finding out he was also a publisher I was very clear that all I was looking for was a printer. He again said yes he could provide this service. He then proceeded to ask for a deposit which I gave him (350.00 USD) after that he engaged a woman to work with my mother to create a new cover, which I did not ask for. I must make sure everyone knows that getting responses from Chad was very hard, he was hard to get a hold of, and many times said he was starting work at the end of the day. On the phone he was short with me, rude and condescending, once actually telling me he was sick of so many people not respecting his craft and skills. My attempt to work with Chad continued over from Sept to March. I continuely requested information about my request and what we were paying for. I finally received cost related information end of Feb. His website costs make no sense to anyone who is not in the publishing industry and when he finally referred me to the site his response was rude I asked him to explain the costs on the website and this was his response:
IF you would have chosen to read what has always been clearly written on our websites regarding the costs involved BEFORE you wasted this much of my time... Then I wouldnt even have to explain why our Title Deposits are not refundable now.
So now Chad has a PDF copy of my mothers book, 350.00 dollars of her money (she is extremely low income, this has impacted her ability to pay her monthly costs)
I want to take this further and file a report with a Washington based complaint bureau neither my mother not myself are able to hire lawyers, but we both want to make sure there is a more serious complaint registered.
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