When I signed up with Total Publishing Media and Peter Biadasz I made it very clear that this is my first attempt at publishing a book and I need the guidance and expertise of a publisher and author of several books. What I got was a run around approach that resulted in waisting a 1.5 years of paying money and a very inconsistent level of service delivery and a book that is still not ready to go to market. I know need to invest even more money to complete this book as the Publisher failed to do the following things:
1. Properly register my book for Copyright including copyrighting the creative content of my book and provide me proof of the registration. This was requested for the entire 1.5 years of my trying to finish the book. I am still waiting for the proof and keep getting excuses why it is taking so long.
2. Spell and grammar check my book. Peter personally promised to edit my book after I expressed frustrations that I have caught many grammatical and typing errors in more than 6 edits where by the operations team did not provide ANY insight on changes that need to be made. I had to pay an external editor Money to actually read and proof my book. I am not a trained editor and paid for editing services by Total Publishing Media. The operations team simply corrected what i noticed but provided no direction or input on additional needed changes which my additional editor found and neither did Peter who gave me his word he would personally examine the book and correct it.
3. Book Layout - After 1.5 years there are still significant errors in layout which was requested to be corrected by email and by phone conversations. These errors include spacing between words, indentation of personal stories, standardizing how quotes look like and many other formatting issues. I will again have to invest more money as Peter and his operation team did not produce a product that is ready to be published.
4. Chapter Cover Pages - It took Total Publishing 9 month to provide Color Chapter Cover Pages which was requested over 20 times but apparently was not clear in instructions.
5. The operations team refused to edit my book for 5 month because my table of contents was out of order. It is my understanding that table of contents are usually done last as things get moved around and the table of contents has nothing to do with editing the actual content in the book.
6. Responses and files would take anywhere from 2 weeks to 5 month to be delivered which is not the standard agreed upon ion our contract with little to no communications why there were such long delays in response or delivery. Peter always made excuses why he is waiting for the files from operations and why their mistakes and inconsistent delivery was justified.
This was a very frustrating experience and I have all the emails tracking change requests to show that the level of service did not meet the standards promised. Apparently the few authors that had a good experience with Peter were ones that already did all the editing and layout and just had Peter provide the print on demand services.
So now after 1.5 years I have to invest more time and money to get my book to market.
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