Helio Distribution
Hi, and thanks for sharing all this information. I have, sadly, heard many similar complaints against Heliographica. I wonder if, now that the one year mark is coming up for many of their authors, or has just been passed, the you-know-what is starting to hit the fan and that is the reason for the new company, Active Imprint.
Speaking about distribution, my Helio book has never been made available to Baker & Taylor or B&N. I have personally spoken to bookstores who had sizeable orders for my book and have never been able to obtain them. Repeated requests to Heliographica to make the book available have been ignored.
As to the background and credibility of the company itself, many authors, including myself, were originally led to believe that Heliographica was the offshoot of a large and viable marketing corporation. As it turns out, it seems we are dealing with the smoke and mirrors of anonymous mailboxes and we have been denied any direct way to contact this company.
It will be interesting to see what happens with any legal action that may be initiated.
Good luck with your ventures!
Cricket
iwrite4u said:
I signed up with Heliographica last year and have lived to regret it. They charged too much, barely understood layout, shipped books late, and damaged over a hundred in shipping. The customer service was the worst it could be—they don’t send out books to people who pay for them—this is the story for quite a few authors. One of the con games was to take $350 of our money for the top level of Baker and Taylor distribution, tell us our book “should” be listed –for months and months, but no one could EVER order it—and it was always—“we’ll check on that and get back to you.” But the bookstores showed the books out of stock the whole time—the books were never in stock. Through person-to-person contact with B&T I found out that the program we paid for was not what we were getting—books in the free program had to be back ordered, but not the Partners program. Questions about this discrepancy were never answered by the owner. They took the money and did not deliver the services.
I paid the same amount for 500 books that I am paying for 2000 now, and they told me/us prices are higher because of distribution costs and publicity—but as I said, they didn’t do either one. Lots of con, lots of promises, and no delivery. They work apparently on the edges of the law, just covering themselves in the "contract" so no one can touch them legally--they think.
I use the term “we” several times because I know several authors who have complaints, some were asked to sign a statement agreeing not to post anything negative, and others have never been paid their royalty checks for over a year, despite the website info and posts on this forum. According to Amazon ranking, books for these authors are being sold, some with very high successful rankings, so something is very fishy. Not paying royalties after the authors have worked hard to sell books is a terrible, dishonest thing to do, if not illegal. And discouraging to authors who themselves are honest and trusting.
Further dishonesty is about the “address:” a PO Box in San Francisco, but authors from out of town have been told there IS a real office; the owner was offended when the author doubted this. Some of us have seen the office address, and have seen the PO Box and the owner getting mail from it, but why disseminate that lie and be found out? When several lies are found out, trust is lost and authors bail.
Another new company has been created by the same people now for distribution: www.activeimprint.com. Watch out for them too. Writers—be careful of who you give your books to, and who has the ISBN for your books. There are a lot of scary folks out there. I created my own company finally—having had two unpleasant, to say the least, and dishonest, publishers. I, and others, have lost a lot of money. There are a few honest companies, but many are nothing like they want you to believe. They know writers are very eager to hold their own books, and many writers are naïve about how it really works. The cons and scammers will take your money, leaving you with buckets of misery and empty pockets.
Many Helio authors are leaving in droves. The jury is out about any legal actions.