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ParaDon Books Publishing / Amazon Book Clubs

aliceshortcake

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aliceshortcake

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Indie Writers Support has a VERY dissatisfied customer who paid Judd Miller/Korede Abayomi $250 for his services in March and got nothing in return. I've invited him to join the discussion here.

ETA: The writer in question posted three messages on the IWS discussion board - and they've now been deleted.
 
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aliceshortcake

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You can say that again!

I see that ParaDon is using their original PO Box number despite the fact that, according to the Montana Office of Consumer Protection, it was closed in November 2012.
 

aliceshortcake

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HOLY CRAP!

Look what I've just found on the Facebook of Bolade Omo Niaja, Korede Abayomi's most recent alter ego:

Okay, so I lost the lawsuit battle against the Amazon.com Technology Inc... No big deal. It was a good fight. www.amazonbookclubs.org will be disable on September 10th, but the network will remain through a different name. It costed Amazon $10,000 lawyers fee for this battle and me, none.

https://m.facebook.com/korede.abayomi?_rdr

It was posted 13 hours ago. Some of the older comments are also worth reading...
 

Filigree

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I slogged through back to March, I think. I got some interesting tidbits out of that: he boasts about hacking, boasts about making money and 'processing orders', might be put off by the SCOTUS gay marriage decision (that's what I read into it), is trying to sub to major genre publishers including Tor Books, and is delighted when his automated Twitter posts spam thousands of people automatically. I'll look into the Amazon decision, but it sounds like he got a pro-bono lawyer who caved to a settlement quickly. Because Amazon has the kinds of lawyers you draw a pentagram to summon...

Whatever. Filigree's Rule. I looked into Korede Abayomi a couple of years ago, and found some stuff that made me back off quickly. Anyone who signs with this company accepts the risks going in.
 

aliceshortcake

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When I looked at Amazon Book Clubs' Facebook a few hours ago I was confronted by a large photo of a woman having sex with a horse. Mercifully it has now been removed - it's good to know that Abayomi has SOME standards.
 

aliceshortcake

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Another barely literate email from self-styled Stanford graduate Celina Marka:

We have signed a distribution deal with Vearsa, a global distribution company with over 1,000 retail channels and 65,000 libraries. What this mean is that, instead of your eBook being available only through Amazon, Nook, Apple, Kobo, etc, your eBook would also be available worldwide, in all of the manufactured eReaders, and the 252 eBook channels listed here http://bit.ly/1KLW8XH.
If you are self-published author, and wish to make your eBooks available to these channels, you may contact our Contracting Editor at [email protected] and tell him about your published novel. You would have to sign the full right of your eBook title to ParaDon Books Publishing in order for us to publish you through-out these channels.

Right now, ParaDon Books Publishing is offering a 50% Royalty to every self-published authors who wish to be listed under ParaDon Books. We are looking to publish over 200 eBooks titles by the end of this month, and they would be made available through Vearsa and their distributing channels.
Act now if you want to increase your writer's income a tenfold with our team.

Every ParaDon Books authors would instantly receive their very own customized email address (example,[email protected]); their own toll-line (example, 888-853- x10); their own bank card; 500 business cards; full services of Indie Writers Support; and websites like these, ww.bit.ly/1QFEtJT, www.bit.ly/1NRUBBa, www.bit.ly/1H1ZERC etc..

If you are a novice writer, or just want to publish your new novel with us, you may submit the complete proposal to[email protected].
Read our publishing guidelines at https://lnkd.in/ewAqkJi,http://bit.ly/1In2wmi & eepurl.com/bxywin.

Paul and I would personally responding to every question and book proposals sent to us this week.

'The full right of your eBook title'? '50% royalties'?
:roll:


 

aliceshortcake

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They know now!

I've been enjoying an exchange of emails with Celina Marka, who I'm 99% sure is Korede Abayomi in a dress and high heels. I started by asking a couple of questions about the nonsense in ParaDon's new press release:

Alice
With which newspapers was Richard Egland associated?

What is Paradon's street address, and why are you using a fake photo to represent the facade of the building?


Celina
If this is your life mission, I'll leave you to it.
As far as I'm concern you are a nobody and don't deserve my respond.


Alice
If you're going to take the trouble to respond, Celina (or do I mean Korede?), you could at least learn to write in correct English.


Celina
I have thousands of followers that'd put you to shame. You have no claim, and I'm sure this is not arabic.
Please continue your paranoia. It's kind of interesting..

Alice
I'd almost forgotten about ParaDon...UNTIL YOU SENT ME THREE SPAM EMAILS REMINDING ME OF YOUR EXISTENCE!

Of course you have claims. You claim - amongst other things - that ParaDon was founded by a newspaper mogul called Richard Egland. If he exists you should be able to provide me with evidence. You claim that ParaDon has a large building in Great Falls, complete with a highly-qualified staff. If this is the case you should be able to give me the street address and verifiable names of these editors, illustrators etc.

And as for your claim that J R R Tolkien self-published and marketed his 'world-renowned books'...do you really not know how ridiculous that makes you sound to any literate person?


Paranoia? I don't think so. I simply hate to see naieve and desperate would-be writers taken for a ride by con artists, and I'm not the only person looking into ParaDon and its offshoots.


Celina
And who are you again?
Please remind me...
What is your credential? Have you done for the writing world? but speculate...
I hope this investigative whatever you're doing won't end your career.
Want a better job? Why don't you go look into amazon and all of its staffs, you should have fun dismantling them..lol

Alice
I'm having trouble understanding your appalling English, but you seem to be asking me what my credentials are. Since when do you need credentials to investigate the ob
vious nonsense spewed by ParaDon and its offshoots?


Yes, I'm a published author. I was formerly a theatre critic for the British Theatre Guide and I have an article in the current issue of the Journal of the Oscar Wilde Society.


You haven't answered any of my questions so I'll try again:

Who exactly is Richard Egland?
What is ParaDon's street address in Great Falls?
Why are you using a fake photo to represent ParaDon's headquarters?
Do you honestly believe that J R R Tolkien self-published and marketed his books?

Please be aware that from now on any emails from you will be published on AbsoluteWrite. You know - the site you threatened with a cyber-attack when it revealed your $25 reading fee scam in 2011.


Celina
you are not qualify to associate with me in any way, and we don't deal with your kind of propagandas.
Have a good life, and good luck with your career.


"Not qualify"!

*brushes away tear*

The formatting went a bit wonky there but I think Celina's professionalism comes through loud and clear.



 
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aliceshortcake

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To be fair, you don't have to be a blithering idiot to be taken in by Abayomi's non-Paradon enterprises. Yes, some of the authors desperately trying to sell their work via the services provided by IWS are serial victims - nobody wants to buy unedited, self/vanity-pubbed books at ridiculous prices. But other members seem to be intelligent people who just don't notice owner Judd Miller's poor English and enthusiasm for ParaDon Books. One of the testimonials on the site is from a writer who states that IWS was recommended by her agent - the highly reputable Peter Miller!

Something else I've just noticed on the IWS site - an ad for AB Bulk Mailer. By acting as a reseller Abayomi/Miller pockets $10 every time one of his clients buys it. Once a spammer, always a spammer...

ETA - could one of the mods please add 'Indie Writers Support' to the title of this thread?

And here's another reference to Amazon Book Clubs from 2012:

Amazon Book Clubs is now no longer associated with Amazon.com; public news. Amazon feared our reach and the forthcoming future of our company. Now they have withheld our funds from 100+ authors for 180 days. WTF. Good new is that Paypal have accepted our service.
have to say my business took an heavy blow on this one.

https://m.facebook.com/korede.abayomi?fref=nf
 
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aliceshortcake

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Some interesting developments at ParaDon...

Writer Al Sequeira says:

There's is one thing that worries me about a publishing company....whe
n you can't click on it and come right to their homepage, the editors, info on how to publish with them, the history, the books by them, or the contact info, etc. ParaDon Books has no info. You have to keep logging in with a huge section blocking the pages. I paid through PayPal to get a book review and never heard from them??? Alberta Sequeira
https://www.facebook.com/paradonbookspublishing


On the same page Cleve Jones contributes an amusing photoshopped image of ParaDon's name on a Hollywood Walk of Fame star, presumably a comment on the company's photoshopped glass facade.

There are also a handful of reviews, a couple of which sounded very questionable to me. Back in 2013 author Cassidy Webb supposedly gave ParaDon a five star review. This came as a complete surprise to her when I got in touch yesterday, and she has since posted a one star review:

Vanity press... I do not give recommendations for vanity press publishers. ANY publisher who takes money from an author, is no publisher for me or for the authors who seek advice...
I recommend ANY author on this site, run screaming! Self publishing or smaller press would be way more beneficial to the author. ALSO... NO LEGITIMATE PUBLISHER EVER CHARGES A READING FEE...FACT!!!
I do not endorse nor do I do business with, Paradon Publishing
CK Webb
https://www.facebook.com/paradonbookspublishing/reviews?__nodl

Two of the five star reviews are from Abayomi's alter-egos Bolade Omo Niaja and Artis Reed. Curiously, Mr Reed seems to have developed an alter-ego of his own - meet ParaDon's envoy to China, Oatis Beede:

http://chinfest.net/blog/view/149/paradon-books-is-looking-to-sign-the-next-bestselling-writers
 

aliceshortcake

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... and his brother, Bodacious Screed.

I'm sure it's only a matter of time before we meet this gentleman. :roll:

ETA: Aaaaand to the surprise of absolutely nobody, Mr Sequeira's post and my response have been deleted.
 
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aliceshortcake

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Abayomi/Niaja boasting on Facebook again:

Bear witness to the magic I do everyday.
Right now you can see that one of the twitter pages that I'm managing (@ParaDonBooks) is at 12,000 followers right now. Watch. In 3 months the list would be at 50,000 followers, if not 100,000+. All real, and very influential people (mostly writers and readers) following me, no bots. If you follow this twitter page, you would see @ParaDonBooks interacting with all of its folowers, tweeting and re-tweeting. BUT IT WON'T BE ME DOING ANY OF THIS.
All of functions would be done with automation. NO MONEY SPENT & NO WASTED TIME.
This means all of the following and following back, tweeting and re-tweeting would be done automatically, with the source code that I have programmed. Real live interactions with humans, from my intellectual program.
THIS IS WHAT I DO & STUDY.
These computer algorithms have there own mind. The future is endless...


A few days ago there was another interesting post:

One of my best friends just invested $2000 in my new start-up. This time next year, our goal is to each own a mansion.....
What's your goal?
https://m.facebook.com/korede.abayomi?fref=nf

New start-up? Presumably it's the recently relaunched ParaDon. And I wonder if this friend is also connected with another dodgy publishing company - Realistic Poetry Publishing International? RP looms large on Abayomi/Niaja's Facebook and both he and RP's founder Delano Johnson formerly lived in San Bernardino.

I'll say this for Abayomi, he's not lacking in ambition or self-esteem. Here he is in his Judd Miller persona writing a review of his own book 'The Oracle':

'The Oracle' is the second published book by Korede Abayomi. This novel is a combination of a very well-written short story, followed by the insightful poems from the artist's moods and grooves) that drove the moments within the story....
Included in this masterpiece are 105 original poems, compressed into an 82 page wordplay that reads more like Shakespeare's writing - only in the modern tongue. We find this author's writing fascinating, and we think you will as well.
http://indiewritersupport.com/profiles/blogs/poetry-the-retriever-of-fate

:Shrug:
 
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Filigree

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Automatic retweets? Man, nothing would get me to unfollow someone faster. That is so callously dismissive of Twitter's real human interactions. Hmm. If he's not watching the henhouse, someone really demeted could pull an Atlanta Nights thing on him. Wonder how long the nonsense tweets would go on?
 

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Ah. "Judd Miller" rang a bell about a recent spam solicitation I didn't have time to research for purposes of public dissection. I received an email from Mr Miller on 6 September, with the following from line:
Judd Miller [email protected] via amazonbookclubs.ning.com

and basic headers like so:

from: Judd Miller <[email protected]>
reply-to: [email protected]
to: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
date: 6 September 2015 at 01:00
subject: Come join me on Indie Writers Support
mailed-by: amazonbookclubs.ning.com

Presumably they were running the amazonbookclubs thing right up to the wire.
 

aliceshortcake

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Abayomi's little empire is based on the mighty power of spam - spam, spam and more spam. On IWS he's singing the praises of No Hands SEO:

Imagine being able to post your book-links to hundreds of book-related blogging sites all at once, and get massive follow back from their audiences and the search engines. That's right, this tool will guarantee you a high SEO (search engine optimization) ranking according to your book subject, and make your keywords, author's name, and book websites show 1st on the every search engines, including google, bing, ask.

What are the alleged 3,142 members getting for their money other than an opportunity to meet one another online and learn dubious marketing methods they could have found out for themselves? According to EasyCounter, IWS' global ranking has slumped from 1 418 399 to 3 307 499 and "traffic on this site is too low to be displayed" (http://www.easycounter.com/report/indiewritersupport.org).
Effectively the members are trying to sell their books to each other.

To be fair, he also encourages face-to-face interaction with potential book buyers - and it's straight out of the PublishAmerica school of bookselling:

In today's lesson, I am going to show you how you can effectively create your own book-signing event, effortlessly. This process will take you less than an hour, and the result may attract hundreds, and maybe thousands of visitors to your book-signing events.


Thousands? Really?

The very first step to creating a successful book-signing event
is to acquire a good position (book shop) for the gathering... try to get the book-store owner's permission (given that you don't a book-rep that will do this for you) to include their location in an article that you are submitting to the local newspaper concerning a book-signing event. Give he or she your professional credential, and a brief summary of what your book is about. Any free broadcast of a local business is always good to a local business owner, so the chance that the book-store owner will say no to your newspaper-exposure-proposal is slim. Promise the book-store owner that you will attract at least 100 book buyers of your own to the event, and that you will provide the paperback books that you will be signing & selling that day. Instead of paying cash to the book-store owner for using their location, pay he or she with your books, perhaps 50 to 100 autographed copies that they could sell for their own profit them after your book-signing.


Most IWS members appear to be self/vanity published. They'll be struggling to sell 100 copies of their books to people they know personally, and I doubt if the bookstore owner will be thrilled at the prospect of being paid in autographed copies of books by unknown writers. And of course, the writers have already had to pay for the books they provided for the signing.


Chances are, if you can attract more than 100 people to that initial book-signing, the remaining autographed books will sell.

Chances are that nowhere near a hundred people will turn up and the hapless writer will have to slog home with a load of unsold books.

Meanwhile, over at ParaDon's Facebook, 'Celina Marka' has some helpful hints on how to sell books. This is from the same article in which she claims that J R R Tolkien self-published:

Many self-published writers have to find ways to market themselves nowadays if they still want to remain in the game, and not die of hungry.


Well, no-one wants to die of hungry. Writers can avoid this awful fate by...selling their books on eBay and other auction sites.

Book auctioning websites attract millions of debit card and credit card owners every hour, and most of them are looking for valuable items to buy / own. EBay is the largest auctioning website in the world right now, and its service is not restricted to authors who were willing to market their own autographed books to buyers.


Just for once I'm in full agreement with Celina. Books are indeed not the only things sold on eBay.

Auctioning off your published books online is fairly easy to do, and may require that you (the author) have many copies of your own books handy and ready to ship out to buyers. Any published author may order copies of their own books directly from their published at a fairly cheap price, of at least 50% off. These self-marketing authors may then market their own books at the local venues and invites, thereby doubling their earnings on every book, and gaining experiences with their readers who may thereby become permanent fans.

*scratches head*

You buy a copy of your book from your publisher - the publisher you've already paid to print the book - at a 50% discount, then re-sell it to double your earnings. Welcome to what Uncle Jim called 'Published Author, the Role-Playing Game'.

Before I give you the free websites that may increase your daily book sales, I want to give you one last advice pertaining to the pricing of your book at the websites. For instance (and for safe practice), if your book's original price is $21.00, and you can get a copy from your publisher for only $6.00, then it will wise if you start your bidding for the sale of the book (autographed or not) between $15 to $20, this way, you will attract more buyers, your effort will still be profitable, and you'll receive instant incomes (mostly through PayPal). The final bidding price for your autographed book may even double if the buyers are very eager enough to have the treasure (book) in the hand.

Your self/vanity pubbed book will almost certainly be a POD paperback. It probably won't have been edited to a professional standard. If it's original price was $21 no-one in their right mind is going to pay MORE for it.

And...'treasure'? We're not talking about Shakespeare's First Folio, despite the similarity between the Bard's style and that of ParaDon's founder (and I'm not talking about Richard Egland).
 

aliceshortcake

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Ooh, I nearly missed this little gem from last year: 'Celina' tells sales-hungry writers how to get round email providers' anti-spam controls.

How to Advertise your book to 2,000+ recipients a day.

As we all know, Gmail is the most commonly used free email domain in the world, and the only one that allow its account holders to send 500 free emails per hour / day. Yahoo, AOL, HotMail and MSN only allow you to send 100 emails per hour & 500 per day. This is very important to remember when you begin your email marketing, because if you go over the sending limits your account may get restricted.

In order to take to take full advantage of Gmail's vulnerability, you will want to send out over 400 emails a day to those individual readers who may get excited about your published book(s).


*unethical explanation snipped*

I will advise that you only send 250 emails at a time using Gmail. Go to this following link to learn how you can send your email to all of the contacts at once with Gmail;
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/30973?hl=en And remember that you may also apply this same method to your Yahoo, AOl, MSN and Hotmail account before you start sending. This will increase your sending ability from just 500 emails per hour with Gmail to about about 1,000 emails per hour if you use the other email accounts as well.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140801222819-149025852-how-to-advertise-your-book-to-2-000-recipients-a-day?_mSplash=1

Incredible.
 
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