Frankly, despite all your claims to the contrary, this shows what you think of the people here who are trying to help you.
No no no. Please. You're misattributing things to us. That's not what I meant. It's not for the people here who are giving feedback
I mean people who are trying to destroy our business via lies and defamation
AND
People who are wishing our business gets destroyed because we don't believe in Customer is Always Right. Seriously, if you're saying - You didn't take the attitude of Customer is Always Right and because of that I wish your business gets destroyed and I'm going to tell all my friends that you don't believe Customer is Always Right and to never do business with you again and try to destroy your business
That's a bit much, no?
What was the whole issue.
ONE author says - they tried to steal my money
We point out - here are emails and we didn't try to steal your money and when you did chargeback we accepted it
AND THE FACTS i.e. For every 485 authors who work with us only 1 has to do a chargeback
AND FOR THAT you are saying we are wrong and Customer is Always Right and we'll tell all our friends to never do business with you
that's not logical. that's not coming from a place of good intentions
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The people here who are responding I have respect for and i love the responses. The feedback is great. It's only by understanding how other people see the world can you understand how beautiful the world really is
We obviously don't like the response claiming our business is going to get destroyed - that's uncalled for. If you really meant to give us feedback why include something like that - that doesn't in any way shape or form make us think you're coming from a place of good intentions
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All this makes us better. However, it takes time to integrate feedback. Perhaps we'll always be the kind of people whose response to someone calling us a scam is - Here's evidence we're not. You're mistaken.
And never reach a place of wisdom where we say - We apologize so much that you were put in the uncomfortable place of not knowing for 3/4 days what was being done with your money. And how can we make it right
Perhaps we aren't capable of that level of customer service or wisdom or tact or whatever you want to call it
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Business Plan
I see you believe very strongly in the idea of a business plan.
Imagine someone different from you, who never wrote a business plan and never will, and instead believes very strongly in strategy and an end goal, without caring about a business plan. Call it a Passion Plan. We do what we are passionate about and not from a place of 'how can we not offend people and how can we handle the 2% who don't like us' and instead focus on the 93% of our customers who are happy
Strategy is simple - connect indie authors and indie publishers with readers, removing all the friction.
It's worked well
Our end goal is simple - making sure that CREATORS get 80% of the money
That's pretty hard - however, we're confident we'll get it done i.e. play our small part
You don't need a business plan for that. I'm sure it would make us a better company and this and that. But in the end you have to accept yourself for who you are and work only with people who accept you for who you are. We're just not the type of people who're going to change everything around for the happiness of - a small number of people who are wrongly accusing us of being a scam and a bunch of people who've never worked with us and are now clearly saying they never will work with us because the way we responded to being called a scam was inelegant
So be it. Que sera sera
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If it's B2B then I don't understand why there is so much 'customer is always right' and 'you should never point out customer is wrong'.
It's a business/entrepreneur we are talking to. It's a win win win - you get to sell your books and build a readership, our readers get good quality books at low prices, we continue to grow
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We really do appreciate all the feedback
We totally understand people who will never work with us again because we stood up for ourselves and corrected the author claiming we had stolen her money. We still wish all of you the best.
We still wish that author the best who claimed we tried to steal her money. We've curated her books for our blog and will continue to do so
We also understand people here who aren't getting what I'm saying and are misunderstanding. Just wait a few years and see the market that develops. Then you'll understand what I mean by Creators should get 70% and middlemen only 30%. I'm just saying this out of our experience in other digital markets, not from any sort of negative place
Everything I write is open to misinterpretation and some people are unfortunately misinterpreting it. Just wait a few years. Then you'll see it's all true. IT's a war between CREATOR centric models and MIDDLEMEN centric models. So let's be very dispassionate and think about it
Do Trade Publishers not give a cut to bookstores? Do they not give placement money?
What if there was a model where that cut was super minimal - just 10% or 20%
Would there be ANY trade publisher who would not jump at that?
THAT is what I'm talking about
Creator - Author
Author chooses whether to work by themselves or work with Publishers
If they work with Publishers and publishers help them craft the book and polish it then Publisher is part of CREATION processs
Now the next step is reaching Readers
That's where the DISCOVERY problem comes in
That's where the middlemen come in, who play no part in CREATION and yet want the lion's share
This also applies to Publishers if they want a disproportionate share - where they wanted authors to take only 8.5% of ebooks
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We're just spelling out the future possibilities and suggesting that the best one is one where CREATORS get 80% or more (at the minimum 70%)
And also pointing out that that future is INEVITABLE
You have to envision what would be best for readers, for authors, and for everyone connecting the two and if you narrow down the choices then there aren't very many end states that are sustainable
If you narrow down more and look at what's most likely, to the point of being inevitable, you'll see that my words are just pointing at what is almost certainly going to happen - If you don't want that to happen, then work against it. If you want it to happen, then work for it. If you don't care, then don't care
Life is too short to work with people who want you to compromise on your principles in the name of some intangible thing called 'Customer is Always Right'. I for one am not going to let a handful of anonymous authors attack our business and slow down our relentless march towards connecting authors with readers in a way such that authors get 80%
4 years ago we had 50,000 readers. Now we have 5 million+ readers. God willing we'll keep growing faster and faster and help more and more readers and more and more authors. We're not going to apologize to someone claiming this is a scam and trying to stop us from connecting 200+ indie authors every day with 5 million+ readers - that's actually good customer service to our real customers - authors we are helping every day and who are happy