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Austin Macauley Publishers, Ltd. (formerly Austin & Macauley)

PeteMC

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If you want contractual advice there are places you can get that. Some intellectual property lawyers will provide it; some writers' groups will (for example, the UK's Society of Authors gives free contractual advice to its members). You don't need to pay a useless agent for this.

Seconding this - I've found the Society of Authors to be very helpful even though I have an agent. I'm sure there's something similar in the US, and, depending on your genre, orgs like SFWA and (I think) RWA do this as well.
 

ss06470

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Has anyone heard of Austin Macauley Publishers

A google search brought me there and I assume it is not legitimate but I would love to learn it is peachy good
 

regdog

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Porting to Bewares, Backgrounds and Recommendations


Please keep your hands and feet inside the thread while it's in motion. Thank you
 

Selkiegirl

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Austin Macauley doesn't take the time to do editing, as someone noted on AM's Facebook an example of tautology in an excerpt from a book on Amazon's book listing, I can't recall what the paragraph was, but here are a couple of examples, of my own: 'Will £2.50 be sufficient enough money to buy a cup of coffee.' Well, you would likely say use the word 'sufficient' or 'enough,' never both. Another: 'A successful businessman owns a chain of shops up and down the length and breadth of the UK.' When in actual fact it is 'up and down the UK,' or: 'the length and breadth of the UK.'

Yet this company more or less boast on their webpage they take time to edit their writer's books.
 

MaryLennox

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Book Covers

One of the first things I do when considering submitting a manuscript to a publisher is look at their book covers. It is a mark of professionalism to have decent book covers. I know you aren't supposed to judge a book by it's cover, but if you judged Austin MacAuley by their covers...wow. These are some of the worst covers I have ever seen.

Check out this gem:

https://www.austinmacauley.com/us/book/crazy

ALSO - there's this one. Have they not heard of copyright infringement? You cannot put the Starship Enterprise on a book cover. This is just ridiculous. It makes you wonder how many of their other cover images are stolen? But they're all awful, so they're not doing a very good job at stealing decent work.

https://www.austinmacauley.com/us/book/houston-we-have-problem

And one more...because the actual title is just as bad as the cover. I mean, "Shittle Gets Shitfaced"? Has anyone seriously considered buying this book? Look at it's synopsis. "While Shittle, was careless and reckless, but damn was she hot!" How is that even a sentence?
These are the stories of Chelsie Von-Bittle and the tales of her sorority sisters, Shittle and Little.Little was innocent and careful. Make bad choices she did not!While Shittle, was careless and reckless, but damn was she hot!No matter how hard she tried, poor Chelsie Von-Bittle always found herself stuck somewhere right in the middle.

https://www.austinmacauley.com/us/book/tales-shittle-and-little

Sorry if anyone finds this harsh but I have two big pet peeves:
1) Crappy covers slapped on an author's hard work.
2) Publishers and other folk who are scammers who prey on new/young writers.

Austin MacAuley does both.
 
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mrsmig

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Mary Lennox, the covers are indeed dreadful. However, they're ENORMOUS and far outside the size requested by AW for graphics (400x400 pixels: see the Image Size Guidelines). Some of the members are on dial-up and these big images slow the loading process waaaaaay down.
 

MaryLennox

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I'm so sorry! I wasn't sure how to make them smaller. I will change them all to links.
 

Maryn

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Thanks for that--and for the laugh over appalling cover art.
 

PeteMC

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Wow, just wow. Also, did... did anyone check out the sample PDF of "Shittle Gets Shitfaced"? It's a picture book. For Young Adults. About getting shitfaced. How is that even a thing? The saddest part is that the author is actually a pretty good cartoonist (assuming those are her pictures), and no one is ever going to see it.
 

MaryLennox

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Wow, just wow. Also, did... did anyone check out the sample PDF of "Shittle Gets Shitfaced"? It's a picture book. For Young Adults. About getting shitfaced. How is that even a thing? The saddest part is that the author is actually a pretty good cartoonist (assuming those are her pictures), and no one is ever going to see it.

Okay, so I went and checked out the PDF. It appears the whole book is available for free? Unless this was an abridged version? The moral of the story seems to be: "So, let this be a lesson to girls everywhere: wake upwith a new boyfriend or with puke in your hair."

Wow. Are those really the only two options for young women? So empowering. Lol. The author's intro said the books are supposed to take on serious social issues in a humorous way. I think she failed on both accounts?
 

PeteMC

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I don't want to slag off the author (RYFW and all that) but, um, yeah. Hopefully that's an abridged version and there's a bit more to it than that.
 

yellowrose

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Austin Macauley London, England

Has anyone had dealings with these people? They profess to have businesses in New York, Toronto, Sydney, South Africa, and Sharjah. I submitted a novel, paid for the privilege 20 months ago, and have had so much trouble that I am attempting to get my money and my novel back - without any luck at the moment. Their first artwork for the cover was dreadful and they also attempted to 'rewrite' a lot of words necessary to the plot. They've only ever communicated with me in direct response to their work despite my letters and emails. I just want to warn anyone else wanting to publish with them.
 

Chris P

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8Hello yellowrose! Welcome to AW.

Are these the folks? https://www.austinmacauley.com

You might want to ask a mod to move this thread to the main Bewares, Recommendations, and Background Checks forum. This particular subforum is for various arms of a certain vanity press and scammer we strongly caution folks to avoid.

That said, I don't have any info on Austin Macauley, although the name sounds super familiar. We don seem to have an existing thread on them, so thanks for starting one.

ETA: D'oh! Thanks Helix. I was looking in the agents index and not the publishers. No wonder they sounded familiar!
 
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Maggie Maxwell

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They're an ENORMOUS vanity press, as you can guess form the 315 page thread Helix linked. Super expensive publishing for a product equivalent that you could slap on Amazon for free and get the same quality. Actually, better quality, as it's probably not hard to make better covers than the trash they put out in their name. I doubt you'll be able to get your money back, best of luck with it, though. Unfortunately, you'll have to count this an an expensive lesson learned. Yog's Law: Money flows towards the author. Legitimate agents and publishers, you NEVER have to pay, you GET paid, because readers are the customers, you supply the product. Vanity presses like AM are only out to get your money, they don't care about your books. The sale ends with you.
 

Chris P

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Looking at the covers linked above, I noticed the number of reads at the top left of each title. I can't imagine any publisher would post the sales numbers of the order pages, but even if that's page views all the numbers I've seen are super low, like 40 or fewer. Regardless of whether that's sales or (even worse) pages views, that should be an alarm bell right there. Nobody is buying or even looking at buying these books.
 

MaryLennox

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I know this thread is a few years old BUT...a local author published a book with Austin Macauley (even though I advised them not to and provided links to this exact thread and other informative links). I decided to be supportive and check it out since they seem like a lovely person. But I was shocked when EVERY SINGLE PAGE had an error on it. It's one thing to pay a ton of money for editing/cover/etc, but then it's mind boggling that this book reads like a first draft. Did anyone at Austin Macauley even read it? It makes me so angry. I understand why people are willing to go with vanity presses, because they want the packaged deal and don't want to do the run around of finding a cover designer and an editor, etc, but this book just proves they do NOTHING but take people's money. For example: the word too is used exclusively, whether it should be to or too, through the entire book. And that's just one of the very small things wrong with this book. I don't know if there are different packages and maybe this author passed on the editing option, but I just can't get over how poorly edited this book is and how it looks like not a single person proofread it. The plot also makes zero sense, but that's a whole other can of worms. At the very least AM should be doing basic line edits for the products they are producing.

I feel bad for the author. But they seem blissfully unaware and happy. This is actually their second or third book with AM, so they must already know they're never making their money back? I guess they don't care, they're rich, or have a rich relative supporting them? And I will admit there is a small part of me that is annoyed because this author loves to tell people they are traditionally published and they give writing advice on various social media outlets, but when I tried to have a polite conversation about AM they chose to just stick their head in the sand and refused to even come read this thread.

This whole thing just made me angry and I wanted to add on to this thread, in case there is anyone out there reading through the whole thing and needs even more reasons to not go with AM.
 

mrsmig

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Longtime member Filigree (who hasn't been around much lately, and I miss her), has a saying about situations like this: "Some authors deserve some publishers."

I had a friend who did the same thing, only it was with Xlibris. She's a smart, educated woman but somehow battened onto the idea that paying to be published was how publishing worked. I tried to warn her, but I think she just resented it and, in fact, barely speaks to me now.

You've done all you can to help your friend. It's painful to watch someone willfully (sometimes repeatedly) walk into a snake pit, but all you can do now is shrug and step away.
 

Fuchsia Groan

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And I will admit there is a small part of me that is annoyed because this author loves to tell people they are traditionally published and they give writing advice on various social media outlets, but when I tried to have a polite conversation about AM they chose to just stick their head in the sand and refused to even come read this thread.
I feel you on the annoyance. I’m Big 5 published and I would feel weird giving writing advice on social media, unless it’s in a dedicated forum like this. I feel like that’s reserved for people who have demonstrated success—a best seller or a long career.

The to/too thing is just scandalous. I see a lot of books from “hybrid” publishers that are pay to play, but they usually at least do a real copyediting job, so the author is getting something for their money.
 
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MaryLennox

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I feel you on the annoyance. I’m Big 5 published and I would feel weird giving writing advice on social media, unless it’s in a dedicated forum like this. I feel like that’s reserved for people who have demonstrated success—a best seller or a long career.

The to/too thing is just scandalous. I see a lot of books from “hybrid” publishers that are pay to play, but they usually at least do a real copyediting job, so the author is getting something for their money.
I think the lack of line editing is the part that bothers me the most. People are paying them to for their services, and it could be helpful to people who just want their book available and don't care about the money, but then they aren't even doing the most basic stuff.