Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash
As I’ve written before, my top blog post is about the Readers Magnet Scam. People around the world search Google and Facebook for information about this outfit and land on my page. Their call center must have been working really hard last night to find a mark because the analytics on my web site was blew up with hits from the US, Canada, UK, and even Japan.
I imagined all these indie authors in their homes, receiving calls similar to the one I did. A quick Google or Facebook search on Readers Magnet pulls up blog posts about the scam, and they have instant access to everything they need to make an informed decision.
Google Analytics Data
I began analyzing the data, and here is what I found:
Readers Magnet appears to be a company located in the Philippines or with an outsourced call center in that country which targets authors primarily in the US and Canada, with some in the UK. Other inquiries in my site came from Japan, India, Croatia, Australia, Montenegro, Nigeria, and Singapore. I believe this because—in addition to the website traffic data—I had a cryptic comment from a user Flumpas@elink.com.ph – I am Philippines who darkly said “I can justify this” in response to my original blog post about their activities.
Here is another view of the keyword analytics on traffic for the past two months relating to Readers Magnet.
They like weekends, and apparently Saturday nights are a good time for calling authors with their aggressive marketing tactics.
I have weeks of logs like this about this article.
Better Business Bureau
Digging a little further with Google research, you can find 6 complaints against this company on the San Diego, CA Better Business Bureau.
Under Customer Reviews, you can find a complaint as recent as September 7, 2018 from an author.
And in case you are interested in other complaints by consumers, you can also check out Ripoff Report as well.
Readers Magnet Publishing
They do publish books. A quick search of Readersmagnet LLC in the Search bar of Amazon.com will reveal several pages of results. Most titles were published in 2018 or 2017, and few have more than 2-3 reviews. Many have none at all. If they are helping these authors with marketing services, the results are not evident.
Are They Legit?
There are ways to check if a company is genuine, including the company website itself. Readers Magnet lists an address in the US and show a physical location on a map. Ultimately you have to trust your instincts, and if you have a “bad vibe” about the location, try to dig deeper because there are virtual office scammers. I have not investigated the address to determine its validity.
Conclusions
Independent authors have a hard enough time publishing and marketing our books. Achieving sufficient sales to recuperate the cost of gorgeous book covers and professional editing services, not to mention any additional marketing or advertisement costs, is a challenge. It may be hard to resist the seductive lure of a scammer’s quick fix and the dream of reaching wider audiences, but armed with the right information, we can help each other to avoid becoming victims of this kind of predator.
If you’ve had any experiences, please like or comment and share. I’d love to hear from you.