Notionpress responded to my review.

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Response from Notionpress to
my previous review of their services.

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Hello Mr. Bhalla

Below is our response for your blog post about our company NotionPress. We thank you for your time and hope that after reading our response you would take down the post which we feel misrepresents the company as fraudulent while we are an ethical and honest company. Our response to excerpts from your article is indicated in blue color below.

“Notionpress a publication fraud.”

Our team is very concerned about the use of the word ‘Fraud’ as we have never approached you for any Fee to publish under the free publishing program. Under our pro publishing program, we clearly indicate what services we provide for the fee. Several authors have published their books under our Free publishing program and their books are being sold on our own store and Flipkart.com where they are paid royalty regularly. You can browse through our online store to find the books published under Free publishing.

 

“MARK THE WORDS IN RED “PRINT COPIES” WHICH IS A EUPHEMISM TO PURCHASE YOUR OWN BOOK. IT APPEARS THAT EITHER ONE HAS TO PAY NOTIONPRESS FOR EVERY STEP OF PRINTING OR ONE HAS TO BUY STIPULATED BOOKS. HOWEVER THE CONDITION OF BUYING BOOKS IS NOT EXPLICIT RATHER IT IS TO BE UNDERSTOOD.”

We work on a print-on-demand model where books are printed when we receive an order from our sales channels. We have never asked authors to buy copies of their own book. Even when an author requests for a few copies, we provide it to them at exact printing and shipping costs. Not on the MRP.

“Actually the free editor provided for creating the book is a kind of challenge. It is not expected that any person get through it and create a book her/himself. Idea is to dissuade a person from using it and force him/her to pay for publication of book as professional fee for the services rendered. This is in addition to the profit they will make by selling the book.”

The Free editor was intended to be used for Fiction books. Although some of our authors have contacted us for Non-fiction book, we collect their print ready files and publish them. The application was built because, a lot of writers did not have the wherewithal to create print ready pdf for their book. Several writers have taken advantage of our application and published their fiction works for free and are earning royalty for the same.

How I was duped by notionpress:

“I registered and in reply to welcome message I asked as to how foot notes can be created in free editor but in reply they answered that foot notes are not supported. I tried for one month, an hour or so everyday, to create a book. Actually I was not creating, the book is already sold at amazon and createspace but Notionpress has no way to upload a book in free section, hence I had to paste it chapter-wise. One has to use an online editor which is partly a WYSWYG html editor. I had thought that I will convert the footnotes to a bracket but html editor supported the end notes. Finally I submitted my book ‘How to make a Will‘ to Notionpress sometime in last week of December 2013. Its status remained ‘pending under consideration’ for entire January 2014. I almost forgot about it, hoping I will get an email. But none was received. A few days back when I logged in, I saw the status of the book was ‘rejected.’ No mail, no reason, nothing. If there was any problem in the contents, or formatting or anything, they should have informed me in accordance with principles of natural justice, but why should they do. when that is not part of plan.

Idea is to increase the number of associated authors by offering free services so that they may look popular and to make money from those desperate aspiring authors who would pay anything to proclaim that they are published authors. That is the bottom line. with more than 27 thousand authors they have published slightly above 3000 books. The number speaks but no one out there cautioned me. Hence this post.”

The reason why your book was rejected is because of some formatting errors. An automated email is sent out when a book is rejected. I am sorry that you did not receive the automated email or could have been rejected by spam filters. Here, you have made an assumption that we have rejected your manuscript to try to convince you to publish in our pro-publishing program. Has anyone from Notion Press called you in the last six months to try to get you to pay for any of our services?

Unless one is too desperate to pay anything to get published, do not waste time at Notionpress dot com. Stay away.

One may ask the list of month-wise free books notionpress has published in last one year but notionpress will not give away this data. They are here to make money not to do public service. Very right. But they must provide a method to close an account with them. There is none. While they being a private party may not be obliged to be fair in business but they can certainly be compelled to remove all data from servers.

Again, you make an assumption that Notion Press will not give data regarding the number of books published under Free Publishing. More than 90% of the books created on Notion Press are under Free Publishing.

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My remark.

An incidental aspect is that they took a pdf file from me and published the book on Will which is now on sale here at this link. Rest is upto prospective author or reader to understand and judge. Since they wanted to respond., I have produced their version, in verbatim.

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