Dog Ear Publishing Fees

If you've been following my blog, you know how unhappy I have been with Dog Ear Publishing. The main problem I have is that they ignore the author's wishes. Although I had a contract with them to publish a printed book, they also published an e-book (several years later) that I neither had the opportunity to review/proof  nor was aware of (apparently, according to a review, there were lots of formatting errors in the e-book). I did receive an e-mail asking for money for them to publish an e-book, which I responded to letting them know I had already published an e-book through Amazon/Kindle and wasn't interested. I was frustrated that they took it upon themselves to publish another after I expressly asked them not - it conflicted with an agreement I had with Amazon to publish only through them for a period of time. (Amazon contacted me to let me know another e-book was being circulated)

I received the notice below letting me know Dog Ear would be charging annual fees and will send an invoice and/or charge their credit card if one is on file.

The letter is confusing, if they are charging this fee on the anniversary of the press date, but start on March 1, does that mean if your press date is April 1, you will have to pay the fee two months in a row?

If you're looking to self publish go with Createspace, they won't inundate you with fees, it doesn't cost anything and if you don't want to do the formatting/editing yourself they have a team to help you with that for a nominal fee. For e-books publish through KDP/Amazon and Smashwords

Dog Ear Publishing Review
Dog Ear Publishing E-Books Without Author's Permission

Misleading Publishing Services

I found an interesting article on self publishing on the Publisher Standards Board site. It explains how some of the companies offering publishing services are misleading. Many of you know of the bad experience I had with Dog Ear Publishing. Make sure you spend time researching before you go with any self publishing company. My experiences with CreateSpace and KDP.Amazon have so far been without problems.

You can read the article on scams and warnings here

Self Publishing with Google Play

Last year I discovered that Dog Ear Publishing had, without my permission, published my book as an e-book on Google Play. I requested that it be removed as although I had hired Dog Ear to publish a printed version of my book several years ago, I was neither contacted by them, given the opportunity to view the file nor set the price for the e-book (which was listed at a considerably higher price than the $2.99 I typically sell my e-books for). I already have my books available on Smashwords and Amazon.

I later wondered if Google Play was worth looking into as an avenue for promoting my books and found a blog post that covers the process for self publishing an e-book with Google Play. The problem appears to be the discounting. Amazon will lower their price to whatever the lowest price you have your book listed for at other locations. If Google Play discounts your book price, then Amazon will follow suit. You can read the full blog post here. For now, I'll stick with Smashwords and Amazon.

Have you had any experience with Google Play? I'd be interested to hear your comments.

Dog Ear Publishing Review

Some time ago I posted blog posts on the pitfalls of self publishing and one of those pitfalls was in choosing Dog Ear Publishing to publish my first cozy mystery, A Graceful Death. You can read some of the posts here. One of the complaints I had was that, unlike Outskirts Press they didn't offer e-book publishing. I rectified that by formatting my book myself and offering it for sale on Smashwords and Amazon (Kindle). At a later date, Dog Ear contacted me and asked if I wished them to provide my book formatted in e-book form as they were now providing that service (the special offer was 50% off their normal rate of $399). I declined and told them I already had the book available for Kindle, and Smashwords provides formats for other devices. So, after signing my book up for KDP Select, a new program through Amazon in which the author agrees not to publish the book in e-book form anywhere except through Amazon, I was surprised to find that Dog Ear had chosen to publish the book in e-book form that I had neither agreed to, nor approved the format. I also did not agree to their publishing it at a price of $9.57 (my e-books are all around $2.99 and occasionally offered free for Kindle.) Another problem I have is that the reviews on Google Play complain about the formatting which I find frustrating as I had neither seen the formatting nor approved the e-book. I have contacted Dog Ear Publishing and the Better Business Bureau and hope Dog Ear will remove it for sale on Google Play or anywhere else they might have taken it upon themselves to publish without my permission or knowledge.

Note: I did receive a response from Dog Ear to my BBB complaint and e-mail - . Here are their responses:

I can appreciate Ann Summerville's concern.  However, all she had to do was contact us and request the removal of the Google Editions version of her book.  In fact, she did contact us over this past weekend by leaving a voicemail.  We aren't open over the weekend.  We did respond on that first business day after the weekend.  Additionally, we contacted Google and asked that her book be removed from distribution. 
Miles Nelson

Thanks for leaving a voicemail message for us over the weekend. Per your request, I have notified Google to remove the Google Edition of your book. Google Edition is the sole digital format that comes with all of our packages as evidenced by the description of our Basic Package.

 Removing it from the package is fine and simply takes a request either by phone or email.

 You have not received our eBook conversion service (Kindle, Nook and iBook). The offer that you declined earlier was for this add-on service.

 Sorry that this resulted in any confusion. If you have filed a complaint with the BBB, please notify them of the above facts so that all parties know the source of the misunderstanding.

 Matthew Murry

Manager, Author Services

Dog Ear Publishing

In another e-mail from Matthew Murry he stated that a broadcast e-mail was sent out a year ago from Dog Ear to all authors offering a free e-book service (I didn't receive it and therefore didn't accept their "offer").  

My thoughts:

They seem to have missed the point. If Dog Ear changed their basic package several years ago and included e-book in this package after I first hired them to print my novel, I should have been informed, been given the option to review the e-book before it was "published" and given an opportunity to choose the retail price both of which were part of the process for the printed novel. Until Amazon contacted me regarding violating the terms of my KDP Select agreement with them, I didn't know that Dog Ear had published my book in e-book form and therefore their comment that "all I had to do is contact them" is redundant. Leaving the author out of decisions to publish copyrighted work is simply unacceptable.

Although as of today the book is still showing on Google Play, hopefully it will be removed soon. 

Self Publishing - Part 3

Dog Ear Publishing - An author friend recommended Dog Ear Publishing, but did not recommend using their design team for the cover. After looking at many other options I decided to go with them to publish my first novel. One of the advantages was that they did not limit the author to a set of templates for cover design. Although they profess to have a large inventory of pictures for the cover, there weren't any available for what I was looking for (a harbor) and I purchased a picture from I Stock Photo. The first proof of the internal pages I received (in PDF form) was very messy with lines at the top and bottom of the pages and my name and book title on alternate pages in a large font, all of which distracted from the body of the printed page. I e-mailed and asked for changes to be made. I received another proof and read through it. Although my paragraph indents were uniform in the Word file I sent, there were many places that there were larger indents in the proof. I also found a few of my own errors. This is where it gets frustrating. Not all the errors I requested were made and each time I reviewed a proof (for both their errors and mine) it took another two weeks to get another proof. If I asked for three changes, two of them would be made and after another repeated request, the third error would be corrected, but it would take several weeks. I began the process in June and it wasn't completed until October. Another problem I found was that at no point did I receive a printed proof to review (they were all in PDF form and e-mailed). It wasn't until the book was printed that I noticed two words in the title were in a different font from the third word. I sent an e-mail complaining about it and their response was that they had e-mailed a proof to me and that some authors preferred to have different style fonts in the title. I agree that I should have checked it more thoroughly, but I had sent them exactly what I wanted printed on the cover and all three words were in the same font. I thought it was unprofessional to arbitrarily change the font on one of the words which obviously was not my preference - they ignored my instructions. For the amount I paid for their services I was not at all happy that they didn't check their own work and that I had to edit both my work and theirs. When they submitted my book to Amazon, my name was mis-spelled and again it took a phone call and some time to get that corrected. There is absolutely no excuse for that. My name is on the cover of the book for heaven's sake. All in all publishing with Dog Ear was an expensive experience and I wouldn't recommend them. Also, make sure you register your book at the copyright office. This isn't done automatically by the POD publisher.

Dog Ear does not offer e-books which was something I didn't check on when choosing them. I used Smashwords for e-book distribution.




Self Publishing Part 1

Self Publishing Part 2

Self Publishing Part 3

Self Publishing Part 4

Self Publishing - Part 2

Printing - There are many Print on Demand (POD) publishing houses and most of them use Lightning Source for their printing. When I purchased books from Dog Ear Publishing Lightning Source was the return address on the package.

One thing I recommend when choosing a POD publisher is to read the contract thoroughly. The following are my experiences with some of the publishing houses.

Lightning Source - You can use Lightning Source to print your book, but they will only deal with publishing houses. You would need to set up a company with a company/fictitious name ending with "Publishing" or "Press". For more in depth detail about setting up a publishing company read The Complete Guide to Successful Publishing by Avery Cardoza. Formatting the book and cover can be difficult, or costly if you hire someone to do the work, and you will also need Adobe Distiller to convert the manuscript. The publishing guide on the Lightning Source site is very informative. Note: You will also need to purchase your own ISBN for each novel printed by them.

See POD publisher comparisons on the Dog Ear Publishing site. More information on POD publishers here

Outskirts Press - Outskirts at first seemed a good choice. They offer several different price levels, but some of the drawbacks are that they require an annual fee to keep your digital file for future printing. On the lower scale plan their choices for cover templates are minimal. The one thing that finally stopped me from using their services were the words "as is" in the contract. While their salesperson assured me in an e-mail that they had never had a problem with keeping customers happy, nevertheless those two little words mean they can put out a product with errors made by Outskirts and the customer would have no recourse. If they are confident in their product they would remove those words. More information about the Outskirts contract on the Book Making Blog here. Also, check the complaints on the Better Business Bureau site. However, I have known authors who have been happy with their experience with Outskirts and one of the advantages I found was that they offer an author web page where it is easy to purchase both a printed version of the book and e-book.


Self Publishing Part 1
Self Publishing Part 2
Self Publishing Part 3
Self Publishing Part 4