$6,000 Spent — and a Complete Breakdown at Every Stage
I’ve spent over $6,000 with BookBaby to publish a single title — and I deeply regret it. From the beginning, the experience was riddled with poor communication, missed deadlines, and avoidable errors. I was shuffled between at least seven different team members with no clear ownership of the project. Each handoff introduced confusion or delays. The account manager I was told would be my main point of contact disappeared entirely after I signed the contract — until it came time to sell me a paid media campaign. The original cover design was completely unusable — I had to pay an outside designer to redo it. During the layout phase, I submitted 14 rounds of revisions. Nearly every round came back with new formatting or design issues caused by BookBaby’s team. I responded quickly each time, but BookBaby repeatedly missed their own turnaround timelines and each update cost me hundreds of dollars. Even when a senior team member assured me that my project would be expedited, the production team later said they had no knowledge of that agreement. The most frustrating issue came during eBook conversion. Despite submitting a clean, final PDF, BookBaby introduced major formatting problems — bolded letters, misaligned text boxes, and random spacing issues. It was clear no one checked the converted files against the approved PDF before sending them back. When I raised it, I was told to manually go line-by-line to flag errors they introduced. I escalated these issues — even contacted management. No one ever followed up. Then came the distribution mess. BookBaby required a two-month pre-order window on all platforms, claiming it would allow them to forecast delivery windows and ensure books would be “In Stock” at launch. But the moment my paperback went live on Amazon (June 3), it was marked “Temporarily Out of Stock” — and three weeks later, it still is, with no timeline or update. The paperback is also unavailable on Barnes & Noble and Walmart — despite BookBaby claiming full retail distribution. I was just told that: Barnes & Noble opted not to carry the paperback (a major detail never disclosed until now). Walmart never ordered any copies because there's no traffic — and there's no traffic because the listing is invisible unless you type the exact ISBN. Worse, I’ve received completely conflicting updates about Amazon orders. I’ve been told everything from 10 to 106 copies were ordered, with no clarity on what’s been printed, picked up, or fulfilled. I was told Amazon ordered books a month ago that went into production — but I have no way of knowing what’s true and people have been reaching out saying they ordered it more than a month ago with no updates. I have no access to real-time sales tracking, and royalties are delayed by six months since it launched. This entire process has completely derailed my launch, hurt reader trust, and erased months of momentum I spent building. TL;DR: I spent over $6,000 with BookBaby and deeply regret it. If you care about quality, timelines, communication, or launch execution — look elsewhere. BookBaby might be fine for authors with no expectations, but for serious authors, it’s a major risk.