Jøel X.
Consider This Before Hiring Heritage Book Publishing
I would strongly recommend first-time authors look elsewhere. I hired Heritage Book Publishing after being told the process from start to publication would take about six weeks. That was in early April. It ultimately took nearly four months before I ended the relationship and published independently. The project started poorly. My first project manager, Kate Williams, went almost a week without getting things moving until I contacted her. I later switched to Ray Joseph. I paid for “developmental editing” based on a 12-point outline of what the editing team would address. In my experience, perhaps two of those twelve items were meaningfully delivered. What I mostly received was typography, formatting, and occasional rephrasing suggestions. Ray was pleasant until I began declining additional sales pitches. One was $150 for a Library of Congress number, which I later obtained myself for free in about ten minutes. I was also pitched international copyright services and marketing packages costing thousands. I declined. The schedule continued slipping. About a week before the original deadline, I pointed out that the pace of chapter returns projected a completion time of roughly 4.5 months. I was told quality took time and they would push to finish within another month. When the pace slowed again, Ray told me he had hundreds of other clients and suggested I had delayed the process by taking too long to return chapters. There was one instance in the entire project when I did not return edited material by the next business day. In early July I contacted Dan Snyder, who originally sold me the package and discussed the six-week timeline. After reading the email chain, he agreed the situation was unacceptable. The next day, roughly the final 30,000 words of my novel were returned edited within about 24 hours. The quality reflected the speed. I found 463 typographical errors and two entire duplicated sequences from my own drafting that had passed through untouched. The editor’s note said she had not needed to do much because the manuscript was so wonderfully written. I then spent two weeks cleaning it up myself. I sent the manuscript back for formatting. A week later I was told it had too many pages for Amazon KDP. It was still double-spaced in editing format. I researched print formatting and reformatted the entire book myself, then sent it back with five specific issues I needed their formatting team to resolve. Kate was brought back and returned the manuscript as “publication-ready.” One of the five issues had been fixed. I fixed three more myself. She later told me the final problem could not be resolved and was standard formatting. I asked ChatGPT and fixed it in about ten minutes. After another five days without a response, I sent a short email laying out the timeline. Kate replied that she was confused because I kept sending “new revisions,” said she was responsible for publishing 20–30 books a day and that mine was not her only project, then warned that additional files would result in further charges. From my perspective, these were not new creative revisions. They were unresolved formatting problems I had already identified and repeatedly had to fix myself. I apologized for my frustration landing on her and said I simply wanted to finish. Four days later, her next message was one line asking whether I had an Amazon KDP account. I replied that I would be proceeding independently. As a first-time author, I hired a publishing company because I expected professionals to handle the parts I did not know how to do. By the end, I had cleaned up the final edit, reformatted the manuscript, solved the formatting problems, prepared the files, and published the book myself. I would recommend considering another company. Better yet, seriously consider doing it yourself. In the end, that is what I had to do anyway.