THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY - Rebecca Buckley's Blog

Friday, March 15, 2013

FREE Should Mean FREE!!! Right???

How many times have you seen something on the Internet advertised as FREE?  And after you fill in the form to get the FREE service or product, you find out it isn't FREE!!!!   This totally pisses me off!  For instance, I just went to the trouble to fill in the form on Bookdaily.com which offers you free marketing to over 25,000 email addresses.  Yea, right.  When you get to the point of decision, you find out it costs $49 for the service.  And I suppose that's fair for the exposure you get, I mean there are nearly 182,000,000 book samples that have been uploaded since the site began.  Although I would like to see some actual sales statistics from one of the subscribers.  Now I may join up eventually, but right now I'm still a bit put off by the false advertising, plus $50 is a bit hard to come by at the moment.

I don't understand why a ploy must be initiated by these companies ... what if I were to say on my publisher site, 'get your free book here!', then when you go to order the book, you have to pay $19 for it?   Wouldn't you be a tad perturbed?  And there are tons of other offerings that do exactly the same.

One of the worst is saying it costs only $19.99 at purchase and then you discover it's $19.99 a month forever-after ... you didn't read the small small print in the very lengthy document that is usually in a separate window with a scroll.  Hiding the facts is just as bad as misleading you with a FREE ploy.

Okay, I'm done.  Just had to vent.