WARNING TO ALL WRITERS OF FICTION: “Inkitt.com” is a SPAM MACHINE ON STEROIDS!!!

LANTERN TIMEGLASS JOURNAL

UPDATE 31 August 2016 – Spam Continues…

I’d never heard of MailChimp.com until I received the Ali Albazaz January 2016 email. My information has recently been shared with MailChimp.com and now I’m being spammed by several companies and individual authors using MailChimp.com – I found out each time I’ve had to unsubscribe from each one. I never subscribed to any of them. Inkitt.com did that to me recently. MailChimp.com is a spam machine, and Inkitt.com continues to be a spam machine although indirectly now.

UPDATE 29 January 2016 – Email reply from…

Hi Jim,

I’m Ali, founder and CEO of Inkitt. I saw your blog post and wanted to apologize!

For the last few months we used a tool for sending emails called Sendy (https://sendy.co/) and we figured out last week that it had a major issue with unsubscribes. No one was able to unsubscribe because a major bug in their system. To us and our users, Sendy’s interface was always showing that a user was successfully unsubscribed – but in reality he wasn’t. We’ve now moved all our email activities to a new service (MailChimp.com) and we’ll will be extra cautious with this matter.

I’m terribly sorry for the inconvenience!!

Warm regards,

Ali

Ali Albazaz 
Founder & CEO | Inkitt.com

Kulturbrauerei (Haus 1, Aufgang D)

Schönhauser Allee 36 • 10435 Berlin

———-

Note 26 April 2016: I still get pestered by them at Twitter, so it’s not just an email issue. There were other kinds of issues while I gave them a try in the past. I didn’t like the writing contest part of it. I don’t like writing contests – too many unrealistic rules to bully the writers. Even so, some of what they were attempting to do wasn’t bad, and the means to upload and display worked well. For perspective, I disliked the Amazon Kindle option more than them and found Kindle to be somewhat dishonest with paying the royalties. I had the same problem with the paperback publisher I used in the past, getting feedback from readers claiming they bought it, then the publisher claiming there hadn’t been any sales. I get more exposure here at WordPress. The main issue is exposure, not just making any money from writing. So many writers can get published now via various Internet means that we are like grains of sand on a beach being hit by a tsunami. It reminds me of a similar problem with Twitter now that I didn’t have several years ago – being like millions of people all shouting at the same time while no one is listening. By that I mean too many writers and not enough readers. Also, some readers have become impatient with a short attention span – preferring to read something short than novel length.

Previous original posting…

Timeglass Journal

3:40 p.m. PT – Monday – 20 July 2015

Posted by Jim Lantern

WARNING TO ALL WRITERS OF FICTION:

“Inkitt.com” is a SPAM MACHINE ON STEROIDS!!!

Through Twitter, Inkitt lures in writers to writing contests, like it did me. It’s not just for contests. You don’t have to submit a story to a contest for your story to be published there.

First problem, the contest is bullshit, especially the way it works.

Second problem – main problem, after you set up an account, and publish a story there, the psychotic Inkitt email SPAM MACHINE switches on.

For example, I get the following email, one for each of the three stories I published there, nearly every hour of every day…

Now is the perfect time to remind the universe!

Did you share your story after submitting it to the Beyond Time contest? Even if you did, it’s always a good idea to remind your fans, friends and family every once in a while. A friendly reminder could go a long way in making sure they don’t forget. The more votes you get, the more readers get to enjoy your masterpiece, and the closer you get to winning!

1. Friends and family lost in another universe and forgot to vote? Remind them of your mindblowing tale on Facebook.
   Share it on Facebook
2. Remind the TwitterBirds that they can help fly you to victory!
   Share it on Twitter
3. Reach out to the Reddit community and remind them to share the love–and to vote!
   Share it on Reddit

Thank you for participating in the contest!
Cheers,
Linda
Founder | Inkitt.com
linda@inkitt.com

…And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Many other unwanted emails from Inkitt, nearly every hour of every day.

Having Google’s gmail classify it as SPAM does not stop it, and then no way to block it or ban it.

Clicking on “Unsubscribe” does not stop it.

Complaining to Support at Inkitt does not stop it. Even when they agree to stop it, it not only continues but gets worse.

Deleting my science fiction stories published at Inkitt did not stop it.

Requesting my account at Inkitt be closed has not stopped it.

It might be necessary for me to delete the gmail address I used to create the Inkitt account in order to stop getting spam from them.

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