Our commitment to cultural diversity
Author Reputation Press is founded on several core principles such as integrity, leadership, reliability, and diversity. The company believes that a culturally diverse organization empowers its employees to develop their skills to solve problems and increase productivity.
Unfortunately, not everyone shares this idea and we’ve been maligned time and again by different blog sites that attack our cultural diversity in the name of “unmasking vanity presses”. We’ve been accused many things such as luring authors into “expensive contracts promising to produce quality books” or scamming authors with vanity radio interviews that get their books nowhere. More notably, the worst accusation made against us targets our “foreign accent”. The accusations posted online by different blog sites against our company are baseless.
For any type of business, it’s inevitable to encounter issues with customers at some point. On a positive note, these problems open more room for growth and improvement, allowing a company to avoid committing similar mistakes in the future. While customer complaints may pose a negative publicity for our business, they give us the chance to rectify the situation. We make sure to resolve every complaint we receive from our authors, and those who had a complaint resolved in a satisfactory way became more loyal to us than before. We’re one of the few publishers that encourage authors to come forward if they are not satisfied with our service. In addition to increased loyalty, many of our satisfied authors have also referred their peers to our business after we resolved their complaints. In fact, more than 10 percent of our new business comes from referrals.
However, a few blog sites seem to have capitalized on these grievances to advance their own agenda. As if they have done their careful research, the articles present malicious claims against Author Reputation Press and other self-publishing companies, accusing us of ripping authors off and all sorts of defamatory assertions based on ungrounded allegations.
More specifically, most of these derogatory blog articles ridicule our consultants for their non-American accent. The fact is, most of our author advisors hail from various countries and they’ve been mostly working for us over the past five years. Needless to say, some of them retain their native accents for sociolinguistic reasons. Author Reputation Press is proud to employ a vast spread of culturally diverse people. But those malicious blog sites spread lies about our company and make it out as though we mislead our authors by falsifying our location.
That said, we won’t be taking a dig at who created these blog sites or who wrote the hate-filled articles further because nothing good comes from it, except that it would only propagate the culture of hate that these people have been spreading all these years.
Instead, we would like to talk more about our company as a reflection of a successful organization that thrives on cultural diversity like many businesses in the United States do. We acknowledge that not all of our consultants and agents are native English speakers. Author Reputation Press consists of a diverse set of consultants from various parts of the world as part of our broader effort to provide employment opportunities to every race, no matter their skin color or language. We have consultants from India, Malaysia, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, London, Netherlands, Scandinavia, and a lot more countries in addition to our American consultants. And these people contribute to the richness of our organizational culture.
Diversity is smart. Non-native English speakers can bring a lot to an organization such as ours, especially that we are dealing with authors who come from various parts of the world, not only the United States. They bring fresh perspectives and give a big boost to the cultural intelligence of a company. Employees with higher levels of cultural intelligence can meet the challenges of serving a varied customer base.
Judging a company’s performance and reputation based solely on the accent of its employees is not only xenophobic, but a reflection of narrow-mindedness beyond imagination. If this is the kind of people that we listen to and believe in, then we are no less than a racist.
In addition, the negative reviews you see on our profile on the website of Better Business Bureau were sparked by false impressions the authors initially had on our company, that we can do miracles for their books overnight. Most of them were asking us to fulfill our services within a month, which was of course impossible to achieve seeing as they had little market visibility to begin with.
You see, we really can’t please everyone and the complaints you’ve seen were born out of irrational expectations from authors who sought fame overnight. On the other hand, have you also tried checking the numerous customer reviews on BBB with positive feedback and kind words for what we’ve done for our authors? There are plenty of them by the way. If not, then it won’t be fair if you jump the gun based on false accusations and believe in blog articles claiming we’re a fraud just like the other predatory publishers without first trying out our service.
At the end of the day, what should weigh more are the good things we’ve done for our authors that are now receiving their royalties.
