Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd. Omdömen 

Austin Macauley produced a beautiful book for me. Unfortunately, their contact with authors is quite impersonal. You can’t talk to anyone, because they insist on emailing. And responses are often slow in coming. If you’re an experienced author and can do all your own marketing, then they might be fine, but don’t expect any hand holding from them if you’re new to publishing a book.

In September 2025, I sent the manuscript of a novel I had written to Austin Macauley, publishers, online. They acknowledged receiving it and six weeks later, they sent me an email saying my story was charming and heart-warming, very well-written and sure to captivate a wide audience. There were other compliments in the email, then an offer to publish on a partner basis, i.e. I had to contribute to the publishing costs. In my case, the invoice was just short of $7,000 Australian.
As a pensioner, this was a large outlay for me, I had to think about this for a while. After a few weeks, I decided to proceed. I signed a contract, and an agreement, completed the Questionnaire, (seventeen pages long,) and sent a photo for promotion posters.
Finally, I went to my bank and proceeded to make an international payment of the above amount in full. The bank clerk told me that Austin and Macauley had not given enough details on the invoice. The swift code wasn’t there, neither was the branch and address of the bank into which the money was to be deposited. (There are a multitude of Lloyds banks in London.) Finally, she told me the name of the account for the money to be deposited in, wasn’t coming up as Austin Macauley. She urged me to contact the company and ask for the missing information before completing the transfer.
I went home and emailed them straightaway requesting the necessary information for the transfer of money to proceed. Ten days on, I still haven’t had a reply.
Having said that I don’t know whether the company as a whole is an issue, or whether the issue lies with staff within the company. Either way, I urge extreme caution if you are thinking of sending manuscripts to this firm.
Update 1/12/25: Five days ago, I received an email from Austin Macauley asking when I intended to pay the Invoice they had sent. I explained to them about my experience at the bank and how they didn't send the required information for me to complete the transaction. They replied that they had never received that email and promptly gave me all the information I had asked for. After more thought, I decided to take their word for it. I've now paid them and hopefully all will go well from here on.

With the fact I had no idea what I needed to do, Austin Publishers were considerate and patient with the entire process, even when I asked the dumb questions.

I was pleased to have to have my book accepted for publication, I have spent many months correcting it and it is now announced for publication on 5 December, it is exciting.

The kindness of the staff and finance. I was kept abreast of all things happening with my manuscript. When I was wasn't being paid over the summer, I was able to defer payments and that helped. In the end I was never nervous, but always excited about this process.

So far, it’s been great from customer service to being a client/writer. Very communicative, professional, responsive, friendly, helpful, polite, understandable, patient, and very supportive in reaching our common goals. Thank You 🙂

No follow-up, no marketing moves, no actual support as a publisher... They are interested only in taking the money and actually doing nothing. AVOID them.
A huge lesson for me, for my very first book, to which by they way I received amazing feedback from clients and students.
I wish I had read the reviews before moving forward...

AFTER having received my first report about the sales, on the top of everything else... I almost had to pay them for the copies that were sold by my own marketing actions! Terrifying to see minus x amount for the wholesale sales! REALLY?!?!?!

I have been with this publishing company in London for 10 years . Took all my money in the beginning , thousands of pounds, and absolutely no push or interest in marketing as per contract. My book was priced out the market. I paid for 12 of my own copies to be sent to me a few months ago and they were completely faulty. You couldn't open the book without all the pages falling out. Very poor quality. Still waiting for the replacements to be sent out but now im getting no reply to my emails. Nobody you can contact to complain either. What an absolute disgrace of a company.

I submitted a proposal for a book which has a section with a physically split page format. I enclosed a large photo in my covering letter and the first page of the synopsis as many people apparently find the concept hard to visualise. The photo could not have been missed.
They quickly replied that they would be interested in publishing my book and enclosed a contract.
I phoned to check that they really were able to print the split age format and was told immediately that they could not.
It was clear that they had in fact not even opened my submission, let alone read it.
I am forced to conclude that they are undiscriminating in who they publish and interested only in obtaining the authors money.

Vanity publisher - took over 2k of my money - Didn’t make any edits to my book and did no marketing. Please do not use.

Colleagues at Austin Macauley have proved to offer timely guidance and support with the overall processes in producing my book.

I’ve just released my first book with Austin Macauley Publishers, and they couldn’t have made the process any easier. Everything was handled quickly and efficiently via email — no long calls or complicated back-and-forths, just clear communication and professional support throughout.

I mainly worked with Jack Morris, who was an absolute legend! He made sure all my feedback was passed on to the right departments and kept everything running smoothly.

For my first publishing experience, I honestly couldn’t have asked for a better journey. Highly recommend Austin Macauley to any first-time authors looking for a professional and stress-free process!

The book the magic bogey am worked on absolutely fantastic from start to finish kept well informed beautiful illustrations could not fault

In a nutshell, I had to go outside of the United States to fin a publisher that was Professional an that offered not 8 or even 10% royalties but a full 20% Royalty to its authors.

The company, Austin Macauley, were very kind, helpful and supportive. Their email about my book was positive and it made me feel very happy.

I love the fact that I was given all the support needed at each stage of my book production process.

The team shows good communication skills with me,they were so patient with the illustration and editing process as well as actioning any corrections noted immediately. Lastly,my book came out as expected and it's so beautiful.

All, or most, of the positive reviews are fake, not in the sense that they're not by real authors, but their positive feelings are written before they've realised they've been scammed. I know from personal experience, having written positive reviews, only to discover later that Austin Macauley had been cheating me on library sales, which I, myself managed to promote successfully to some libraries (title of the book "VLAD DRACULA: THE IMPALER" (a novel of historical horror). Found in all Saskatchewan regional libraries, so AMP can't worm their way out of this one. STAY AWAY FROM THIS VANITY PRESS!!!!

Most of the positive reviews here seem to be written at the beginning of the reviewer's relationship with Austin Macauley, and the negative ones are written later on or after the relationship has ended. Keep that in mind as you read on.

I signed my contract with AM in 2019, and it took them until April 2023 to publish my book, it should have been done in about one year. It was a couple of years after signing before anything appeared to happen, I might imagine that Covid-19 might be blamed for the delay, but much of the work could easily have been done by remote workers.

When I finally did get the first round of suggested edits and corrections, they had replaced many of my UK spellings with equivalent US ones, the most amusing exception being when an American character used the word "mom", they replaced it with a British "mum"! They also broke up sentences arbitrarily, damaging the flow and losing important context.

Once the book was out in the wild, things went swiftly downhill. Yes, they got my book listed on all the top UK and US online retailers, but that's where I feel the marketing effort largely ended, apart from regularly inviting me to spend £200 per time for them to include my title in their stands at international shows which you might imagine a publisher keen to make sales would do anyway for its current titles.

I'm sure that AM will respond to the above comments that this was a "blended publishing contract", meaning that both they and I had a role in publicising my book, but there will be two flaws in any such argument; one being that I did quite a lot of marketing through my established social channels, but I never saw any mention of my book in any online marketing content from AM. The other flaw is that when I asked AM Marketing about accepting paid collaborations to publicise my book, they told me I did not need to spend money on any such thing because they publicised my book. I'm sure they did not.

Early on, I accepted their offer to have my book featured in the Publisher's Weekly magazine, which involved purchasing a digital subscription to PW. I should have received a hard copy of the edition that featured my book, but never saw it featured and never received the hard copy.

At one time, a lady from AM contacted me with a video she had created to publicise my book, but she clearly had not even read the blurb of the book because her video supposedly about my story bore little resemblance to it. Once the final version was created, I added a voiceover and used it in my socials, but they never used it.

If you're thinking of signing with AM, you will not have much of a relationship with them, especially once your book is published. I suspect that all communication is handled by an external contact centre because responses to e-mails seldom answer all of your questions, those that are answered get minimal detail, and they seem to want to wrap-up phone calls just as quickly.

Whilst AM does have a presence on all the main social platforms, the team operating those channels seems to concentrate almost entirely on gimmicky, Tik-Tok-style videos that do next to nothing to publicise any published titles. You also cannot contact them directly, they seem to be separate from the Marketing e-mail address that you have for marketing contact. During my time with AM, several attempts to discuss collaborations with them came to nought, nothing ever came back from them.

Some reviewers have mentioned not being paid all royalties. I didn't follow too closely at first, but towards the end when they claimed no sales had been made in a set period, I know of people that had bought the book so there should have at least been some.

After two years and four months, AM abruptly ceased publication with no prior discussion, and refused to entertain any discussion on the number of copies that had been printed and circulated, which I feel is very suspicious.

On the whole. the main thing I needed from a publisher was help with marketing, and that is where Austin Macauley fails hardest. If you don't already have an significant online presence or access to friends or other contacts that do, it's not worth signing with AM because they will not provide effective marketing solutions.

Terrible company, they are nice to start with but totally incapable of publishing a book correctly. We had to tell them how to do their job (and they charged us for this ) Names wrong, details wrong online. We canceled the publishing agreement in June 2025 they have not paid us our royalties, the statement they sent is incorrect, and they refuse to answer emails. Avoid like the plague