A Small Rant

A while back I was contacted by a publisher and was asked if I would be willing to review one of their products, it was an audio book. I said yes and was sent an audio book, listened to it and published my review. Everything was fine. I was then asked if I wanted to run a contest on my blog page and said yes, I thought it would be a great idea and this publisher would send the winner their prize. I should say that the prize was a copy of the same audio book I had listened to and reviewed, Everything went well and the winner got their prize. I was asked if I would like to do it again...and once again I said yes.

I ran the giveaway this time for a different audio book and gave the publisher their address...this is when things got a little strange. The winner was sent a copy of the same audio book I had reviewed and another person had already won in another giveaway on my blog. Now at this point me and the lady from this company had been emailing each other quite often and I never went more than a day without getting a response from her. But when I emailed her this time about the mix up it took a few days for her to get back to me but she assured me she would resend the right audio bookset that my winner had won and that we had agreed I would be giving away.

A couple of weeks went by and my winner told me she never got anything else. It's now been more than 2 months since this has gone down and all my subsequent emails to the publisher have been ignored.

I was not going to tell you the name of the company I was dealing with but anyone who looks back into October can see what giveaways I was doing and for what company and I think it's only fair to tell others to be careful when dealing with companies who are going to be responsible for mailing the winners their prizes. So I decided to tell you it was Macmillan Audio that I had these problems with.

I've seen on a couple of other blogs that they tell you they are not responsible for lost of misdirected mail when it comes from the publisher itself and not to take it out on the person who's blog you won it on since it's coming straight from the publisher and they are responsible for mailing the winnings out. So I was wondering how much do things like this happen?

I really have no idea what the problem was but it turned me off from doing this type of giveaway again. I may do another giveaway in the future but if I do...it will be for an amazon.com gift card...