Sophie Howard, Knowledge Source
Sophie Howard, an Intro
A customer victim of Sophie Howards courses recently came to me to explain her experience, by all accounts a very interesting and quite fascinating story of loss through the ‘author’ of Blue Sky Amazon and now her “K-express” and “KPI” courses.
Sophie Howard is also the ‘author’ of:
Though I feel Sophie Howard is probably NOT the author of any of these, considering she advises using Ghost writers or plagiarism of other peoples work I would presume these courses are also the same.
Robina’s message
Hi Michael,
I like your blog. You are onto something here. I am a victim, I mean student, of Sophie Howard and her marketing company, Knowledge Source, based here in Melbourne AU.
I’m $15,000 poorer for their two questionable courses. I wanted to invest in myself and have something I was passionate about to do as I was disabled in both legs during surgery 12 years ago. I had written short stories and lots of poetry in the past so felt passionate about it.
So…let me explain. There are 2 courses they flog to death on Facebook. The first, KPI (Kindle Publishing Income) @ AU$3081. Once they have your info please expect a call to be told they think you would be perfect for their 1-on-1 mentoring course, K-Express, and that their call is to assess whether you would be right for it! Of course he assessed me as being perfect so next I get a call from some other guy to seal the deal. This was a Sean and Adam both calling from the US. OMG I fell for it. It was sold to me as 1-on-1 mentoring. No! It’s just a handful of coaches she has, mostly in the Northern Hemisphere (near impossible to find a suitable time slot) that you get a fixed amount of 1/2 hour and a few 1 hour zoom appointments you can book. That’s not mentoring. Apart from that they have weekly zooms that you can log into and watch as one of her coaches goes through some part of publishing. You can put up questions but many are ignored, especially anything that isn’t positive and they always run out of time. They are in complete control of everyone. Basically you are told to watch the hundreds of videos and learn everything yourself.
I need to explain here that you join KPI first but if you decide to join K-Express as well the money you have already paid for KPI does not go towards K-Express! They are 2 different courses they say. So sneaky. The difference is you get to speak to these coaches when you can. I don’t believe that constitutes $11,995.
I should mention that they swap between calling it a mentoring course to a coaching course once you have paid them all the money. So, for the tidy sum of AU$11,995 I signed up for K-Express believing I was going to be personally mentored for 12 months and have assistance to produce 5 published books – their promise. I felt special. How sad!
What they fail to tell you is the pot of gold that you need to actually produce a book ready for publication, i.e. employ a ghostwriter if you don’t want to write it yourself ($2-3,000 for an average 30,000 word book), an Editor, a formatter, a book cover designer, hundreds and hundreds of dollars, and then the second pot of gold to pay for Amazon advertising if you ever want to sell anything. In other words they omitted to tell me, and the thousands of others worldwide, that you need at least another AU$10-15,000 in the kitty to actually produce 5 books in the 12 months. So, I and many others found out afterwards that we can’t actually afford to publish a novel and we are left trying to figure out how to do it, why we signed up, how to make some of our money back and generally try to come to grips with having been scammed. Then you realise that everything you’ve been sold is available free online.
You could call me an idiot but there are 16,300 students on her Facebook group (Aspiring Authors) from around the world at present. Even if only half of them are K-Express students that represents approx. $98MILL. and she’s still pushing it. We are all told to join this facebook group and post our newly published books so fellow students can give us Amazon reviews. These are necessary for credibility and to be ‘seen’ on Amazon. This is an extremely difficult task. Posts on this group are controlled by her “people” and there’s nowhere that you can openly discuss anything with fellow students, i.e. no community group.
But wait, there’s more! Then there’s the ‘add-ons’. All the other tools you need to learn how to ‘work’ all the behind the scenes Amazon algorithms, how to find a possible niche to publish in etc etc. $$$$. It’s never ending.
Her next launch recently was a world class AI programme called Blinkbook. OMG the huge build up and then the dismal launch with this guy, supposedly a top AI guru, where you couldn’t hear him and the screen was all blurry but for US$995 you could buy ‘credits’ to have Blinkbook produce some books for you in a matter of minutes. This was a special launch price of course and time sensitive. Well, it hasn’t worked since they launched it and Knowledge Source continually told those who bought it that they were “working on it”. Sorry? You launch some wizz-bang ai magical tool that doesn’t work!! Thank god I didn’t fall for that one, but many did. I’ve heard many in agony about how hopeless it is, some taking months to sort out the repetitive rubbish it produced. So now Sophie is all about flooding Amazon with books produced by AI. She’s no author and admits to it.
Back to the point. Omitting all the vital information at the start prior to paying is totally against Australian Consumer Laws. There is a money back guarantee though! A whole 7 days on K-Express, yet on the much cheaper KPI there is a 180 money back guarantee!
There is zero possibility of anyone getting their head around the K-Express course in 7 days within which to make an educated decision to proceed or opt out. The course is hundreds of videos! Support desk, can take days to get back to you if you have a question, all the while whittling away your 7 days to nowhere.
Are you confused yet? It’s all done with smoke and mirrors and there is no way of contacting Sophie, ever, she’s completely invisible and too busy showing off on Facebook with her kids travelling the world having a wonderful time plotting her next re-branding probably.
Look, I could go on for days about this but my head hurts now :). I’m not one to sit back and throw my hands in the air and say “oh well that’s $15,000 down the drain”. I am fighting this. I’m a disabled pensioner and they stole a dream from me.
ASIC already has a formal complaint, a letter has been written to A Current Affair and I’m in the process of complaints to VCAT and ASIC. Wish me luck and keep the momentum going Michael because these people need to be made accountable. Thank you.
P.S. I think the Sean in the Utube is one of the guys who called me and most of her reviews – only the good reviews – are from coaches!
Summarising Sophie Howards Courses
I leave it to the reader to decide whether Sophie Howard is a scammer or not, I do not have a decision either way, my feeling is that people who sell more than they can deliver, who hide behind disclaimers and who require many additional courses to be completed without full disclosure certainly have an ‘aura’ of disingenuous behaviour around them, I will leave the reader to decide what they think and leave these words here for you.
Please read my other post here about Sophie Howard and Blue Sky Amazon and Knowledge Source, Now Knowledge Source is an interesting story with the owner of this site, a Jon Giannopoulos whom I will write about later, fair enough to say though that this guy also has a history of not doing things by the book.
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