Self-Publishing School Review: The Company Changed Its Name, and Most Reviews Haven't Noticed

Last reviewed by Robert Prime — August 2026

Search “self publishing school review” and most of what comes back quotes a price the vendor no longer charges, names a brand it no longer trades under, and was written by someone holding an affiliate link — or by the vendor itself.

For a purchase that starts at $6,000 (about £4,455) and runs past $60,000 (about £44,550), that is a thin evidence base.

We sell a £197 course ourselves, so treat that as the bias it is. It is also why every figure below came from the vendor’s own live pages on 6 August 2026 rather than from a blog’s summary, why there is a full section on when a free option beats paying them or us, and why we say plainly which parts we could not check. We are not an affiliate of selfpublishing.com. We earn nothing whichever way you go, which is the one thing most of the reviews ranking above us cannot say.

Currency conversions throughout are indicative. They use £1 = $1.3467, the mid-market rate published by ExchangeRate-API for 6 August 2026 — the same day the prices were read. Dollar figures are the vendor’s; sterling figures are ours, and your card issuer’s spread will move them.

Four companies, four confusingly similar names

Thirty seconds well spent, because two of these differ by a hyphen and a suffix.

We cover that case in full, sourced to the FTC’s own filings, in Publishing.com and the FTC settlement. | publishing.co.uk | Us. A UK formatting and launch services company | Trading; £69–£799 services and two courses |

The two in the middle are not the same business, and we found no connection between them. Getting the distinction right matters because only one of the two carries a Federal Trade Commission order.

The case is In the Matter of Publishing.com, LLC — FTC Matter/File Number 242 3055, Docket Number C-4836, enforcement type Part 2 Consents. The FTC announced the settlement in April 2026 under the headline “Publishing.com to Pay $1.5 Million for Misleading Consumers about How Much Income They Could Earn Using the Company’s Products and Services”, and approved the order on a final basis in July 2026 under the headline “FTC Approves Final Order Against Publishing.com, Settling Allegations It Misled Consumers”. Publishing.com LLC and its two principals, CEO Christian Mikkelsen and Chief Product Officer Rasmus Mikkelsen, “will pay $1.5 million and be required to substantiate earnings claims in the future”.

The FTC alleged that most consumers who bought the company’s products “never achieved the income the company promised in its advertising”; that people seeking refunds under a “no questions asked” guarantee found “many additional conditions, which were often buried in fine print”; and that the company failed to disclose when reviews were written by employees or by relatives of the Mikkelsens. The case page records the status as “Under Order”, last updated 6 July 2026. For scale, the FTC describes Publishing.com’s main course, AI Publishing Academy, as one that “can cost up to $1,995” — an order of magnitude below the programmes reviewed here.

We found no equivalent FTC action against selfpublishing.com. Different company, different regulator history. We flag it only because researching one name surfaces the other constantly, and the reputational spillover runs the wrong way.

The rebrand, in the company’s own words

Two of selfpublishing.com’s own pages settle the name question without needing a third party. The About Us page says that “in early 2015 he officially launched Self-Publishing School (which would later become selfpublishing.com)”. The Chandler Bolt biography page is blunter, referring to “Self-Publishing School (now rebranded to selfpublishing.com)”.

Three further pieces of evidence line up:

• help.self-publishingschool.com now 301-redirects to help.selfpublishing.com. We tested this on 6 August 2026 by requesting the old help-centre URL for the refund policy article; the server returned a permanent redirect to the new domain. A 301 is the strongest signal a company can send that an address has moved for good.
• The testimonials on the vendor’s own reviews page carry annotations. One reads: “I’ve been involved with selfpublishing.com [formerly Self-Publishing School] for 10 months.” Another refers to a programme “[offered via Self-Publishing School]”. Someone has gone back through older testimonials and bracketed in the change.
• The old brand survives inside product names. The terms page and help centre both refer to “SPS+” subscriptions. SPS is the old initialism.

One wrinkle: self-publishingschool.com is still live. It is not parked and it does not redirect. It serves a full site headed “Learn how to write, publish, & market a fiction novel / a nonfiction book / a children’s book / a memoir”, branded Self-Publishing School, listing five programmes (Fiction, Nonfiction, Memoir, Children’s Book, Elite), with a footer that now reads “© 2026 selfpublishing.com. All rights reserved.” Its programme links push through to selfpublishing.com. No prices appear anywhere on it.

So the operating brand, the pricing, the legal entity name and the help centre are all selfpublishing.com now, while the old domain runs on as a branded front door with the prices stripped out. Land there first and you will be told less than if you land on the new site.

What it actually costs

The most useful thing in this review is a price list, and it is a price list almost nobody publishes.

Nearly every ranking review says pricing is secret and only obtainable on a sales call. Several quote figures from 2023 with no source. As at 6 August 2026, that is out of date. The prices are published, in plain sight, on the individual programme pages.

There is still no pricing page. selfpublishing.com/pricing/ returns a 404, and the company’s own long article about the cost of self-publishing does not quote its own fees. Its “Compare Our Programs” page lists eleven programs side by side — Become a Bestseller, Fundamentals of Fiction, Memoir & Story, Children’s Book School, Market Your Book, Full Time Fiction, Publishing Package, Author Advantage Accelerator and its renewal, Ghostwriting and Elite — and carries no prices at all. The homepage sends you to “Schedule a Consult” or “Take our quiz”. But navigate straight to a programme page and the number is right there. (We use the company’s American spelling of “programs” when naming its own pages; elsewhere this guide is in British English.)

Read the last row carefully before you budget from this table. The ghostwriting page does not quote $60K. It says “Starting at: $60K”, and publishes no upper bound, no per-word rate, no worked example and no indication of what moves the number. Every other figure here is a list price. That one is a starting gun, and the comparison in the next section suggests where the ceiling may sit.

Every programme page carries the line “Payment plans available”, with no terms published anywhere we could find. The call to action on all of them is “Apply Now”, not “Buy now” — so read the published figure as a list price you will still have a conversation about, rather than a checkout price. If a consultant quotes you something other than the number above, ask why, in writing.

Two practical notes for a UK buyer. These are US dollar prices from a US company, so your card issuer’s conversion spread and any foreign transaction fee sit on top of the sterling figures. And nothing on the pages we read addressed UK VAT treatment, so ask before you pay.

How it compares inside its own category

If you have already decided to pay a firm to get the book done, the useful comparison is not selfpublishing.com against a £12 Udemy course. It is selfpublishing.com against the other operators at the same end of the market. Only one of those publishes a full price list, and it publishes payment terms too.

Scribe Media — the Austin firm behind the Lioncrest and Houndstooth imprints — lists four packages on its own pricing page, with the instalment schedule printed beside each:

Three things fall out of reading across.

Scribe’s entry package costs roughly what selfpublishing.com’s Author Accelerator Elite costs, and in both cases that tier is where professional editing first appears. Scribe’s ghostwriting tier — a professional ghostwriter, up to 60,000 words, audiobook production included — comes in at $56,000, below selfpublishing.com’s $60,000 ghostwriting floor. And Scribe prints the number of instalments and the amount of each, where selfpublishing.com prints the words “Payment plans available” and stops.

None of which makes Scribe the better buy. Scribe has no equivalent of the $9,000 coaching tier, which is the product most people searching for Self-Publishing School actually want. It collapsed in 2023, laid off staff and was acquired before restarting, so its trading history is shorter than the brand suggests. The narrow point is this: at the top of this market, prices are checkable if you look, and a $60,000 floor with no ceiling reads expensive against a $56,000 all-in with a published payment schedule. Get both quotes.

What the money buys, and what is not published

The programme pages do publish an inclusions list. They do not publish a curriculum, and the difference is worth holding onto: you can read exactly how many coaching calls you get, but not what is taught in week three, how many hours of video exist, or who your coach will be. We are not going to tell you what the course “contains”, because the vendor does not say.

Here is what is published, taken from the pages themselves.

Become a Bestseller, $9K lists three blocks. Coaching and mastermind: “6 Private Coaching Sessions, Unlimited Daily Office Hours, Unlimited Group Coaching Calls, Bestselling Author Mastermind”. Book production: “Professional Ebook & Print Formatting, Custom Book Cover Design, Publishing & Global Distribution, ISBN Number”. Launch: “Custom 6 Week Launch Plan, Launch Team Support, SEO Optimization Package, Optimized Book Description”. Access is one year of unlimited Daily Office Hours, with training materials and publishing services that “never expire”.

The fiction and memoir programmes at the same $9K price publish near-identical blocks (coaching, production, launch), with the coach described as a bestselling author in the relevant category. Market Your Book, also $9K, is a different bundle: it drops Book Production (formatting, cover, ISBN, distribution — the assumption is you already have those) and adds a Premium Marketing Package instead — Amazon A+ content, 50 hours of dedicated marketing assistant support, digital advertising consulting, and PR and social media strategy.

Author Advantage Accelerator, $16K publishes all four blocks together — Coaching, Book Production, Launch, and the Premium Marketing Package. It is not a new tier of marketing support on top of Become a Bestseller; on the published inclusions, it is Become a Bestseller’s production bundle and Market Your Book’s marketing bundle combined into one price, for $2K less than buying both $9K programmes separately.

Author Accelerator Elite, $28K is the first tier with a full editorial pass — the page lists Developmental Editing, Content Editing, Line Editing, Copy Editing and Proofreading — plus a branding expert, a book trailer, an audiobook lead magnet, a YouTube spotlight and an email feature.

Elite Ghostwriting, from $60K is done-for-you: positioning and outline, a series of 1:1 content interviews, transcription into manuscript, revisions, five rounds of professional edits, then production, publishing and launch planning. The page states the company has “successfully ghostwritten over 500 books”.

So the real ladder is: $9K buys either production (Become a Bestseller, Fundamentals of Fiction, Memoir & Storytelling) or marketing (Market Your Book) but not both; $16K buys both together; and $28K is where someone edits your manuscript. If your book needs a developmental editor, none of the tiers below $28K include one, and closing that hole is the first question to raise on a consult call.

The refund policy, in full, because high-ticket goes wrong here

We read the terms page directly. This section is the most useful thing on it.

The policy is called the 14-Day Honest Try Refund Policy. It “applies to the Core Offer Products listed below” — a list of 18 named products on the terms page that covers every programme in the price table above, so nothing reviewed here is excluded from the window. It is conditional on the buyer doing four things: submitting a refund request through the Help Center, completing an “Inquiry” call with the Author Success team, completing the Orientation Checklist, and stating a reason for the refund (“What’s changed since signing up?”).

The critical clause: “A refund will not be provided after Book Production Services have been initiated.”

Set that against the fact that book production — formatting, cover design, distribution — is bundled into every programme from $6K upwards, and the consequence follows. Once production starts, the window shuts, whatever day of the fourteen you are on. Establish in writing what counts as “initiated”, and when it happens relative to day 14.

Subscriptions run separately: 30 days for a yearly SPS+ subscription, three days for a monthly one.

The terms also carry a blunt earnings disclaimer, which we quote because it is the correct counterweight to any success story on the site: “we offer no representations, warranties or guarantees verbally or in writing regarding your results.” Legally sensible boilerplate for a coaching company — and a good reason to read every “my book made $X” testimonial as a marketing asset rather than a forecast.

The legal entity on the terms page is given as “selfpublishing.com”, with a postal address at PO Box 26556, Greenville, SC 29616.

Why there is no independent review of this company

Type the query and count what comes back: the vendor’s own reviews page, the vendor’s own help-centre FAQ (including an article addressing whether the company is a scam), affiliate reviews, and complaint-aggregator sites that monetise the negative side of the same query. Independent, no-affiliate, primary-sourced coverage is close to non-existent. There is a structural reason, and it is checkable.

selfpublishing.com owns The Book Designer. That site — one of the longest-running and most trusted independent self-publishing resources, founded by the late Joel Friedlander — was acquired at the end of 2020. Its own about page states: “At the end of 2020, Selfpublishing.com purchased The Book Designer from Joel.” The footer reads “Copyright selfpublishing.com All Rights Reserved. © 2026”. Jane Friedman reported on the acquisition trend at the time, noting that “The Book Designer changed hands and became the intellectual property of Chandler Bolt”. Her full analysis sits behind a paid newsletter, which we did not access.

The vendor also publishes reviews of its competitors, and they age badly. selfpublishing.com hosts a page headed “Scribe Media Review: No Longer Operating”, dated June 2023, reporting that Scribe “recently collapsed and is in the process of being acquired”. As we established above, scribemedia.com was live on 6 August 2026, selling four packages with published prices and payment schedules. A three-year-old obituary for a trading competitor still ranks, still carries the vendor’s brand, and still tells a shopper that one of the alternatives no longer exists. A content strategy, not journalism.

None of this is illegal or even unusual — acquiring editorial properties in your category is a well-worn playbook. But it means checking the footer before you weigh a positive review of selfpublishing.com on a self-publishing resource site, and checking the business model before you weigh a negative one on a complaints aggregator.

On third-party ratings, here is exactly what we could and could not establish:

• BBB. The profile for SelfPublishing.com (West Lake Hills, Texas, in the Austin metro — the company’s own reviews page describes the team as “based in Austin, Texas”) showed an A+ rating and “NOT BBB Accredited” when we read it on 6 August 2026: 12 years in business, business started 30 May 2014, incorporated 5 September 2019, BBB file opened 14 July 2021, Chandler Bolt listed as CEO. The same profile carries an advertising review that tells you more than the letter grade does. BBB contacted the company in November 2025 about advertised claims on its website and social media, including a “Bestseller Guarantee”, “#1 resource” claims and testimonials about sales results, on the basis that they lacked “recent and competent testing or other objective data”. The profile then records: “As of January 2026, SelfPublishing.com failed to respond to BBB’s request to substantiate or discontinue the advertised claims.” An A+ measures complaint handling, not advertising accuracy. Both entries are on the same page, saying different things. Read the profile, not the badge.
• Trustpilot. Could not verify. Trustpilot returned a 403 to automated retrieval and our browser session could not render the page. We will not quote a score we did not see. Go and read it yourself — and note that invitation-collected profiles skew high by design, because the company chooses when to ask and whom to ask.

When paying five figures is the right call

Your book is a business asset. If a published book plausibly wins you one £15,000 client, a $9,000 programme that gets it finished and out is a rational marketing spend, and the calculation has nothing to do with book royalties. The nonfiction programme is visibly built for consultants, coaches, executives and founders, and the bundled done-for-you production is the point: you are buying the removal of admin, not the education.

You have started three books and finished none. Accountability is a real product and the strongest part of the pitch. Six private coaching sessions and daily office hours move manuscripts that willpower alone has not.

You want one throat to choke. Assembling an editor, a cover designer, a formatter and a launch plan yourself means four vendors, four briefs and four sets of quality risk. Paying one company more to carry all of it is a legitimate trade, particularly at the Elite tier where editing is actually included.

Your time is worth more than the delta. If you bill $400 an hour, the 60 or 80 hours you would spend learning KDP’s quirks costs more than the programme.

When a free or cheap option beats both of us

If you are a novelist planning a series, the maths rarely works. Indie fiction is a volume-and-backlist business with thin per-unit economics, $9,000 is a very large fixed cost against a debut, and the cheap end of the fiction market is unusually strong.

If your gap is knowledge rather than execution, buy knowledge. It costs a fraction of a percent of the figures above.

Two things flagged in the interests of not marking our own homework.

Reedsy’s free email courses cost nothing and are better than several things people pay for. Do them before you book a consult call anywhere, including with us. You will ask sharper questions.

ALLi is the option we recommend most often and profit from least. At £109 a year for the Author tier you get contract vetting, an advisory team and an approved-services directory that will steer you away from the worst vendors in this industry. For a first-time author it is the best-value £109 in self-publishing.

Self Publishing Formula publishes no prices — the same criticism we levelled at selfpublishing.com’s homepage. Its ads courses are well regarded, but we cannot tell you what they cost.

The unbundling test

Before committing $9,000, price the components separately. Few exercises clarify a high-ticket decision faster.

Run that with real numbers and one of two things happens. Either the coaching and accountability are worth the difference to you, in which case buy with your eyes open. Or you conclude you are paying a large premium for formatting and an ISBN, in which case buy the editing separately — the part that is not included — and get production done for a couple of hundred pounds.

If you want to know where your book stands before spending anything, our free KDP readiness audit will tell you what is wrong with your file and your listing in a few minutes, which beats a sales call as a starting point. If your gap is the marketing system rather than a coach, that is what our £197 course is for — and if it is not the right fit, we would rather you spent the money on ALLi and Reedsy.

Questions to ask on the consult call

Go in with these. Written answers, not verbal ones.

1. Is the price on the programme page the price I will pay, or is there a different quote?
2. Is developmental editing included at this tier? If not, what will it cost and who does it?
3. Who specifically will my six coaching sessions be with, and what have they published?
4. At what exact point are “Book Production Services initiated”, and how does that interact with the 14-day refund window?
5. What are the terms of the payment plan — total payable, number of instalments, any interest or fee?
6. Who owns the ISBN, and who is listed as the publisher of record?
7. What happens to my access after 12 months?
8. Can I speak to two authors in my genre who finished the programme in the last six months?

Four and five deserve the most persistence, because the vendor’s own pages answer neither.

What we could not verify

• Trustpilot score and review count. Blocked twice; we did not see the page.
• Payment plan terms. Advertised on every programme page, published nowhere we could find.
• Any curriculum, module list or hour count for any programme. Inclusions are published; content is not.
• The ceiling on ghostwriting. The page publishes a floor and nothing above it.
• Complaint volumes at the BBB. The profile did not display closed-complaint counts in the content we retrieved.
• UK VAT treatment for a British buyer.
• Jane Friedman’s full analysis of the site acquisitions, which sits behind a paid newsletter.

Send us written answers to any of these and we will update this page and credit you.

The bottom line

Three facts should drive the decision, and only one of them appears in the reviews currently ranking for this query.

The prices are public, so nobody should be paying five figures on the strength of a review claiming the number is a secret. The refund promise is shorter than the fourteen days it advertises, because production start closes it. And editing — the thing most manuscripts actually need — does not appear until $28,000.

Put those together and the buyer this suits is narrow but real: someone whose book is a business asset, who has separately solved editing, and for whom $9,000 to $16,000 buys back time they value more. Priced against the rest of the category, that band is defensible; the $60,000 ghostwriting floor is not obviously so when a competitor publishes $56,000 all-in with the instalments printed.

For a novelist, a first-time memoirist on a budget, or anyone whose real problem is not knowing how Amazon works, £109 to ALLi, a free Reedsy course, a $199 keyword tool and a few hundred pounds of formatting will get you a long way — and you can always buy coaching later with the money you did not spend.

Related guides

• Self-publishing costs UK: the real numbers
• Self-publishing packages UK compared
• Reedsy UK guide: what it does and what it costs
• The book launch checklist
• Amazon Ads for authors

Frequently asked questions

Is Self-Publishing School the same as selfpublishing.com?

Yes — same company, same founder, new name. The company’s own Chandler Bolt biography page refers to “Self-Publishing School (now rebranded to selfpublishing.com)”, and its About Us page says the school launched in early 2015 and “would later become selfpublishing.com”. The old help-centre subdomain permanently redirects to the new one. The legacy domain self-publishingschool.com remains live as a branded landing site, but publishes no prices.

How much does selfpublishing.com cost in 2026?

As at 6 August 2026, the prices published on the company’s own programme pages are $6,000 for Children’s Book School, $9,000 each for Become a Bestseller (nonfiction), Fundamentals of Fiction & Story, Memoir & Storytelling and Market Your Book, $16,000 for the Author Advantage Accelerator, $28,000 for Author Accelerator Elite, and “Starting at: $60K” for Elite Ghostwriting. That is roughly £4,455 to £44,550 and up at August 2026 rates. Contrary to most reviews, the pricing is not hidden behind a sales call: there is no pricing page and the homepage pushes you to “Schedule a Consult”, but each programme page carries its own price openly. All say payment plans are available without publishing the terms.

Who is Chandler Bolt?

Chandler Bolt is the founder and CEO of selfpublishing.com, the company he launched as Self-Publishing School in early 2015 and later rebranded. His own company biography describes him as a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and a five-time bestselling author by the age of 22, with titles including Published., Book Launch and The Productive Person, and describes selfpublishing.com as “an INC 5000 company”. He is also the buyer behind the company’s 2020 acquisition of The Book Designer, and is listed as CEO on the company’s BBB profile.

What is selfpublishing.com’s refund policy?

It is a 14-Day Honest Try Refund Policy covering the “Core Offer Products listed below” — 18 named products that cover every programme in this review. To qualify you must submit the request through the Help Center, complete an Inquiry call with the Author Success team, complete the Orientation Checklist, and state your reason for the refund. Critically, the terms state that “A refund will not be provided after Book Production Services have been initiated”, which can close the window before day 14. Yearly SPS+ subscriptions have 30 days; monthly ones have three.

Does selfpublishing.com include editing?

Only at the Author Accelerator Elite tier ($28,000) and in the ghostwriting service. The Elite page lists developmental, content, line and copy editing plus proofreading. The $9,000 and $16,000 programmes publish inclusions covering coaching, formatting, cover design, ISBN, distribution and launch support, but no editing. For most first manuscripts that is the largest remaining cost, so price it separately before you commit.

Was selfpublishing.com fined by the FTC?

No. We found no FTC action against selfpublishing.com. The action people are thinking of concerns Publishing.com, a separate and unrelated company: FTC Matter/File Number 242 3055, Docket Number C-4836, announced in April 2026 under the headline “Publishing.com to Pay $1.5 Million for Misleading Consumers about How Much Income They Could Earn Using the Company’s Products and Services” and finalised in July 2026. Publishing.com’s own site now states it “is no longer accepting new student enrollments or course purchases”. The similarity of the names causes constant confusion.

Is Self-Publishing School (selfpublishing.com) worth it?

It depends entirely on what your book is for. If the book is a business asset that could win you one five-figure client, $9,000 to $16,000 is a defensible marketing spend and the bundled production removes real work — provided you have budgeted separately for editing, which appears only at $28,000. If you are a novelist building a backlist, or your real gap is knowing how Amazon works, the same outcome is reachable for under £500 using ALLi membership at £109 a year, free Reedsy courses and a one-off keyword tool at $199.