Okay, so Publishizer isn't really a scam in that it does what it says: gives you a platform to share your work and also provides a platform for publishers to find you.
But, just because it does what it says doesn't mean it isn't cheating you out of money. As a crowdfunding site, it takes a 30% commission compared to the much lower commissions on Kickstarter. Plus, it sets the cost of your book extraordinarily high. This makes it more difficult to find people who are wanting to buy in to your project. It also requires you to get a certain amount of people to pre-purchase your book before it will submit a "query" to a publisher. All of these things are slightly shady and not things a normal literary agent does.
A normal literary agent will look at your book, decide if it is marketable and which publisher would be most likely to market it, and then proceeds to submit it to those publishers. A real literary agent then helps you in negotiating your contract and usually takes up to 20% of what you make from commission. Publishizer does not formulate your query--it seems as if you are responsible for creating your own pitch. A real literary agent would do this for you. A real literary agent would not require you to pre-sell your book in order to pitch your book.
In this case, after you post your book, you may find yourself inundated with offers from self-publishing companies. My question is: why would you pay someone to self-publish a book? Yes, hire me, of course, to edit, format, and help you upload your book to Amazon and hire a cover designer for the cover, but why would you pay a company to hire me? That is, unfortunately, how most of these self-publishing companies work. It is also how vanity presses work--they do the editing and formatting and charge you a huge fee, but they are just going to sub-contract the work. Which means you could find it cheaper yourself.
The "traditional" publishers that work with Publishizer are mostly small indie publishers. I followed the posted links (some of which were broken) and found out that at least the random ones I checked all allowed you to submit queries without an agent. At least one of the traditional publishers requires you to purchase a minimum number of your books after you publish with them which sounds very similar to a vanity press.
The whole reason an author would need to raise funds Kickstarter style is if he or she is going to use a vanity press. Traditional publishers just don't require upfront funds. But even if I recommended the vanity press route, why would you pay 30% of what you earn to a company when you can pay 10% for the same service. I know, you get the chance of a real publisher seeing your book, and yes, there are one or two on their list that require agented submissions only, but (1) They won't even send your book to a traditional publisher unless you sell 500 units at an elevated price in 30 days. Do you even know 500 people? If you do--are all of them going to buy a book that costs more than $20 just because they know you? (2) Does your book happen to fit in the niche that those two or three publishers requiring an agent sell or are you too busy to send your own proposal to the other publishers (something you could do yourself for free)? (3)If your book is good enough to do the above, why would you pay 30% when you can get a real literary agent to represent you for less?
Are people successful at this using Publishizer? Yes. These are the ones they brag about. However, all of these success stories are usually working on their 2nd+ book. They have huge online followings of 100,000+ visitors and followers to their blogs and other online social media. These people are so busy marketing themselves and their books, that they do not want to spend time researching a traditional publisher, but they do want to move in that direction to take some of the pressure off themselves.
For comparison, I have had over 60,000 visitors to my humble blog. All my Facebook friends are really friends, and I could tell you how we know each other. Plus, I have Facebook followers and Goodreads followers on top of that. Realistically, I don't think I could generate 500 sales of my next book in only 30 days. And why would I want to put that much effort into boosting the sales of only one of my books? I also could not in good conscious make people pay $20 for a book unless it was large and full of images like some of my education workbooks.
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