StoryWorth Reviews

I received Storyworth as a Christmas gift, and have enjoyed writing 13 stories so far. Getting started was easy. The interface is intuitive and uncluttered. However I have discovered a major flaw in Storyworth that you should be fully aware of before purchasing the product.

Storyworth gives authors the option of sharing saved stories with family and friends, and makes sharing very easy in the Manage Account> Settings> Sharing Permissions interface. To share, we simply add the name and email address of someone, and are told “The people you invite below will be able to suggest questions for you. They'll also have access to all your stories, not just the ones you post after today.” This is the only disclosure about sharing that is provided, and is woefully inadequate.

Much to my surprise, my daughter who is a software engineer/web designer at a major university discovered that whenever you share stories, you give the recipient complete editorial freedom to modify any of your work as author. Readers can edit a story, edit a title, change the order of stories, add and delete photos, delete sentences, delete paragraphs, and even delete the entire story by clicking on the Red Remove Trash Can Button at the top of the screen. Can you imagine a reader clicking on the Trash Can Button by accident?

When I reached out to Customer Support, their response was that some authors wanted to allow others to edit their stories. Fair enough. But for me to prevent editing by others, I needed to stop sharing altogether, and delete all current guests. However, turning off sharing also turns off the opportunity to get feedback on your stories as well.

The obvious solution is to give the guests you share stories with different levels of permission. Currently the default and only option at Storyworth is complete editorial freedom for guests. There should be a default option to allow guests to read your stories, and add comments at the bottom that are separate from the story. There could be a second option to allow collaborators to edit your writing, but only if you choose this option. There is a wonderful implementation of a tiered-shared permission system for family trees at Ancestry.com, where owners can allow guests to (1) view trees, (2) view trees and see living people, (3) contribute to a family tree, (4) become Editor of the tree. Storyworth already employs one shared permission in that guests cannot share your stories with anyone else. Only the owner can. It should not be difficult to further refine the sharing permissions.

Finally, it is worth noting an error in the Privacy Policy at the Storyworth web site, which promises "You have control of your Content you provide to us. By default, Storyworth will never delete your Content unless you instruct us to do so or you terminate your account with us. You therefore control which of your Content is retained in your account.” Clearly not true if invited guests can delete your content.

Great concept. Poor execution. My daughter gifted my husband and me a year of Storyworth. We loved the idea and I, in turn, gifted it too my 94 year old mother (very tech savvy). We have all "lost" stories. We just type and it is gone! Or a phone call comes in and we answer it and everything we were working on has disappeared. Surely they can hire some coders or techies to fix this. It just happened again to my husband.

My wife and I were gifted a subscription by our daughters, but we spit the hook when we were overwhelmed by daily badgering emails, and reviewed the encyclopedic "Privacy Policy" which concerned us, that our story could be compromised by their 3rd party partners who had their own separate Privacy Policy (not our fault). Plus, as a couple we could not compile one book, which was misleading, it had to be 2 books, 2 subscriptions, so double your expense for a couple there, which seemed a scheme for them to make more money. On top if this, there are LOTS of negative reviews out there, including an "F" rating from the BBB, including one concern that your data could be compromised (by a 3rd party vendor of Storyworth) to discern your password questions...ex. favorite pet, where you were born...etc. The company is also apparently, per one review, loath to refund your money (30 day money back guarantee), suggesting instead you re-gift the purchase to other relatives who might be less bait shy...Buyer Beware of a Phishing risk. There were also complaints about your loved ones exceeding the 1 year expiration of the subscription and having to pay yet another year to finish the project, without due notice by email from Storyworth that time was running out. Ugh. Life is too short for these kinds of headaches. We are out.

I just saw your commercial on TV. My husband just passed away in March of this year and he wrote stories of his life. We had been married for 60 years.

One of our daughters told me that we could do a book of them and we could give a book to our 3 daughters and 5 grandchildren plus his sister and a very close friend, We will be giving them the book on Christmas. My husband was the best husband and father and grandfather and I know they will love the book. It means so much to me and it is like he is talking to me.

I think you should do a commercial about writing your stories so that future generations can learn about their ancestors . I can't put into words what this means to me. I will never get over losing my husband but this Beautiful Book helps me. Thank you again, Barbara Gervasoni

Wow. I'm surprised at reading the reviews as well. My daughter gave it to us (my wife and I) as a gift for Christmas last year and we've done it each week, all year long. Finishing up now and appreciate the extra bit of time at the end to write the ones we missed along the way. My pictures appear to be going into the right places, and we've had a lot of fun writing down family things to remember. Some of the questions were kind of hokey but it was super easy to change them out for ones that worked for us. We can't wait to see how it will come out.

I was given a gift certificate to participate in Storyworth. The GC covered one year's worth of weekly stories culminating in a published book. I rec'd a new story prompt every single Monday morning. If I didn't like a particular prompt I could change it to whatever I wanted. When I was ready to publish there were some editing issues I needed to resolve. Storyworth customer service was extraordinary. Someone responded in a timely manner with helpful suggestions and a very positive outcome. The published book was very well made and attractive. I highly recommend Storyworth to you.

We are currently on our second (colour) book and have had no problems with them at all. Yes, the font and layout is limited, but we realised that from the beginning. Yes, careful editing is essential before you complete. Our first book is beautiful, exactly as ordered. We've no complaints, and thoroughly enjoy the whole process.

I was disappointed in the quality of the binding for the price I paid. I had what I considered great customer service working thru the binding issue, but overall the book quality is very poor for the price of $80 plus shipping. If I could post the pictures Storyworth asked me to post of the binding, I would.

Basically, it's a paperback book with the front and back pages affixed to a hard cover. The spine of the "paperback" is not glued or attached to the hard cover, so the only think holding it together are the front and back paged secured to the front and back cover. Once I opened the book to inscribe the front to the persons I was gifting this to, the fold where the front hard-cover cover meets the spine is permanently creased.

If this book is to last several generations, it's got to have a better quality publishing.

Lastly, there is a minor glitch in their platform for editing. I wrote my paragraphs as blocks with no indentation and a line-space between each paragraph. If I made an edit to a paragraph, the line space frequently disappeared. I didn't catch this on all my edits and ended up publishing with at least one paragraph without spacing.

I purchased storyworth almost a year ago for my grandmother, and she has loved writing the stories and has not had any issues with the interface once she got the hang of it. I would have given 5 stars up until my recent process of ordering the books.

Firstly, they are insanely expensive for what you get. With the subscription, you get one black and white book. The others are $39 each, and if you want color it's a whopping $79 each. My grandmother had added a lot of pics, so I splurged and got color for her and her daughters, and black and white for the grandkids (which annoyingly had to be two separate orders).

They came in the mail a few days ago and I am shocked by the poor quality of the paper for all that money. Not shiny, rough to the touch. In addition, my extremely pricey color books were sloppily packaged and the corners were smashed on one side. I have been in email correspondence with storyworth now for 3 days trying to get them reprinted. They keep asking for more pictures and more explanation so that they can "show it to the printers", like they have to convince them somehow to reprint. I will have to gift the damaged books at this point and replace them at a later date.

It is impossible to find reviews for a company like this that is all social media advertised. There is no place for reviews on their website, and clearly that is not a mistake. I have spent $500+ on books I know my family will love, but I wish I had just taken the PDF and printed them elsewhere.

I am truly disappointed with StoryWorth. When I sent in my stories, the pictures are not placed in the paragraph as I had written. The pictures were all about 2"x3". Not good! Pictures were printed in black and white!

When my book was published, some places had a paragraph in between paragraphs and some didn't.

I do not like the font. There was no availability to change fonts.

The price at $82.99 per book is outrageous.

My daughter had paid for the "questions" and first book supposedly; however, I did have to buy my first book at $40.00, The each other books that I ordered were $82.99.

Well, I went to a book publishing company. I was very pleased. They published my pictures in color at no extra cost; they printed my pictures as big as I wanted them; they printed my pictures in the middle of a paragraph where I had wanted them. The price was $35.00 per book.

Your company did not serve me well.

I am totally disappointed and I lost boco bucks!

I wish I read the Storyworth reviews before investing time to research and write my stories. My finished product is ugly. Formatting is random from story to story. Corrections are impossible and customer service is horrible. To post this review, I'm required to give it at least one star. It deserves no stars. Save your money. Ugh!

What a horrible company! I bought a subscription and a book. My subscription expired before I answered all of my questions and unless I pay $60 to renew for a year, I don’t get the book! And they don’t give refunds for the book unless it’s within 30 days of the subscription. Such a bad company with horrible service!

StoryWorth talks about a year of prompts and questions. Not true. You will be lucky to get 4.

I have read most of the other reviews and agree with most every one that is negative. With all my problems, I was never able to actually talk to anyone in person for help. I have “lost” entire chapters of stories and one would think with a company such as this would have a backup in order to “hold” chapters. I am not a book writer and why would I feel it necessary to back it up as that should be their responsibility.

My photos and the descriptions got so totally messed up in one chapter and I tried everything under the sun to correct. It. I was labeling people, cities and countries. It was so terribly frustrating. Finally I typed out descriptions and they were able to correct it but WHY did it happen????

Most of the time they had a computerized generated answers to my questions so it did not even help when I ran into problems.

I have looked back on dates and found other people had complained about the same things. But with a lot of time spanning in between - they had done NOTHING to improve their systems.

I was so relieved when I finally finished the year long process. If my son had not given this gift to me - I would have thrown it out the door and gone with a different company. The idea is great - they just have done a terrible job of helping people complete all the problems.

The stress is finally gone since I am done. I will not recommend this company to anyone else.

Storyworth is not expensive and you get so much for your money. I read some of the reviews, and I’m very surprised. This service provides you with the opportunity to tell your stories, and those stories will be handed down to your descendants. I’m not the savviest person on the computer, and I found it easy to navigate.

You can be as creative as you want to be in writing your stories. You can make them long or short. You can add a few or several pictures. You need to have the time to do this, and it does require a lot of editing- but so what. In the end. I was thrilled with the quality of the book.

My daughter took the extra step of ordering the book in color. I highly recommend Storyworth to anyone wanting to tell the story of their life.

If you use Norton, don't buy Storyworth. Got Storyworth as a gift, have done 2 stories so far and have a problem with both of them.

Tried to upload photos into the stories, but can't.

Storyworth has an "Attach a Photo" link, but it doesn't work. Went thru customer support twice including speaking to a supervisor. Their claim is that because I have Norton security on my laptop, the photo link won't work and I have to call Norton to get it to work. My wife also has Storyworth, and uses her phone to post and can post photos.

She also has Norton security on her phone, so their explanation is suspect.

Initially I thought this was a great idea. Basically the gifted acts as an interviewer by asking the recipient a weekly question. I went through this process for 52 weeks as my daughter sent me weekly questions.

I spent many hours weekly, writing and attaching photographs using Microsoft Word. I spend quite a bit of time wrapping photographs with descriptive text and proofing each week's work prior to submitting it to Storyworth.

I was very disappointed to find Storyworth would undo all of my formatting to put it back to email format. I went back and forth with them about this issue but they didn't seem to care.

There are also many pages where words have double spacing between letters l I k e t h I s. It's very upsetting given all the work I put in to this process. I could not recommend this process unless they print in a reasonable format submitted by the author.

I was given Storyworth for my Birthday from my children. I was so excited about the concept and looked forward to it since I love to write and the thought of leaving a living legacy was so intriguing to me. So I started getting my weekly questions and I wrote and added phots and after 40 questions I felt like I had covered all of the subjects that I wanted to leave my heirs even though the program is up to 52 questions. So I went ahead and ordered my 4 books. One for my my wife and I and three for my children and their families.

When I received the books I found that many/most of the photo captions did not line up with the correct photos. They were either out of order or on different pages. What a disappointment after spending over $500 on these books and the time and energy I put into these.

So I contacted Storyworth to let them know about the problem. After a lot of back and forth they did nothing but blame me for not having edited it before publication. I went ahead and corrected the stories based on their recommended method of adding the captions below the photos (I had them on top of the photos) Instead of publishing me 4 new books , they wanted me to pay full price for 4 new books! What kind of customer satisfaction program do they have?

So, they took was what a positive experience and ruined it because they had no system to check the books for errors before publishing.

I was going to gift this to several family members but I won't now and I would caution anyone considering using this to understand that they have no quality control in their publishing of these books.

I would advise anyone thinking about buying a subscription to Storyworth to save their money. The idea is fabulous, but the system just does not work. The customer service is TERRIBLE - and to get Sarah to respond to me, I spent an hour leaving terrible reviews on all their social media platforms. Save your $$, and write your own version in word, and have it printed at your local print store. I gave one star, because I had to to have my review posted - but they get NO STARS.

The concept of an older person leaving stories of times past for loved ones is great. HOWEVER, StoryWorth is not the company to use. The site is not user friendly for older people. I gave this as a gift.

After a year of stories, my mom tried to order her free book. The site kept changing her order to color options. And she could not get it to the black and white option. So she ordered and was charged the extra $40. She emailed customer service about the issue. They offered to change her book to black and white but refused to refund the $40. She then requested a call from customer service. The caller told her to get black and white she would have to drag the black and white writing to the order box and that it is not just an option that can be chosen.

She then requested the changes and a refund. This representative told her that changes weren't allowed. My mom told him she had an email stating that the change could be made. The rep refused to make changes and also told her no matter if a change was allowed they would under no circumstance give a refund. So my mom is frustrated and I am beyond disappointed!!!

Please, please read all the reviews and know that this company has poor customer service!!!! She is waiting on receiving her book before she gives her final review. But as of right now she is unhappy with this company!