The email spam is the thing people usually think of when it comes to Inkitt, but I escaped that- maybe because they contacted me through wattpad and we directly won the first contest we entered.
We (my cowriter and I) took an award in their 2016 Story Peak contest. To be fair, the first experience wasn't too bad at the time, we were younger and dumber- but after working with legit publishing companies I'm disgusted. There was no content editing, barely any grammar editing. They did give us input on that cover. Published, did a little bit of marketing, all seemed okay. But you can tell by reviews that it's an unedited mess pulled practically straight off wattpad with minimal, middle school level editing.
The contract for that one came with first rights, and there were readers who were extremely interest in two minor characters- who we had already written a book for, so it was technically in the series. We offered it to them, they said yes. We waited four months for them to give us more info. Asked again. They turned us down even though they had already said they accepted it- and after we lost all of the buzz and momentum from publishing the first book.
They did, however, accept a series we had posted to wattpad. We signed the contract and they were supposed to do the same thing- edits, cover design, marketing. They told us they were going to 'test' it and we figured that would be on the site. Nope. They didn't edit a single thing, made covers we had no input on, and put it live on Amazon. Without telling us. I didn't even know it was live until a month later when I was checking reviews and such and noticed we had another title on our amazon author account.
That series is literally right off wattpad, to the extent where I eventually just reposted it for free because it wasn't fair to ask people to pay money for it.
These days, we can't get them to respond to a single email- even when we reply to emails they send us, it's radio silence. At least we still get the pittance of royalty money but it wasn't worth it.
I literally changed my pen name because I didn't want to be at all involved with those projects and still struggle over my cowriter and I keeping the same pen name for our joint projects because I want nothing to do with the smear Inkitt put on those names.
I take every chance I get to warn people away from Inkitt. It's a joke of a company >.>