Pubby

Account was suspended after a payment was taken. They refused to refund me or delete my data. Customer service is shocking. What a scam!
Update: I had to contact my bank to get my money back.

When you talk to this people they seem to think that they are making a favour to you. Really rude people. It seems they do not care about the bussiness. Not helpful at all. Not recomended.

They don't add enough option to modify or remove our books that we uploaded. They try to fix an issue and messed up my account but instead of trying to fix everything they just suspended me. When I try to contact them they just push the ball away and after trying to resolve their issue that they made themself they just suspended and banned me. Can't open a new account and all this coming from their side.

Basically the idea is good but don't plan a marketing strategy with this platform because it's run super strangely and it's no reliable.

Raison for suspension: "SUSPENDED"... they don't even know why!

Sadly I don't recommend...

I canceled before my trial ends in a few days because they stopped me from getting reviews. I reviewed a book and started reviewing another book, only to find the get reviews button on my account deactivated because they cannot verify that I did any reviews. They told me to contact "support" to get the hold removed, but there is NO SUPPORT. I contacted "support" earlier in the trial and received nothing more than an out of office email and no answer for my issue. This is a sham and not worth the few reviews you can get with the service. I found a really good free book and one on Kindle Unlimited to review, but this is more of a platform for people who want to SELL their book AND get a review in the process. Each user will give a review, as you expect reviews in return, but I'm not buying books JUST to review them. I'd rather set up some social media account, give the book away for free, and ask for an honest review than pay these jokers one red cent for this nonsense. If you are thinking of using this system, don't. Pubby will purposefully waste your trial time by preventing you from really using the service. On top of that, you will NEVER get any real customer support for your money; save it or spend it elsewhere. Pubby is a ten on a one to ten BS scale.

This company is designed to spam dishonest reviews, and they have absolutely no ethics. It is nothing short of snake oil salesman. This company charges you a subscription fee to give you nothing in return. You post a book you want reviews of then you earn snaps for giving reviews and spend snaps for requesting reviews. These reviews are posted on Amazon. Then pubby employees watch Amazon to ensure the reviews were posted. If not, they take away your snaps. Authors seek out writing as many reviews as possible to earn snaps quickly to get as many reviews as possible back. The problem is that reviewers don't actually read the books. They read summaries and other pieces of "Information you want the reviewer to know about your book" and they fake reviews. It is common for reviewers to read and write reviews on books hundreds of pages long in just two hours. It's a joke.

On the surface, it looks like this company is trying to support independent authors, but the reality is they are charging you a monthly subscription, in which they give authors nothing and authors do all the work. Pubby is as crooked as they come.

Pubby is one of the worst sites I have dealt with; if you are not happy with something and you offer suggestions that don't fit their way of doing things, they won't listen to your feedback and send you emails that are not pertinent to what you're trying to say. They won't listen to you. They will keep telling you they are the only review site compliant with Amazon (I wonder if I should ask Amazon this directly, as it is still a review-swapping site). They also always have to have the last word- paying customers are never right in their eyes; they are.
They charged me more than I needed to at the beginning—first, it was over $30 per month. Then, when I tried to leave, the site said, "Are you sure?" and offered a cheaper rate of $11. None of the support team offered me this, and I would have still been paying $30 had I not tried to leave. The cheaper rate enticed me to stay, but I wish I hadn't.
There are no incentives for authors to write decent reviews for each other with a reasonable word count (whether positive or negative, I might add), and you could find your book raked over the coals by some angry, wound-up grouch who decides to have a nasty old whinge about it that day—beware! There is constructive criticism and plain nastiness—trust me, you don't want the latter!
It is authors reviewing each other's work- essentially, many authors want to get swaps as quickly as possible to get as many reviews as possible, so this doesn't always guarantee quality reviews. One review I received just said 'Enjoyable'. Ha! I had just bought a book and given it a great review, and that was what I got when I used my snaps. Amazon removed it, too, of course.
I played the game as well as I could, always leaving well-thought-out and considerate reviews, but unfortunately, I didn't always receive that. I imagine someone reading this may think it is because I have bad books, but I am a graphic designer. I have contacts who are editors- I am incredibly fussy with my work and never put something out I am not 100% happy with, and I am sure it meets industry standards.
There are fabulous, genuine people on Pubby who are willing to write great reviews, but they are rare. I do not recommend this site (especially to headstrong authors who may want to challenge crap systems- you will be put in your place!), but if you are willing to risk it… good luck.

I have been enjoying reviewing in the Pubby app for a few months now, and there are only two concerns I have. 1) sometimes there are just a few books available to review, and they are borderline interesting to me...2) there is a limit to how many reviews you can do due to a 10 book a week limit. It has been fun reading the books and getting great reviews on my book too.

Pubby use this sentence in their Terms and Conditions to extract money from your account even when your account is closed:
"4.3 We have the right to remove users from the program for any reason and without notice, at our sole discretion, WITHOUT REFUND."
Source: https://account.pubby.co/terms.
In my case, they closed the account simply because of a review I wrote they did not like. They did not even mention they would go on to charge my credit card! This must be illegal!
They even did not allow me to use the thousands of credits I had earned from the reviews I had written.
Scandalous!

Do you want to be associated with a company that tolerates, encourages, and covers up for gender and ethnic discrimination occuring on their platform? And that engages in this discimination to discourage highly promising minority voices from expressing politicall sensitive opinions?

I complained to customer service because a reviewer who had read a tiny, minimal number of pages of a book several hundred pages in length left me an abusive review replete with gender discrimination. I was trained as an attorney and know it when I see it. Had the reviewer told me his review in person, I would have called the police for assault. In response, Pubby banned my account, and the reviewer admitted to his discrimination. He deleted that portion of his review and changed his reviewer name to anonymous. Too bad for him, I already have all screenshots. Which I didn't really need because I know the kind well. But it helps to have as evidence.

All of this fails to intimidate me. The reviewer and Pubby are living in the stone ages while humanity is many light years ahead. Which true artist wants to be associated with that?

I am glad this happened. It is always good to see your enemy and how low they fall. Do not use Pubby's services as there are much better and more creative ways to get reviews for about the same price.

Whenever I login to find a book to review, there are hardly any if any to check out. With such few choices, how will I find something I enjoy reading and how will I earn snaps to put my own book in the library to get reviewed? This has been such a disappointment and waste of time - constantly checking and nothing. Shared image shows current empty library.

Pubby is a review service you have to pay to use. Then, you earn "snaps" by reading and reviewing other author's books.

Although this is a great way for new authors to get their books into people's hands and earn reviews on Amazon, there is no quality controls in place to ensure reviews are legit. Most of my reviews I've received are obviously generic. Many are paraphrases on the back cover blurbs, or rehashes of other reviews received. Authors can tell when someone has read their book, versus when someone purchases the ebook and writes a fake review.

The customer service is amazing. They are on top of refunding snaps for reviews done by someone who has not made a "Verified Purchase" on Amazon.

Also, starting four months ago, I have a heinous online stalker who disagreed with a review I wrote for a book she liked. She started an online campaign to try to bring me down. After one particular nasty email where she promised to beat the **** out of me if she saw me, she also promised to ruin my author career. When she changed her Amazon profile name to match mine and tried to submit a 5 star review to make it look like I was reviewing my own books, not only did Amazon block the review, but Pubby also shut it down when I reported it to them. They do a great job protecting the authors who use their service.

As for the fake reviews, I don't blame Pubby for this. It is not their job to police reviewers. I use BookRoar as well, and I have the same problem there. Authors are using both services to generate reviews for their own books and don't care about the veracity of the reviews they're writing to earn theirs.

Overall, use Pubby to get reviews for your new books, but beware, the reviews that come through may be generic and the books not actually read by the reviewer.

In my hectic life as a new mom, I did not notice they charged me twice monthly for my subscription. When I contacted them about it, they didn't offer any resolution except to cancel one of the payments. I asked for a refund—or at the very least credit to my account— but was refused by Mary, who stated she can only cancel the previous month's payment. Beware of this company and check your accounts. Sadly, I would have been a customer for many years.

I didn't know pubby existed. I found them by accident because onlinebookforum services (which, by the way, I do not recommend, you will waste your money there). Pubby.co review exchange actually work. Now, sometimes the platform is a little buggy and they seem to have problems but their customer services would get back to you when contact them.

I do recommend them. I have not tried their marketing services so I am unable to tell you here.

Almost every review I received on PUBBY was outright fake or highly suspect. The fakes are quite obvious to spot, For example some members will download a book of 100,000 words, then submit a review in a matter of a few hours. The reviews are either one liners or a patchwork cribbed from other posted reviews.
PUBBY has a great chance here but failure to curb the abuses will ultimately ruin it for them. Maybe it's time for Amazon to step in.

I feel I would be remiss if I didn't update this review when the quality of the service has changed. It has actually changed quite a lot in the last six months or so.

The main and most notable change is in the amount of work an author such as myself puts into the service, and the amount of service we get in return. It used to be, I could read five books and get one of mine read five times in more or less the same amount of time. It was fairly balanced. What's changed recently is the amount of time it takes to get a review. I submitted one book a couple months ago, and about a month later, when no one had taken up the book to review it yet, I had to change the price of the book and get those points credited back to my account. I currently have one book in there which is in cue for seventeen reviews/readers, and has been at that number for over a week without a single taker. I've found myself using pubby much less as a result, and am spending more time re-exploring other avenues of getting/giving reviews.

One other thing that has changed recently is the amount and quality of customer service. A couple recent examples come to mind.

The first was when I posted a permafree book and asked for reviews at 99 cents. It costs me an extra 300 points or snaps for each review but that's one of the positives about pubby, you pay more points to get read when your book costs more and you get more points the more you pay for a book. They don't have an option to get verified purchase reviews for permafree books, so I was basically giving away free snaps to other readers. But pubby put a sudden stop to that. Currently there is no way to get verified purchase reviews on permafree books through pubby, which effectively means that pubby reviews on permafree books are worthless. This would be an easy fix, I'd normally be inclined to email the company about something like this, but the way they communicate makes me feel expressly unwelcome to reach out with requests or complaints.

This brings me to the second example, the way they communicate and how it makes people feel unwelcome to reach out. I submitted a message a few weeks ago asking a question while asking to unassign some reads that weren't getting picked up. They granted my request, but didn't answer the question. Around the same time, I got an email from them saying they took back some of the points/snaps I'd earned while implying that I'd lied about submitting a review. Sometimes Amazon hides reviews due to their so-called 'sensitivity filter,' and there's not much one can do about that except re-submit the review and hope some other gatekeeper is in a better mood when they see it. But I can't fault pubby for taking back the points, the other author spent those points on a review they never got. What I fault pubby for is how they communicated the situation to me. They actually said in their email to me "We understand that life can sometimes get in the way. If you ever need to cancel one of your reading assignments in the future, click the book's title in the left sidebar, and click the gray 'Cancel Assignment' button." They're implying that I never submitted the review and lied about it. That was both insulting and unnecessary.

I gave the service five stars last year, but if I were reviewing it now, I think I would give it three. If I were researching it now for the first time, in light of how it's been working lately, I would not sign up for it. Hopefully they figure out whatever's causing that bottleneck in reviews and get it fixed. I'm worried they'll instead find this updated review from me and retaliate in some way, at which point I guess I'll just update this review again.

Terrible experience, $240 per year and then you have to spend more money buying or earning Snaps to get ONE review on your own book...! And then in my own case, PUBBY even approved a ONE star review from one of their reviewers (After giving them a free copy of the book) which was totally unfair as I already had a confirmed purchase 4 star review, am a well established author with over 130 plus books on Amazon... and they expect authors to subscribe! Unbelievable.

It isn't what they advertise but that's not the worst. The people don't actually read your book and it's evident by the reviews. Everyone is just trying to get reviews for their own book and if you read one and give it an actual review beware, it better be good or when you want yours reviewed again they will trash you. Terrible experience. Quit after two weeks!

Customer service (particularly by Mary) is embarrassingly bad. There is no FAQ on the site so you're forced to use the chat. Admittedly, she did respond quickly but with a snarky tone to a simple question.

It's also designed for only US citizens. She stated that you can simply "create an account, make a purchase, and leave a review". Amateur hour - it's not that simple.

Just. Stay. Away.

Signed up for the free trial. First review (and last) came from someone who clearly didn't read my book yet proceeded to bash my cover and call me an amateur. It is obvious they have 'reviewers' (failed authors) out for a grudge with the sole intention of destroying other authors.

Pubby allowed a baseless, negative religious comment, in a review of one of my books, to be posted. I initially was getting great reviews on both of my books on their site then the reviews took a negative turn and I submitted a complaint about one being inaccurate. I received no reply from their administration. Then a few weeks later a very negative religiously biased review was posted and I immediately terminated my membership. I am the author of the book in question and was subscribed to Pubby.

I have gotten over 40 (mostly positive) reviews and at the same time, the opportunity to read and review other new and interesting and writing. The support team has always gotten back with me within a day or two and answered any questions I've had. Overall, I've gotten more reviews using this service than any of the others and it's fairly easy to use as long as you're able to put in some time reading a book or two a week.

Pubby offers authors an opportunity to get their books out there to the public – more specifically, Amazon customers – with genuine reviews.

You're given a free 10 day trial period before you're billed $11.99 per month to promote one book. And the monthly fee goes up from there based on how many books you want to promote. Or you can pay annually, if I'm not mistaken.

Here's where Pubby's marketing gets shady in my opinion: You have to read other Pubby authors' books in order to get reviews. And each book you read is only worth a certain number of points that are referred to as "snaps" that you will use for review requests.

You will need thousands of snaps just to get one review. And very few books you can select are worth more than 1,000 snaps unless you shell out more money for a Kindle Unlimited account, which is mandatory in some cases regardless of how many snaps the book is worth. And even then, you probably won't find a lot of books worth more than 1,500 snaps. But none of that is mentioned up front.

Another thing that's not mentioned up front is the one-time $14.99 fee you have to pay in addition to the monthly or annual fee in order to have your book reviewed by people who will buy a copy of your book before they review it. And your book can't cost more than $4.99. So if your book(s) cost more than that, you are going to have to lower the price in order to get reviews through Pubby. Or you will have to forgo sales and give away free copies of your book in exchange for reviews, some of which might be bad because Pubby readers don't have to give you good reviews. And some won't just because they know they don't have to.

The wait time for reviews after someone selects your book(s) varies. It can take a week or longer because some readers may ask for an extension or decide they don't want to read your book after all and return it. So you're not going to get very many reviews per month, regardless of the plan you choose. In fact, you probably won't get more than four per month.

There is an option for faster reviews that cost additional snaps. However, there's no guarantee that you will find a reader right away. And there's also an option for reviewers who may like your book(s) more than other readers based on the genre. That costs additional snaps too. So you may end up needing around 3,000 snaps just to get one review, which means you're going to have to find the time to do a lot of reading.

This brings me to the next problem I have with Pubby. You can only select two books at a time. And no matter how fast you read, you have to wait for Pubby to accept your reviews – a process that can take up to four days if I'm not mistaken. So I don't think you really get that much bang for your buck when you add up all the fees, requirements and wait time.

Another problem I have with Pubby is its customer service. It is horrible!

You don't get confirmation email when you sign up. You just get billed and only find out you were billed by Pubby through your credit card company or bank. And what appears to be an automated customer service representative is not always available during business hours. And when it is, your issue may not be resolved. You may not get a response from a human being either if you email customer service.

I've read some reviews that suggest things haven't always been this bad. And I realize the pandemic has taken its toll on all of us in some way or another. However, unless things change for the better ASAP, I can't see Pubby lasting much longer at this rate. And I'm certainly not going to waste any more of my money waiting for them to come around.

Pubby has really helped me a lot, especially in this pandemic period where everything seemed impossible - let alone being able to find feedback from readers, less and less inclined to release their thoughts.
It 'a service, that of Pubby, which should be replicated in many to make the life of us writers, easier. Exceptional experience that I share...