Pubby

Cancelled three days after signing up. You pay to "subscribe" then you have to earn "snaps" so you can trade them for reviews. So you are in essence working for Pubby and paying Pubby. I canceled after three days and they charged me anyway and set up a recurring charge. Just disputed these charges with my cc company.

I have never worked with a LESS professional group. After signing up with Pubby I received no Email verification, no Emails at all until I complained that I was not seeing any of there guaranteed results. Then I was told by a snarky employee my book was rejected for a bogus reason ten day previously. Since I had worked with other promotional services and hadn't had a problem I knew they were lying. I assumed that was it and told them to drop me, but found out they were still charging me for their services months later. Do not use them!

As an indie author, marketing your book and getting your first reviews can be a daunting experience. Pubby provides a positive and Amazon-approved way to get additional reviews for your book while helping others. You receive points for giving reviews to other author's books. These points can be used to get your own book reviewed! It remains anonymous and you do not review the same authors that have you reviewed your book.

My family and friends read my book and they all thought it was great when I put my book on pubby an author gave it a 1-star review it was a children's short story. How rude of an author to give my short story a 1-star review if it were me I would try and help other authors. Pubby allowed amazon to post the 1-star review thanks a lot pubby for nothing!

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.

You can NOT delete your book from Pubby.
You can NOT delete your credit card from Pubby.
Reviews can be detrimental and these DO stay on Amazon.
Some reviewers are anonymous names.
Some reviewers are 'bulk' reviewers.

The website sounds great. $20 a month for 5 to 10 reviews. Just post up your manuscript and then let keen readers read it and write a review.
What they don't make clear is that on top of the subscription fee you have to earn snaps in order to request reviews of your book. Most books require you to buy them and only a very small number are free to read! You basically have to read others people books to earn credits to the request a review of your own.
I got 1 review and it was obviously a fake. All they did was copy by summary of the book and post 5 stars. I'm not surprised though as when you make people have to read others book before you can get yours reviewed and people don't have time then they will cheat the system.
When you ask customer support you get a very short and rude response from Mary. She does not want to keep customers.

This could be a great site if they just matched keen readers that want books for free in exchange for writing a review. But this isn't the case. I have cancelled subscription and will look for alternatives.

Hope you find this honest review helpful.

Most of the reviews that I received for my books over the subscription period of one year were deleted by Amazon and the remaining reviews are being slowly deleted - like 3-4 reviews deleted every week!
Even the reviews that gave are being deleted by Amazon!
The customer service is very rude and respond very late with some UNRELATED ANSWER!
Subscription is expensive and getting a refund is a hassle.
Even if you get reviews on pubby now, there is no guarantee that those will stay.
Stay away from PUBBY!

See attached screen grab from my account. Note the item circled in red. This is all you need to know about the lack of legitimacy for Pubby reviews. The site has to WARN reviewers to WAIT at least 6 hours after purchasing a copy of your book to post a review. That kind of caution would not exist, if people were reading your 500 page book. My experience with Pubby was highly unsatisfactory, and their customer service is the worst I have encountered. The site is run by just one person and unable or unwilling to deal with all the complaints. Each review I received, even the ones where the reader had to purchase a copy of my book from Amazon in order to get a verified purchase tag, was pulled down within two months of the review. I had to read 75 books (and post reviews) to get those 38 reviews and now they are gone! I suspect because after satisfying the terms of Pubby in order to gain SNAPs for their own reviews, the author/reader returned my book for a refund, and the review would come down. Which is explains why the reviews were posted so quickly, otherwise the Amazon time limit for returns would expire.
And the reviews never contained anything more than the information that is available in the sales page content or a reiteration of what another reader posted. Authors know their work, and can tell the difference between someone writing a review based on actual knowledge of their book versus someone making something up based on the promotional content. In the end, using Pubby was an expensive mistake and a waste of time. Buyer beware.

Been using Pubby for a month or so. I've been able to read some incredible stories and had many opportunities to share my own work. Support is great and quick as well!

This is a great service to help launch new books, especially if you dont have a reliable advanced reader group. Get reviews on your book quickly in the first week by using saved credits (or snaps) before expanding your marketing and advertising. This will give consumers some confidence in the quality of the product / book. Of course you have no control over the reviews so if your book is of poor quality then likely you will still get bad reviews (deservedly). There are not many ways that you can get guaranteed reviews that dont break Amazon's T&Cs - this is one of them. You tend to get a faster turn around than traditional ARCs. The one downside is that some users of the service go to far and get themselves banned from Amazon reviews - this can lead to all their reviews being removed by amazon. This can be frustrating for you when the number of reviews goes down. (Dont read too many books to fast in too many different niches and you should be ok). If you ask then Pubby will normally replace your snaps if this happens.

Overall, Pubby works well for obtaining reviews and helping fellow authors. You pay a membership fee, submit your published book, and enter your book for reviews. Other author members can choose your book among all of the current titles available in Pubby. When another author chooses your book, they are supposed to read it then offer an honest review, receiving "snaps" for following the process (you spend your snaps to have your book offered for review). I've had an excellent response whenever I've put my book up for a review request, it has been snatched up within minutes. The catchier the title and cover, the quicker people respond. If an author complains about their book not receiving reviews through Pubby, it's probably because they have a weak title or less-than-exciting cover (people DO judge a book by its cover).

I would say the majority of the members follow Pubby's rules and do leave honest reviews. Unfortunately, not all do. A minority takes shortcuts and leaves generalized reviews without reading your work. This can be quite frustrating when they leave less than five stars without reading. But with the high quantity, it averages out.

Pubby is a great way to obtain quantity reviews. It helps a new author get the numbers needed to gain interest. And it allows those of us who enjoy reading, many titles to read for "free" under the paid membership program. I would recommend it, even if only for a month or two.

So I have been using Pubby for a short time now, under a month and I took the monthly subscription because I wanted to be able to change my mind if things started to go badly but so far I am very happy. In the 10 day trial I was able to get 9 reviews and they were all detailed and did not give me the impression that the book was not read at all. In addition, I read several books that I really enjoyed. I found the quality of choices to be really good for me and I can say with great honesty that I have reviewed each of these books after carefully and fully reading them. So if this site is only as good as the people who are on it, I would like to represent some of the honest and real readers out there. As far as customer service goes, I ran into two issues that were quickly resolved. First, one of the reviews for my book was supposed to be posted in 3 days. It was late and when I reported this to customer service via the chat, my snaps were very quickly refunded. Second, I had one of the reviews come off of the amazon page for my book. Again, I reported this to customer service and within and hour those snaps were refunded. I know its only been a short period and an application like this is going to have its share of issues because it is at the mercy of the people who sign on but so far I am happy and if I had to end my subscription after this month, I would feel as though I got my money's worth. So staying positive and hoping for the best!

I have been with Pubby for a little while now. I have to say despite a lot of negative reviews I have had nothing but a great experience so far! Let me pin point some things. First the customer service is not as bad as people are saying. Yes you do get a response. Sometimes it is an automotive one, but that is just letting you know someone will be with you shortly. People are getting mad over customer service not getting to them so late in the night. I do not think they work 24/7. If I know I am leaving a review at a late time I know not to expect an answer until the morning. As for reviews, I would say that I have received very honest reviews so far. Yes some are only a few words and some are not as descriptive. Out of all review that have been left maybe 5 have been removed. But I end up getting my snaps back for those. All in all I can not complain. The price for the subscriptions are a little on the high side but totally worth it. I have and will continue to recommend other authors to this site!

To be honest, if I had initially experienced the issues described by other reviewers of Pubby, I would not have remained with it, however my experience has generally been extremely positive. I began with one novel and now have three with Pubby. Between them I have had over one hundred reviews and have had no issues with any of them. Most have been extremely positive but with plenty of constructive criticism which I am happy to take on board. A few have been quite basic with little comment or information. I choose to ‘pay' extra Snaps to have the reviewer purchase my novels, so all appear as ‘verified purchases' on Amazon, which they are. I do admit I have experienced some of the issues mentioned by other reviewers of Pubby, when the system seems to get backed up. When that happens, reviews take longer to be passed, so it is not possible to choose another book to review for quite a few days or reviews of my books may take longer to appear and the response from customer services may not be very prompt. This may be because a lot of reviews have come in, a reviewer has had to cancel, or a review has not been accepted for some reason. I always give an honest review of the books I read and try to be positive and constructive. I have learned to be patient; any issues I have experienced have been sorted quite quickly. My books, and reviews, can be found on Amazon.com under the names, Joanna B McGarry and Alicia Mayberry-Fitch so you can see this is a genuine, unsolicited review of Pubby, by a genuine author and reviewer.

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.

Pay fee to use site, then have to review 3 books to get enough points for review, then Amazon takes them down anyway... all my time &money for nothing.

This is a great way to get reviews. You help others; they help you. Very simple, and Pubby is easy to work with and cost efficiency for the independent publisher.
D. M. Sorlie

I have submitted five books to be reviewed through the Pubby website. Although it took me awhile to catch on to how the system works ( I grew up with typewriters), I was very pleased with the service ( and patience) Pubby Support gave me whenever I had a question. ( Thank you Bruce!)
I am not expecting to be a famous author ( or make money out of selling my books!) so this is a way for my books to be reviewed ( had one reviewed in Australia). It has also opened up to me a wonderful selection of books to read and review- something that I did not even think about when I signed up! I would totally recommend this company to anyone who would like to get their books noticed on Amazon. ( Just remember you have to accept the stars as it - celebrate the big wins and forget about the reviews that are not so wonderful) " You can't make ALL of the readers accept your writing ALL of the time but if you are able to have MOST of the readers like your writing MOST of the time.then you are successful! Thank you Pubby for offering this opportunity!