PubbyReviews 124

As a new, self-published, and/or relatively unknown author, one of the most important things to get is reviews of your book. They can also be some of the hardest things to get. That's why Pubby is such an invaluable asset for indie authors. I'm close to one hundred reviews on Amazon and the vast majority of them are from Pubby reviewers. I wasn't sure I wanted to commit to the $240/year subscription at first so I started out with the free trial, and after the trial was up I had no doubt that I wanted to continue! I highly recommend this service!

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.

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 was happy with the reviews I was able for receive through the service. It's easy to get the hang of and once you do, the reviews are done promptly and the staff makes sure each review is posted for you. When anything went wrong with a reviewer, they were able to find a new one for me without any problem.

I pay for the book for the listed price on Amazon, I read the book in an allotted time and post a review. I get credits. The monthly fee is very small compared to a review site. These are verified reviews. My novel? Someone buys it, that I will never know, they, review the book and there we go. The only thing I am unhappy with is the lack of authors taking advantage of this. The more authors with various genres, the better it will get. Customer service has gotten better, but I could get good with more participation.

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!

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!

There are no ACTUAL READERS just other authors, who are reading and for the most part, trashing your book. The membership cost is $240 per year. If your book is on Kindle Unlimited, that will cost you an extra $14.99. If your book is to be 'purchased', it will cost you an extra $14.99. Want a 'recommended reader' who likes your genre? That will cost you an extra $14.99. If you provide a PDF copy of your book, that will cost you an extra $9.99 -- like baggage fees at the airport, it all adds up. All of these costs are REAL and required just get your book listed with the service. Although calling Pubby 'a service' is a joke.

Now after being 'listed,' you'll want to get your book put into rotation, so that 'readers' can see it, select it, read and review it. This will cost you too. You have to use SNAPS -- the currency of Pubby's website. Here's an example: If you read a book that's free and about 50K words, you'll earn about 1200 SNAPS. But it will cost you more than that to have someone purchase and read YOUR book. My book is 4.99, so it costs about 3500 SNAPS every time I request that it be put up for selection. So you should expect to read 2 or 3 free books for every review you request. Or expect to purchase a book that is the same cost and word count as your book. And even then you may not get a review for a week or two. The website says you can expect to get up to 5 reviews a week, which is a total lie. It may take a week or more for someone to select your book to read.
Then after a few weeks or months, the reviews which you have paid for in terms of time and effort (gathering SNAPS by reading other books) and writing & posting your own reviews -- will simply disappear. And Customer service will do nothing about it. Total rip-off.

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.

I've used pubby for about 2 months, and so far my experience has been decidedly positive. Most of the reviews I've seen are detailed and include information about the book being reviewed. I don't think it violates the zon's policies since these aren't direct review exchanges.

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!

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.

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!

I'll go ahead and address the customer service issues upfront. Yes, too often the response is canned, copied, and pasted. I'm okay with that. For the small monthly fee, I am not expecting a dedicated customer service rep. Each time I have pressed Pubby on a missing review or been dinged when an Amazon review I posted did not go live, the Pubby team honored my effort.

I have used Pubby since the fall of 2019. I have reviewed hundreds of books through Pubby and received over a hundred reviews in return.

Not all the reviews of my books are favorable. I have received 1 star reviews that came close to personal attacks and 3 star reviews from those who didn't read the book, but I have also received many 4 and 5 star reviews.

Any review service is only as good as those reading the books and writing reviews. This includes NetGalley. Pubby does seem to attract a lot of self published authors, so that needs to be figured into your review expectations. If an author cannot get published by a traditional house they may not be able to recognize quality writing when they read it.

But overall I have found that for great books, books traditionally published or professionally edited and proofed, Pubby is a good option.

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.

First, we will have several reviews deleted by amazon. Also, Their support team dont respond to you and they may cancel your assignment without telling you about it even if you reviewed it but they can't see it.

Absolutely horrible. They did not deliver on ANYTHING they promised. The members did not read my book before posting reviews, so the reviews were off sounding and weird. It was easy to tell that the person was guessing his or her way through the review. One Pubby member even made up scenes that were not even IN my book and then miraculously... these made up scenes popped up in future reviews. So a whole lot of copying. Amazon deleted most of them except for a few poor quality ones! I also paid extra for verified purchasers but most did not buy the book because you can see that on Amazon. In addition... l paid extra for "recommended readers", meaning readers who like my genre (historical romance). Instead l got college age boys. I finally cancelled and they will not refund me. Avoid this company like the plague.

I've used the Pubby service and, for the most part, the users are on the up and up. Very rarely do I suspect a reviewer hasn't read the book. ALSO, it's not like the authors just blow each other all day, giving each other five-star review after five-star review. To my own frustration, I've received a number of 3 and 4-star reviews, but usually the review shows that the reader was an idiot. For example, one of my books is titled "... BOOK FOUR..." and the reader didn't realize it wasn't a stand-alone book until she was half-way through and got mad about it and gave me a full star penalty because she was hoping to read a stand-alone book. She also didn't understand a certain grammatical rule that's actually quite common, and counted a point against me because I "kept getting it wrong" (though I was actually doing it right, she was just a moron, like one of those people who don't know the difference between "then" and "than" or "their", "there", and "they're".).

HOWEVER... I will say that I'm ending my pubby subscription because their customer service is absolute garbage. I once asked a question that all it took was for the support person to look at my account to resolve, but she was being lazy and didn't feel like bothering to look, so she just gave me a quick BS answer and tried to get rid of me. Also, they seem incapable of verifying when you post your reviews to Amazon, and when they can't do their job properly, they lock your account so you can't get more reviews until they can finally figure out what they're doing. I've had to send them screenshots of my last dozen or so reviews to prove they've been posted, and my account is still currently not allowing me to be reviewed.

Overall the service would be good, and I find it to be as ethical as possible given the setup, the problem is that the staff is lazy and incompetent and penalize their paying customers for their own failings. Also, as with all reviews (I suppose), you're still subject to idiots giving you bad reviews because they're not bright enough to know what they're doing.