I was tricked by a fake influencer promoting this service who got a referral fee for me signing up. Don't be tempted and get tricked into believing some of the fake reviews you see from influencers who are paid and have a financial gain to make you sign up for this service as they get a referral fee from Pubby. Therefore, it is in their best interest to hide the bad things and only promote good things. Avoid doing business with them at all costs.

This organization is fraudulent and bullies its customers. They falsely claim that everything is unlimited, which is a complete lie. First, they restrict how often you can leave a review. Then, they claim they are increasing the limit, but it never happens. It doesn't even reset every 24 hours. For example, if you finish your last assignment on a Friday or Saturday, you'd expect it to reset in 24 hours so you can start early on Monday, but that's not the case. The cycle repeats from the time you start the first book. So, if you read a book on Monday and use up your 10 assignments later that week, you can't start the next assignment until the exact time you started on Monday. The same applies to Tuesday, Wednesday, and so on, using the time you started on those corresponding days from the previous week. You have to wait until the exact time you started the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and so on. They lie—nothing is unlimited.

There are numerous other caps that limit it. Another cap is how snaps are given to you and how you use them, which also limits how much you can earn in return. They mislead you into believing it is unlimited, but it is not. Don't fall for this lie.

They claim to be in compliance with Amazon's terms and conditions, but they are not. Many reviews get removed a few days after they are left, and many don't even get posted. Additionally, they have broken and violated numerous laws.

I also had an issue with Bruce, who was caught red-handed in a scheme incorrectly charging me. I was told he took care of the overcharges. I didn't realize his scheme until months later when I noticed he started charging me a higher rate than what the monthly subscription was supposed to be. When I asked nicely to resolve this issue, he refused and said I should have caught him earlier. How could I have known when I believed Bruce, who promised to have corrected the billing error? He left the chat after that while I was still typing. He intentionally charged me more and when he was caught this was his behavior. If there really was an error, Bruce had the chance to make it right when I went on chat. Instead of resolving the issue, he stole all my snaps and banned my account saying its bad for bad language when I was nothing but professional about the incident and giving him the chance to make it right. This behavior by Bruce is not only unprofessional but it is 100% proof of his illegal activity. If it was an innocent mistake, he could have made it right instead of acting the way he acted and then banning my account and stealing my snaps. Now I realize this was all a scheme to steal money and overcharge me. I have heard numerous customers claim of similar situations and then Bruce retaliates and harms them by leaving fake reviews. Stay away from this crook.

I also pointed out a major glitch where the activity wasn't showing. They told me their developer confirmed there was nothing wrong. After showing them numerous screenshots, rather than investigating it further, Bruce tried to bully me and close the case instead of being thankful that I pointed out the glitch. This issue has never been resolved to this date.

The list can go on. It is not worth dealing with Bruce. Action needs to be taken against Bruce and this fraudulent organization. Their headquarters is in an apartment in the Bronx, New York:
1135 226th Dr Apt 2D, Bronx, New York, *******. Kristen Forbes, founder and customer support, you should be ashamed of how you allow your team to treat their customers. Let's keep in mind it is the customers who keep you in business and keep your scheme going. Who knows if there is even a Bruce or if it was you disguised as Bruce in chat.

Action needs to be taken against Bruce and this fraudulent organization. Stay Away At All Costs!

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.

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.

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.

The Pubby business model seemed to be a good one: you pay for a yearly membership, which is not cheap by the way. And then your book goes into the pool for other members to read and review on Amazon. If you read someone's book and do a review, they do not have access to your book, so there's no "exchange" of reviews. Seems good when you first think about it.
However, let me start by saying their customer service is absolute garbage. I don't know who put together what they call their "team" but it is the worst customer service I ever got from anywhere. Their system sometimes doesn't work properly and they accuse you of not posting a review when you were supposed to, and then you go and look on your Amazon account and your review is right there for all the world to see.
So I guess they use that as an excuse to penalize you when they want to deactivate your account on and off. Not sure what the motive would be but it's happens all the time. Every single review I ever did for a book is still on Amazon to this day, but I've been accused of not doing my reviews multiple times. How hard is it for them to go to Amazon and look and see that the review is there? Why would they even need to bother the reviewer for that?

The next MAJOR problem with Pubby is that MOST of the readers that chose my book DID not read one word of it. The very first review I got from this company was from someone who had no idea what happened in the book and just made up a review as he went along. NONE of it was accurate. He called someone a main character who was actually killed off in the first chapter. He called the book a "cross between Romeo and Juliet and Wuthering Heights." There were absolutely NO similarities whatsoever between my storyline and either of those famous tales. He went on to make other ridiculous statements leaving me to wonder what book he actually read, if any. After THAT, the next NINE reviews I got from Pubby members were nothing more than rewrites of that first review. So they clearly did not read the book either, because if they HAD, they would know that that initial review contained inaccurate information.

So instead of getting legitimate reviews from people who read my book, I got one nonsensical review from someone who didn't read it, which was then copied again and again and again by other Pubby members. I actually tracked down one of the people on Facebook and asked him to please remove the review since he clearly didn't read the book, and his response was "but I gave you five stars so what are you complaining about?"
Well, of course we all like to get five stars, but I'd rather have NO review than a five-star review that contained incorrect information copied from other reviews written by people who did NOT read the book. So you see what I'm saying. They also have another thing that I would consider an outright scam, and that is paying extra for a "recommended reader." I fell for that at the beginning, and would request recommended readers, which are supposed to be people who prefer your genre. Well, my book is a historical mystery-romance set in the 1600s. However, most of the Pubby members who were supposedly "recommended readers" were college-age boys. I find it hard to believe that men in their teens and early twenties are interested in historical romance. Hence the goofy reviews left by kids who never read the book because they would rather be reading sci-fi or fantasy.

There is also a problem with reviews being taken down. Amazon is obviously over the top with the militant way they police reviews and rip down anything they think is not up to pare. How they determine that is whacked, but anyway, I had approximately 15 reviews from Pubby members taken down, so a lot of this is paying for nothing. Some of them I can completely understand why they were removed, such as one that was written in English that was so poor it would be obvious to anyone that that person could not have read my book. If you can't even write a review in proper English, how on earth did you read 380 page book in English? But other reviews were just normal reviews and Amazon removed them, so maybe they are catching on to Pubby. There was also one review that said "this is a good book if you have nothing else to do," yet he gave it five stars.? That one was taken down and I knew why, because I had looked up this reviewer's profile, and he gives every book 5 stars and says "this is a good book if you have nothing else to do." Well, you can't do that, because Amazon will detect a pattern and know it's a bogus review. So overall, if you want your book actually READ, Pubby is not the place for you.
Secondly, if you want QUALITY reviews, Pubby is not the place to get them. If you want good customer service, run as fast as you can in the other direction because you will NEVER get it from Pubby.