Lee M.

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.