PubbyReviews of pubby.co

They claim you can cancel anytime. They are liar. I tried to to talk to their customer. It is useless. They just give you the wrong around. I cancel. They did not refund my money as they promise and they charged again. Beware another thief!!!

Very disappointing. A company that discriminated against me, closing my account and continued charging my credit card. When I contacted them, I got no replies explaining why.

Customer Service sucks! They claim to have unlimited plans and get at least 10 reviews a week for an annual subscription but No! Not true! They will block you as soon as you review just 1 30k-word book! You need to wait again for another day to review another book and get points that they called snaps! They will only say "according to so and so guidelines" your as! Useless Scam!

Pubby.co presents a seemingly genius idea for authors and readers alike. However, the platform falls short in its support and ethical conduct. Transparency: The company does not disclose who operates the platform and is unresponsive when questioned directly. Customer Support: I experienced delays of several days when seeking responses via their chat feature. Ethical Conduct: I reported two suspicious reviews that claimed the reviewers read my entire book and posted reviews—all within 45 minutes. Initially, support claimed they couldn't take action. After I emphasized their ethical responsibility to prevent fraudulent behavior, one review was deleted. When I pressed them to remove another, my account was suspended instead.

My experience with Pubby, was not as bad as some of those I am reading. The things that Pubby has control over, they do very well. I have zero complaints about their customer service. In my opinion, there are too many spoiled people complaining. But keep this in mind: for every decent, legitimate book reader-reviewer that reads and reviews your book, there are two flakes who do not. There are way too many 'so-called' reviewers who have not read a single page of your book. They are easy to spot. They either leave an irrelevant review or write some ridiculous review that any person viewing your book will know is nothing but BS. Then you have the 'nasty people', who got assigned your book. They would never read a book of your genre without a tit-for-tat situation. They gave it a poor review because they found the book boring. Example: Jonny, the Reader, has three books on Amazon. They are about becoming successful Drone pilots. Jonny has been assigned your romance novel. Jonny gives it a 3-star review because he found it silly and boring. What the review does not say is that Jonny finds all romance novels silly and boring. Jonny should not be reviewing romance novels. The bottom line, folks? Even if you get 82 five-star reviews, it will not increase the sales of your book. It will just inflate your ego. This is a great concept, and 40% of the reviewers are good, but 60% are not. You will not be satisfied.

Based on a recommendation in a Youtube video, I decided to give Pubby.com a try. I signed up for a ten-day free trial and input my book specs. I wasn't comfortable uploading a PDF for strangers to download, so I limited myself to reviewers with Kindle Unlimited subscriptions. My novel is quite long and the startup credits, called snaps, weren't enough to get my first review. I'm in the middle of a job search, so my time was limited. I went looking for books to review, but the site's library was largely empty and books would get snatched up while I was browsing. I also limited myself to low content books, like children's picture books, because my time was so short. I finally found a few, left honest reviews in the 3-5 star range, and got enough credits to request two book reviews of my novel. Despite the length of my book, two reviewers quickly accepted the task. At this point I was having some trouble with the site and contacted customer service. Their wait times fluctuated between 4-12 hours during the time I was using Pubby, which is obviously bad. When they did respond overnight, I was granted 5000 credits and an apology for my trouble. On the morning of day 3 of my trial, I found the first two readers had pending reviews. That was fast! That morning I spent my credits to ask for three more reviews. Within an hour I had three more takers. Here's where it got weird. I can monitor reading progress on Kindle Unlimited--they pay you based on pages turned. There had indeed been pages read the previous day...enough for one reader to finish my book, but not two. This, and the fact that so many people are willing to sign up for a long book, started raising red flags. That night, a little over twelve hours later, one of the three reviews I had requested just that morning was posted! Someone had to maintain a speed of 300 words a minute for twelve hours without breaks to achieve that. It's not impossible, but unlikely. Checking Amazon, I could see only one page has been turned ALL DAY. Someone downloaded the book and glanced at the cover. I go back to Pubby to raise this issue with customer service--someone is claiming a finished review without even reading the book. As I'm writing them, another review is posted. By the next morning, I had no response from Pubby about my concern, but the 3rd and final review is in. Checking Amazon, I see this person has skimmed 38 pages of my book. I can also see the reviews on my Amazon book page. Of the five reviews that Pubby says I should have, one apparently was not even approved and posted by Amazon, although I was able to find it with a link from Pubby; the reviewer had pasted my own description of the book on Pubby advertising for reader as his review! The others were written like high school book reports authored by students who didn't actually read the book. One person said it was great and quoted a line right from the book description as their review. Another lifted something from a previous review. I was only halfway through my ten-day trial, and I had already had three 5 star and a 4 star review, none of which were very convincing. I was feeling stupid at this point for leaving honest reviews for other products, and also complicit in a system which is clearly dishonest. If you want a 4-5 star review factory to fill your book's page with sketchy reviews, some of which are going to be flagged by Amazon, Pubby seems to be the website to do that. My concerns had not been addressed by customer service after 12 hours, so I quit without finishing my trial. I won't be going back there.

Where do I begin? 1) How about the ethics clause we all have to sign when we sign up that nobody follows. And when you do, you're penalized for it. 2) 3 DAYS of downtime with absolutely no communication. (Those with paid memberships don't get "extra days" for those downtime days, either...) 3) Sudden changes in policy without any sort of advanced notice. (Went from 2 books out at a time to 1 at a time without telling anybody) 4) Random "snap" values attributed to your books. When you have four books at one value, and then a 5th comes out suddenly costing you more to post, you ask, "what's going on? This book is the 2nd shortest book of the series? Why is it more?" And the reward for providing actual page/word counts is to have it ALL raised—significantly. 5) Flooded with books in other languages and coloring books that are blatantly plagiarised or AI-created... or are sometimes in blatant violation of copyright/trademark infringement 6) You will pay extra "snaps" for Kindle Unlimited reads, but you won't even earn a penny because nobody actually cracks the binding. And if you do (I read to the end every time and got everybody their full value), you're a sucker for playing by the rules.

Authors can no longer earn snaps (the currency that Pubby uses) by inviting friends to read as that has been disabled until further notice. You can get a good amount of reviews quickly, but they'll have to be standard reviews since it costs more snaps to get reviews for the other formats that they offer. This means you'll have to read a lot of books to get reviews on your book, which means you may have to read and review some books that are mediocre. If your review isn't stamped as a verified purchase, Pubby will penalize you by taking snaps away. While this may be resolved by sending them the receipt that you did purchase the book, they'll only reimburse you once for this, even if it isn't your fault that your review was not stamped as a verified purchase. Pubby does mention that you can send an appeal via email, but this is not guaranteed to work and it can be a slow process. Naturally, Pubby encourages you to not do verified reviews if your reviews aren't being stamped as verified, but if you're attempting to do the right thing, I think they should handle this on a case-by-case basis. For example, if I do opt to review three books that require verified reviews in a row and one of them wasn't stamped as a verified purchase, but the other reviews were, I should not be punished for the third that wasn't if I can procure a receipt demonstrating that I bought the book (rather then Pubby saying that they'll only reimburse me once for that altogether). Pubby encourages you to avoid doing verified reviews if your posts aren't being stamped as verified purchases, but this is quite bad considering the amount of money you have to invest to subscribe to their yearly plan. Essentially, they still get the same money, but you cannot reap all the benefits of your subscription. Sometimes, it takes them too long to approve things, such as an update to your book cover. Normally, when you make a change to your book and submit it for approval, it'll say approved within 4 hours, but I have noticed that it can take longer than that. In my experience, the server for the website has been down on more than one occasion, which is a frustrating experience for everyone. Finally, you'll notice that a lot of the reviews that you'll get are one to two sentences long if you are trying to get a review for a high-content book. You'll observe that your reviewers most likely did not read the book, as they're saying the same things that other people said before them, so they can get snaps faster. If you point this out to Pubby, they most likely won't be able to do anything for you if you cannot prove that they did not plagiarize. While they may be able to give you snaps for a few cases, there will be an endpoint in time where they will not be able to allot you snaps in the future.