Complaint Review: Pubby -

Pubby sounded like a great business model at first. You pay a yearly membership of $240 and you review other writers books on Amazon and other people review yours. You never "exchange reviews" meaning that if you reviewed a specific author's book, then they don't get to review yours. So there's no "swapping" of reviews. It's more like a daisy chain and that way it does not violate Amazon's terms and conditions. HOWEVER, the service is definitely not as described. I submitted my book and it was accepted, and I immediately began choosing other books to read and review and did everything I was supposed to do. I did NOT get the same in return.

The first review I got from a Pubby member was not a legitimate review. He was literally making things up as he went along. None of what he described happened in my book. It left me wondering what book he actually read, if any. He described scenes that never took place, listed main characters who didn't exist, and essentially went on a nonsensical ramble down the rabbit hole. After this, to add insult to injury, approximately 15 Pubby members who supposedly read my book did nothing but copy the original review. This is how I know they are not really holding up their end of the bargain: they COPIED information from the first review and they didn't know it wasn't accurate because they didn't read the book EITHER.

They simply put it into different words, but repeated the same inaccurate information that came from the very first review. So these members are clearly not reading the books they are choosing, they're just claiming the assignment so that THEIR books get reviewed. So they're taking the assignment, running out the clock, and then going to Amazon and compiling information from other reviews and posting a fake review. I did NOT sign up for fake reviews written by people who didn't actually read my book.

That was NOT what this was described as and no matter how many times I contact Pubby customer service to discuss it, they ignore me. Their customer service was garbage from the beginning, but I was going to hang in there because I wanted legitimate reviews. However, these reviews are clearly fake. The members, from what I can tell, are primarily teenagers and twentysomethings and they obviously don't have the patience to actually read the books they're "reviewing."

Pubby also charges extra in order for you to get what they call "recommended readers." I fell for this at first and paid the extra money, and my supposed "recommended readers" all ended up being college-age boys, because I tracked them down through social media. Well, my book was historical fiction, romance-mystery. I highly doubt the demographic that should be targeted is college-age boys. I don't think they particularly like 1600s romance novels. I would've never paid extra to have 19 year oId boys choose my book, because naturally that demographic is not my "target market." So the "recommended reader" fee is just another way to get money for nothing. The true recommended demographic for this book is women between 30 and 60. Not college-age boys.

I also got some reviews that were obvious translations that someone did through Google translate. This obviously shows that they are also allowing people to "review" books in languages that they don't even understand. Amazon took down so many of the Pubby reviews that I can't even count. Every time one got posted, another one got deleted by Amazon, probably because they were such poor quality and just repeats of other people's reviews. Amazon is very strict about that kind of thing. And they can also tell if a review was written in another language and just put through Google translate, because the translation does not come out right. So if you can't even write a review in English, you clearly can't READ a BOOK in English. This could have got me into a lot of trouble with Amazon because reviewing books that you didn't read is completely against their terms and conditions.  In my humble opinion,  Pubby is simply not on the up and up. It's a good business model, but it was not perfected before they started taking people's money. I'm disgusted.