Beware

I can't speak for any other self-published authors, but this has been MY experience with a company called PUBBY:

Pubby has what is perhaps a good business model, where readers and writers pay to join a community and earn “snaps” for reading and reviewing other authors’ books. The "snaps" can then be used to have YOUR book read and reviewed. You never “exchange” reviews with another author. If one person read your book, then their book does not come up in the feed for you to read. Sounds good at first, because Amazon strictly forbids authors from exchanging reviews just to do each other a favor. It sounded like a legitimate way to read and review new books and have mine read and reviewed. Where the program unravels in a very negative way is as follows:

From what I can tell, most Pubby members absolutely do not read one word of the books they are reviewing. This became apparent to me very quickly. The very first review, which was written by a college-age boy, who I’m not surprised wasn’t really interested in historical fiction, contained gross errors. By that, I do not mean he gave me a low rating. He actually gave me a very high star rating, BUT...the information he listed was wholly inaccurate. He named one of the characters and said that the story was primarily about that character, when in reality, that character was killed off in the first chapter.

He then compared the story to Romeo and Juliet, when it had absolutely zero similarities to that famous tale. LOL. He then stated that the female protagonist had to “deal with a man she didn’t like in order to solve personal issues,” which is absolutely not similar to anything that took place in my book. After that, about TEN other Pubby members simply repeated and reworded this person's "review" and I can only reach one conclusion from that: very few members are actually reading these books, they’re just reading other reviews and repeating what is said in those, and they don’t realize it’s inaccurate information because they never read the book to find out! No one who read my novel would think any of the things that were listed in that first review, yet MANY people copied that information.

I even went to the text box where we can leave a message for our readers and I BEGGED Pubby members to stop repeating inaccurate information from other reviews, and after that it got even worse. So I’m assuming this is a bunch of young kids who think they’re being cute to do the opposite of what you asked. And all I asked is that they actually read the book before they post a review. There is also something called a “recommended reader,” which costs you MORE money and you supposedly get only readers who are interested in your genre. I paid the extra money and primarily got boys from 18 to 22 years old. I DON’T think that’s the main demographic for historical mystery-romance. Just a hunch.

Talking to the staff of this company got me nowhere and the last straw was when the most recent review was literally a word-for-word copy of a review that was already written. THAT kind of stuff can get you in big trouble with Amazon because they think you’re just out there paying for fake reviews, which was not my intention. I was naïve enough to think that this “community of readers and writers” were actually going to be reading each other’s books. I guess you live and learn. *sigh* In all good conscience I have to say AVOID Pubby!