Jared W.

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.