My Pubby Review
TLDR: Avoid them. Very bad customer service.
I used Pubby.co. Let this article serve as the ultimate review of Pubby.
Pubby claims to offer “Unlimited Reviews by Real Readers”. I paid a substantial amount of money for their service (and only one month of it), to see if I could get more reviews for my book. The problem is, their customer service is atrocious. I am writing this review to be very clear: I do not recommend Pubby and I hope that no one uses their service going forward.
The short story is that I was supposed to get a review for my book, I believe according to Amazon’s guidelines, through Pubby’s system. While I did get some reviews, in the end there was a review I didn’t get that I was supposed to get. I never got that review. And I asked them about it quite a few times and their service support was very bad. They said I would get the review but I never did. The ugliness is in the details. Feel free to see my complete customer service conversations below, for proof.
Four weeks ago (according to their system) I got this message. No big deal, just run of the mill:
I don’t think I responded. Pretty sure it was automated. Then, we had this conversation. Here’s the end of it:
Long story short, by this time I was very frustrated and the customer service representative assured me that I would get the review. I held out some hope at first. I have not yet gotten the review, even after tons of explanation from me. You can read the whole conversation (the end of which is above) below if you’d like to:
Conversation with Pubby
Started on July 24, 2020 at 12:07 PM America/New_York time EDT (GMT-0400)— -
12:07 PM | Eric Martin: [Image “image.png”]
12:08 PM | Eric Martin: Can I get a refund for these points since this reviewer is 7 days late?
12:08 PM | Operator: Pubby typically replies in under 20m.
12:17 PM | Eric Martin: Great!
12:20 PM | Eric Martin: Great!
12:34 PM | Mary from Pubby: Hello!
After a reviewer has submitted their review to Amazon for your book and turned in their assignment to us on Pubby, we continue to check Amazon.com multiple times a day to see if the review has been posted publicly yet.
Amazon can take multiple days (up to 3) to approve and make a review public. After 3 days, if we cannot verify the review, we will send you an email letting you know, and we will email the reviewer asking them to try posting it again. If we still cannot verify it 2 days later (5 days total after they turned in their assignment to us), we will assign the book to a new reader automatically and send you an email letting you know what’s happening.
If the review gets posted after the assignment has been taken from the original reviewer, you can consider it a freebie. You will get that original review, plus the review from the replacement reviewer.
Please do not reach out to support unless it has been more than 5 days. Our system runs automatically and smoothly, and the likelihood that your review is being “lost” or “skipped” is about 1%. Please help us keep support wait times down by only reaching out when necessary.
“12:36 PM | Eric Martin: Hi
12:37 PM | Eric Martin: It’s been more than 7 days and it says they’re still reading
12:37 PM | Eric Martin: 7 days after they were supposed to finish reading
12:37 PM | Eric Martin: [Image “image.png”]
12:51 PM | Eric Martin: Did the image I sent? Am I part of the 1%?
12:58 PM | Eric Martin: Did you get the image I sent?
01:03 PM | Eric Martin: It’s been 7 days since the latest the book was supposed to be reviewed, but the reader is still reading.
01:18 PM | Mary from Pubby: Hello! We automatically cancel the assignment and find you a new reader.
01:38 PM | Eric Martin: Thanks. How long does that take…. since it’s already 7 days past this one and I see no new reader.
02:03 PM | Mary from Pubby: I have no idea. It’s all automated. So sorry
02:08 PM | Eric Martin: Wow. I’ve paid about $45+ to you in fees over a few weeks. It surprises me that that’s the only answer you can give me. It seems like you shouldn’t offer this chat at all if that’s the best you can do.
02:17 PM | Mary from Pubby: Sorry you feel that way Eric. We will make sure you get a review.
02:24 PM | Eric Martin: Sounds good!
Later, I wrote to them again. I really wanted to give them every chance to solve this problem. In my opinion their automated system isn’t perfect and was having a glitch. They can’t seem to believe that their automated system not being perfect is even remotely possible. Here’s the end of this next conversation:
And if you’re interested, here’s the whole conversation:
Conversation with Pubby
Started on July 25, 2020 at 07:55 PM America/New_York time EDT (GMT-0400)— — July 25, 2020 — -
07:55 PM | Eric Martin: Could you get this a new reviewer since it’s over a week late?
07:55 PM | Eric Martin: [Image “image.png”]
07:55 PM | Operator: Pubby typically replies in under 30m.
— — July 25, 2020 — -
08:15 PM | Mary from Pubby: Hello! We have an automated system that cancel their assignment and finds you a new reader.
09:53 PM | Eric Martin: It might not be working at 8 days late?
10:05 PM | Mary from Pubby: It works. We will make sure you receive a review.
— — July 27, 2020 — -
08:43 AM | Eric Martin: Thanks!
And here’s the beginning of my final conversation with Pubby:
I’m not sure if that nice, happy face is really their customer service representative… but whoever the real rep is, they and everyone at this company should probably just move on and try to find some other way to make a living. I really think I gave them every chance. I cancelled my subscription because I didn’t want to get charged for another month of not getting the review that they repeatedly promised to me.
To be clear, it was very obvious to me (and I tried to make this clear to them) that the automated process was broken. This is what I see in my dashboard right now:
It’s supposed to be reassigned after someone fails to review in time. This never happened. This review has never been reassigned as far as I can tell. That’s what I’ve been complaining about this whole time.
Here’s our whole final conversation. Well, it’s just me because they haven’t responded yet:
That’s the final hurrah. Oh well.
p.s. I just got a response from them. So I shared this review with them:
Thank you for reading my report of many of my experiences with Pubby. I hope it helps you to decide whether to use them to help you get Amazon customer reviews for your book.
After the initial publication of this article they offered me a partial refund (I think they probably would have offered the refund without the publication, since it is their policy). They claimed that they refunded $29.99, which was for my first month. I have received now the $29.99 refund, although for a bit it had not shown up in my account. But I wanted a full refund. And here was their response:
Not too polite. They seem like a sad example of a company that would never consider an exception to any rule. I got a $29.99 refund. That’s not to mention the $24.98 of charges I got on July 11th for other (related) services, that she is claiming here that they won’t refund. It’s August 13th, so I guess 3 days over 30 days is still too much for some flexibility.
A final glancing blow from Pubby to me at 9:15 PM EST on 8/13/2020, after I informed them that my review was near the top of Google search for “pubby review” and “pubby reviews”:
TLDR again: Please don’t use Pubby. They have horrible customer service. Perhaps the best example I’ve ever seen of poor customer service.
