Navigating Review Swap Platforms
For independent authors, reviews are the lifeblood of the publishing business. With millions of titles available in online marketplaces, customers rely heavily on social proof to decide which book to pick up next.
While many authors are familiar with Advance Reader Copies (ARCs), where digital copies are given to readers in hopes of an honest review, a different type of service has gained popularity in recent years: The Review Swap Platform.
What is a Review Swap Platform?
Unlike traditional ARC services, review swap platforms operate on a “give to get” model. While these platforms usually charge a monthly subscription fee, they also require authors to read and review other authors’ books to earn “tokens” or “points.” These tokens are then redeemed to get reviews for their own books.
To stay within the good graces of Amazon and other marketplaces, these platforms build in safeguards to prevent “reciprocal reviewing” (Author A reviewing Author B, who then immediately reviews Author A).
General Characteristics of Swap Programs:
- Amazon Focused: Most programs prioritize getting reviews onto Amazon.
- Point-Based Systems: You typically earn points by reading, which you spend to “list” your book for others to find.
- Subscription Fees: Most services offer a free trial followed by a monthly fee ranging from $10 to $25.
- Time Commitment: It usually takes 2–3 months to accumulate enough points to see a significant influx of reviews.
A Word of Caution: As of early 2026, the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) has not officially vetted many of these swap services. Before investing your time and manuscript, research current user feedback on sites like Trustpilot, keeping in mind that Amazon’s Terms of Service regarding “review clubs” are constantly evolving.
Want an even better system than review swaps for building social proof?
Learn about ARC Platforms in Training #620
ARC platforms provide a community of engaged readers ready to give your book's reviews a head start.
Top Review Swap Platforms for Authors
Here are some of the top platforms for review swaps that are available right now:
Click on the name above to read about a specific one, or scroll down for more information about each.
Pubby:
Established in 2019, Pubby is one of the oldest review “swap” programs. In this industry, seven years of business is considerable. Some authors find this track record comforting. However, according to Trustpilot feedback, the quality of Pubby has fallen during the last few years.
Pubby has a 10-day free trial and then charges $20 per month, though you can find discounts through program affiliates. (Check with book influencers on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.) Besides the monthly charge, some books are only available to read by purchasing them from Amazon.
Pubby allows you to build up as many tokens (which they call snaps) as you like, which you can then turn in for reads from other authors. They also have a Readers Program that allows non-author readers to read and review books.
You can choose to upload an ARC to Pubby, or you can require reviewers to read the book through Kindle Unlimited (if your book is enrolled in KDP Select) or to purchase your book from Amazon. If reviewers purchase the book from Amazon, they can leave a verified purchase review, which may minimize the likelihood that Amazon will remove the review.
However, Pubby charges an additional onetime fee to include verified purchase reviews as part of your campaign. If you want readers to purchase the book, consider offering it at a considerable discount or put it in the KDP Select program, allowing some readers to read for free.
Note: If you choose to require purchases, this program isn’t really part of your pre-launch review strategy and should be, instead, used for a boost of reviews shortly after launch or later in a book’s life cycle.
Each assignment comes with an assignment page. So, to review a book, you look through their catalog, select a book, and activate the assignment. The assignment page will show a due date for the assignment. You either download the book or purchase it from Amazon and read it. You return to the assignment page and use the Pubby link to post a review on Amazon. Then you return to the assignment page and turn in the assignment.
The Pubby software then attempts to find your review on Amazon. However, this step is one that generates a lot of criticism from users: the software frequently seems to be unable to “find” the reviews. This really isn’t surprising when you consider Amazon is constantly tweaking and updating its own systems.
If the Pubby software does not find the review within 14 days, it then removes the snaps from your account. It takes a long time to really read and give an honest, well-reasoned review of a book, and to do so with no benefit can be very frustrating.
When you set up your own books for others to review, you have the option of providing a free download, requesting that readers read. The Pubby dashboard provides links to reviews and the reviewer’s Amazon profile name.
In theory, I appreciate this because it allows the authors to monitor whether reviews are actually coming from Pubby. However, new additional Amazon Customer Review Guidelines (see: Promotional Content in Customer Reviews) state that customers cannot review products if the customer is a member of a review club that asks members to register their Amazon public profiles so that sellers or brands may monitor their reviews of products offered through the club.
So, do platforms like Pubby amount to a review club, and if so, does this violate the new guidelines?
OK, so what is the Trustpilot rating for Pubby? At this time, the rating is 1.5 stars. The complaints include, as mentioned above, that the software isn’t able to confirm reviews left on Amazon, the system is buggy, and the customer service is not good. Several service reviews state Pubby started strong and customers enjoyed using it in the early years, but that the service has gone downhill in recent years.
BookBounty:
BookBounty works similarly to Pubby.
BookBounty offers four different plans, including a Reader plan that allows authors to sign up for $4.99 per month. On this plan, participants can begin reading books and stock up points for their book launch.
However, if you do this, you will give up a fairly generous 15-day free trial that goes along with the Publisher and Publisher Plus accounts, so you’ll want to assess how long it will be before you are ready to/have accumulated enough bounties to begin your own campaign. The Publisher account is $25/month.
Again, you can find discounts through program affiliates. (Check with book influencers on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.) Besides the monthly charge, some books are only available to read by purchasing them from Amazon.
BookBounty has a few safeguards built in to minimize conflicts with Amazon’s review guidelines.
First, BookBounty does not provide any information about those that review your books or provide a link to the reviews, although I don’t believe this is a reaction to the guidelines; I believe they simply never provided that information.
Also, authors can only work on up to three “bounties” (assignments) at a time. This cuts down on the number of reads without reviews. It also means that the reviewer is unlikely to be leaving an unrealistic number of reviews on Amazon in any week, which is one factor that might have Amazon removing reviews.
A downside to this is that authors are limited to six reviews on their books in any week. Still, if you are lucky enough to get six reviews per week, this could be upward of 24 reviews in a month.
BookBounty asks reviewers to paste reviews into their BookBounty dashboards to improve the likelihood that reviewers really leave reviews. However, the author does not see these reviews, minimizing the likelihood of the author discovering the identity of their reviewer.
Like Pubby, BookBounty allows authors to upload an ARC for direct download or to require reviewers to read the book through Kindle Unlimited (if your book is enrolled in KDP Select) or to purchase your book from Amazon. Instead of paying an extra fee to enable verified purchases, authors pay with extra bounties (assignments).
BookBounty’s Trustpilot rating is 2.8 stars. Again, customer service was a big complaint. There were also some complaints that the book reviews received read as if generated by AI and that legitimate book shoppers notice this.
That said, there are some good customer reviews in the last year as well. I see a few comments that the books available to read are mediocre with very few truly good books available.
Get Books Reviewed:
Get Books Reviewed is a lesser-known review “swap” program. I’m not sure how long it has been in operation. The domain was registered in 2020, but there are no reviews older than spring 2025, although at least one testimonial states that the author began using it no later than spring 2024.
Get Books Reviewed has two membership levels. The Standard plan gives you 20 days free to try it out and then is just $10 per month. The Premium plan has 20 days free and then $24 per month. As far as I can tell, the plans operate the same, but the Premium plan offers ways to earn bonus tokens. Besides the monthly charge, some books are only available to read by purchasing the book from Amazon.
Their stated success rate is quite modest compared to some sites we reviewed on Tuesday. They claim their customers receive 60% more reviews than they have gotten on their own.
There are some interesting features in Get Books Reviewed that make it different from some others:
First, many of the company testimonials and social mentions say that authors are likely to get fewer reviews here, but the reviews will be more thought-out and reviewers clearly read the books. Get Books Reviewed confirms that this is their strategy: help authors get more reviews over time. This strategy might not be great for a launch, but it can help keep your book in front of shoppers for a longer period.
Along with this, the setup of your book on Get Books Reviewed requires more thought than some of the other sites. Thankfully, the service automatically populates the very basics, like book title, cover, page count,, etc., with a link to the Amazon listing. But you will need to give some thought to categories, keywords, excerpts, and comparable titles. Of course, if you’ve been following along with our recommendations, you will already have all of this information at your fingertips.
Books go through a short vetting process before they are accepted into the program in order to ensure at least a minimal level of quality of the book. They also do not allow books with large portions written by AI.
The service claims that it monitors for fake reviews. While they can’t take down fake reviews, they consider banning participants that leave fake reviews: reviews that clearly show reviewers haven’t read the book or simply used an AI tool to write the review.
An important distinction: Get Books Reviewed does not ban people who leave negative reviews, which would violate Amazon’s review guidelines; they ban people who are not doing the work of leaving authentic reviews. Unlike some of the other services, (I believe) reviewers can only work on one assignment at a time. This encourages thoughtful reading and reviewing. Reviewers get four days to read and review a book.
Authors say the program develops a sense of community. The program provides a way for participants to provide anonymous private feedback to encourage authors to improve their writing.
One of the most interesting features is the Friends & Family Network. We all know by now that Amazon does not permit an author’s friends and family to leave reviews. But on Get Books Reviewed, authors can invite friends and family to join as readers.
Friends and family get free books to read and review, and a percentage of the tokens they earn by doing so go into the referring author’s account, thus helping the author get more reviews.
Get Books Reviewed has a Trustpilot rating of 4.4 stars, but there are only 17 reviews, so this rating isn’t particularly conclusive. Feedback praises the customer service and the thoughtful nature of the book reviews they receive and the attention the service places on Amazon’s product review guidelines.
Get Authentic Book Reviews:
Get Authentic Book Reviews got started in late 2024. Only authors with books published on Amazon can join (though their FAQs tell you that if you are not quite ready to publish, you can contact them and they will get you set up to accumulate tokens (points) to use when you publish).
Get Authentic Book Reviews focuses on verified purchase reviews, so participants must be willing to purchase books. However, the price to join the program is just $5.90 per month or $65 per year, so what authors save compared to some of the more expensive options can go to book purchases.
The site encourages authors to lower the cost of their books as much as possible while trying to get reviews. Also, while all of these services are heavily focused on digital media, since there is no PDF upload option on Get Authentic Book Reviews and print books are more costly, this service is really targeting digital media.
Reviewers can work on one assignment at a time, and deadlines for each review vary by the length of the book. I appreciate this because some sites have unreasonable deadlines: 3 days to read and review a book is fine if the book is low-content or a 25,000 word novella, but an epic fantasy should never be read that quickly; a reader could never truly enjoy it that quickly!
Get Authentic Book Reviews is still in its early days and does not have a Trustpilot rating yet. I have seen positive reviews from independent publishing influencers, but some of those may be skewed because the books I saw on offer from these influencers were, in fact, books about how to improve an independent publishing business and all the service’s participants are authors, so the book has high appeal for all the participants. It may not be as easy to find reviewers for your books.
Goodnight Reads:
Goodnight Reads is a little different from the other services here because it is only for children’s picture books. Otherwise, it works similarly to other swap sites. Other authors review your book; you review theirs. There is also a free library for outside readers.
However, you must have an invitation to join the platform. While there is a button on the website to request an invitation, they are slow in coming. Your best option is to get an invitation from another author already on the platform. There is an invitation link in our Facebook Group from a member, Kristin Haynes. (You can find it simply by searching the Group for “GoodNightReads”.) You can also find invitation links from publishing influencers.
There is a free plan that allows you to try out the service. You can upload one book for review. Once you upload the book, that’s it; you can’t swap it out for another book later. To swap or add other books, you need to upgrade to a paid plan.
There are two paid plans: a monthly plan of $14.55 and an annual plan of $145. The monthly plan has some limitations: 5 books and fewer guaranteed reviews.
Speaking of which… I don’t know how they guarantee the reviews. They can’t force someone to write a review, so I assume if a “guaranteed review” does not materialize in a timely fashion, they return the credit to you so you can request one from someone else. I’m not sure what else they could do because forcing participants to leave reviews for participation would likely violate Amazon’s promotional content in reviews policy.
This brings me to an aspect of this program that I don’t like: a lack of transparency about how it operates. The website provides very little information and, since one needs an invitation to join, it feels a little more like a secret club than I’m strictly comfortable with.
Goodnight Reads does not have a rating on Trustpilot.
Gemsy:
Gemsy is specifically for low-content books, including children’s picture books, and non-fiction.
Gemsy has a monthly plan for $19.99 and an annual plan for $180. You can find discount codes through influencers, so check out YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram to find codes.
Like many other platforms, you can choose to upload an ePub or PDF of the book so reviewers can read for free, or you can enable the Kindle Unlimited review option or require a verified purchase. They are also experimenting with requiring a verified purchase of a print book, likely because many of the book types that can participate in Gemsy cannot be sold on Amazon in ebook form.
However, requiring a verified purchase of a print book may mean 1) fewer people willing to review your book because the purchase price will significantly add to the cost of using this platform and 2) the reviews will come more slowly because reviewers will need to wait until they receive the book to read and review it. That said, reviewers who purchase a print copy can leave video reviews showing off the book, which can be valuable.
Gemsy has a Trustpilot rating of 4 stars. Many customers say the customer service is great, but a few warn it is terrible. Other feedback mentions success with children’s books and non-fiction.
Should You Use a Review Swap Service?
While the allure of fast reviews is tempting, authors should weigh the benefits against the potential downsides:
- Genre Mismatch: Because “readers” on these sites are motivated by points, they may review your epic fantasy even if they only usually read cozy mysteries. This can lead to lukewarm reviews or “skimmed” readings.
- Time Drain: Every hour spent reading and reviewing someone else’s book to earn points is an hour taken away from writing your next bestseller.
- Platform Risk: Amazon is increasingly sophisticated at identifying patterns. If you use multiple swap services simultaneously, you increase the risk of “cross-pollination” that could lead to review deletion or account warnings.
The Verdict
Review swap platforms can be a useful supplement to a marketing plan, especially for new authors struggling to get their first 10–20 reviews. However, they should not replace traditional ARC campaigns or organic reader outreach. (We talk about traditional ARC platforms in Training #620.)
If you choose to experiment with these services, start with one at a time, monitor your Amazon dashboard closely, and always prioritize the quality of your writing above the number of stars on the screen.
