OnlineBookClub.orgReviews of onlinebookclub.org

I am an editor and used this for a client who was adamant we sign up her book. What we thought we were signing up for, a book review was not what happened. We got "Laney k" who said while she liked the book, she gave it two stars because in a 240 page book she found 3-4 "open quotation" marks. Had they been closed, she would have given it "a few more" stars, closer to a 4 or 5. My client did not pay for copying, which is apparently what Laney does. This review was initiated after heavy solicitation by email promoting their 6 million plus readers. That is not accurate. While there might be millions of subscribers, it is very difficult to unsubscribe keeping their numbers large, but meaningless. My client paid to have the book FRONT PAGE FEATURED to their MILLIONS of subscribers. It was featured, we think, but it received absolutely zero sales. Whole experience was a huge waste of money for the client and I was blamed. I do NOT recommend this service. Interestingly enough, there are no google reviews for this service.

I signed up to do this because I thought, I've got 2 master degrees, been an educator for over 25 years, I've read plenty of books, and written many research papers. I can write book reviews! But according to their standards. I was very wrong. The book selections that they recommend are actually pretty decent. Beware that the criteria for book reviews is extremely stringent, and it is not as simple as it is stated on their platform. There will be a person who will review your review. If it does not meet that particular person's idea of what a review should be, it will be denied. You will be told to correct it to meet their standards. But even when you meet every one of the criteria, it will not be good enough unless you are a professional editor. Today they banned me from the online book club. I wrote two reviews that were not accepted nor was I given any specific details of why it was not accepted other than it didn't meet their criteria. So I don't recommend anyone ever joining this unless you are a professional writer or a professional editor to where you have experienced doing writing reviews. Otherwise you're writing skills will not be up to par. All I got from a year of reading and two reviews were several interesting titles I may read in the future but on my own dime.

Super disappointing. For a while there, you would pay OBC for a review, and your book would get a gushing 5-star review. Now you are paying to have amateurs (some in their early 20s) review your book and trash it or worse, give a raving review for garbage. Total waste of money. Our editorial team submitted a terrible book and it got a GREAT review. It was a test. They failed. Here's the worst part: They promote themselves as "creating bestsellers" on Amazon. It's easy to be an "Amazon bestseller" if you list your book in an obscure category with only 45 books. It would only take 5 people to read the book in one day for it to hold the top-selling spot in its sub-category. OBC is super deceptive. I've published four mediocre books, and each was a "bestseller" in some obscure category because I had four friends buy it at the same time. What they are doing is promoting these authors online as "We did it again! Another best seller!" Many of the OBC authors are self-published and produce books that are not particularly good. OBC is selling a dream to these people for hundreds of dollars to promote their book. It's sad and a waste of money.

It is nice that they pay you to review books. It gives you an opportunity to read a variety of different books and practice your writing. However, the reviewing process is incredibly strict and if you submit something incorrectly they make you redo it. I submitted a review, the author rejected something so I resubmitted it and then I had to resubmit it again and again. This last time I didn't do it and now I am banned which seems rather dramatic. I also was marked for a different error everytime I resubmitted it which seems odd, almost like the reviewers are not allowed to give a perfect score. They owe me $99 for reviews I've completed at this point. Will I get paid for this? I have no idea. At this point I'm done dealing with their games.

My first experience of Online Book Club involved paying several hundred dollars for an expedited premium review of my debut novel. The book club makes authors create a profile and then answer questions - the better to match a book with a suitable reviewer. Excellent, I thought to myself. My reviewer will know what to expect. I will get someone who is comfortable with the subject material, and eager to read something in my genre... Imagine my surprise when months later (well after the expected deadline for an expedited review) I got an absolutely withering three-star takedown written by a reviewer who hated the plot and characters, was deeply uncomfortable with the subject matter (I write about some controversial things, including LGBTQIAPK+ identity) and disliked the slow-moving style (I write litfic, not romcoms - my style is not brisk). A few weeks after that, I was invited to try informal, amateur reviews for a far lower price. they worked out to $20 per review. Well, why not, I thought. What could possibly go wrong? It's been several MONTHS since I ordered twenty reviews. Most of those paid amateurs DNF'd and bailed on writing their reviews. Did I get a refund? No. Of the reviews I did receive, fully half were written in a barely intelligible manner, and nearly all the reviewers pointed out "errors" that did not exist in the manuscript and probably appeared as a result of e-reader and/or electronic Hindi-to-English translator incompatibility. I am living proof that fools and their money are soon parted. Never again. Never. Oh, by the way - about those ludicrously overprised advertisements you can buy to make your book the featured book of the day, book of the month, etc? Just say no. I did. There is no way I would buy advertising space in a forum for indie readers looking for reviewers. That doesn't seem like a good way to get people to buy my book on Amazon, or anywhere else. A forum that's all desperate indie writers and no casual browsers? Yeah, no. Give this site a hard pass. It's a ripoff. It's not a scam, but it is not worth the gobs of money it charges its users.

What I have found is a lack of control over your reviewer so that they can lie about a book with no repercussions or redress whatsoever. And that may be because of using a quid pro quo system. When I pay $400 to have my book reviewed, I expect a quality review nd not a hatchet job, as was done by the last reviewer because she did not like what I had to say about her particular religion. Therefore, she proceeded to beat my book up. This type of review, which was purely out of spite, does not reflect kindly on your business and how it is run.

I signed up for this website about 2 years ago but had never used it as I was too busy at the time. However they kept sending me emails to review this book ' Deceptive Calm' and I would get paid $50. I eventually took up the offer , read the book and put up my first review. I got a response back few days later and asked to resubmit because it had a few grammatical errors, I fixed them and resubmitted but after almost 3 weeks I haven't been scored on my resubmission but that's not even my main compliant. My real issue is to do with the payment. I received an email acknowledging that I was due for payment but had to submit my ID for verification for that to happen. The instruction was I had to take a selfie of me holding the ID. I sent in the picture and a few days later received an email asking me to verify my ID once again but this time I had to use an online verification system called Stripe, I did as instructed. Waited for a response none came. A few days later another email, asking for the same thing. When I complained about this, citing that I had already done this twice I was now asked to send a video proving that I had done the verification process. That's when I realized that this was useless and not worth it. I had read a review that they make you jump through hoops inorder to get payment and unfortunately that has been my experience I have decided to unsubscribe from the site because it's more stress than actually having the pleasure of just reading and reviewing books. For a first time reviewer I'm highly disappointed with this site.

I had worked with OBC for over 3 years with no major problems until a few months ago when payments started getting delayed. I think it has to do with a change in management but a lot of complaints went unanswered, and reviewers started getting banned with little excuses. Editors would reject reviews without basis even when reviewers follow strict guidelines, and it would take countless emails to get issues resolved. I got banned a few days ago based on review disputes that happened two years ago which I assumed had been resolved. Efforts to get an appeal have been largely unsuccessful with moderators claiming there's nothing they can do about it. I have pending payments dating back to June and it is frustrating knowing all my hard work has been for nothing. I used to be a big advocate for OBC because I genuinely loved reviewing books, but my recent experience has left me with a very sour taste in my mouth.