Hello, everyone and thank you, Adriano for the warm welcome. I have a few books published over the last year and a half but reviews have been the one thing keeping me down. I have noticed a few reviews missing recently. I don't worry about it too much but I also see the impact they have on my momentum. I appreciate all your intent and efforts with BookVillage!!

Hi everyone! I'm Tony Glynn, a new member of the BookVillage community and author of The Forty-Eight Tides, Book One of The Tidebound Chronicles. After years of writing and revising, I've finally published my first novel and am excited to connect with fellow authors and readers. I'm looking forward to learning from this community, sharing experiences, and supporting others on their publishing journeys. Thank you for having me, and I look forward to getting to know everyone!

Adriano, thanks so much for building such an awesome platform and community. Hi, I'm Mike, and I started publishing on Amazon about a year ago. I started with unique word search challenges, and I've since moved into chapter books for kids In the science niche. Early on in my journey, I had a book which had half its reviews stripped and then was eventually blocked for "review manipulation". It seems to me that the primary issue was getting too many reviews on the Kindle free promotion. That was a significant setback to me, but I persevered and published four more books since then. Given that experience, I'm quite conservative with using online review platforms, but I use Book Bounty and Book Reverb to slowly build reviews over time. I only do one Book Bounty review per week and no more than ten Book Reverb reviews per week. Outside of that, I make sure I have QR codes in my book that go direct to the review page, although I think the review rate is something like one or two out of a hundred, which is obviously pretty abysmal. I'm excited to test this platform, but I am very curious how you are ensuring authors don't get review swaps. My understanding is that sites like Book Reverb and Book Bounty ensure that no swaps happen, but Amazon seems to even be cracking down on review rings (i.e., person A reviews person B, person B reviews person C, and person C reviews person A). One of my concerns with smaller platforms like this one is that those sorts of triangles are highly likely with only a small pool of reviewers. Anyway, glad to be here and looking forward to testing out the platform for at least a month or two.

I discovered BookVillage through the interview on YouTube. I’m not a beginner publisher, so when I listened to Adriano’s explanations, I immediately understood how valid his points were. I had already realized for some time that something wasn’t quite right with the other platforms, but as long as reviews were coming in and there were no major issues, I chose to ignore it, as I think most people did. Since October, however, the situation on Amazon has changed drastically. At that time I was still using another platform, and in a short period of time two of my books were blocked, including one for which I had never even received reviews during the free promo. This goes against what many experts claim when they say that only free promo reviews can trigger KDP book blocks. From that moment, I unsubscribed from that platform and stopped publishing new books altogether, simply because I no longer had a simple and reasonably affordable way to obtain reviews. And I’m sure that many others like me put their publishing business on hold from that point onward. In my opinion, the truth is that the alternative review services that are being promoted instead of these platforms are simply too expensive. After watching the interview, I immediately realized that Adriano had a deep understanding of the situation. So I decided to test BookVillage while strictly following their guidelines. I post three reviews per week (all paid verified purchases) and in just over four weeks I received exactly 13 paid verified reviews on one of my books. All of the reviews I received are currently live on Amazon, except for one that I received on the uk marketplace which, although still live, is not displayed on .com (don't know why). Now I’m considering purchasing the annual subscription. I’m very satisfied with this platform.