May 19, 2026 I’m testing the Scrivy software platform, which uses the Advance Reader Copy (ARC) system to help indie authors generate authentic Amazon book reviews.
This is not a paid promotion. I’m paying for these products and services myself and documenting the real-world results as I go – good or bad – so other independent authors can see what actually works.
This video is Part 1 of an ongoing series following my experience with Scrivy, ARC readers, review generation, costs, results, and overall value for self-published authors.
So far? Surprisingly positive. If you’re an indie author trying to break through the noise on Amazon KDP, this series may save you time, money, and frustration.
Get The Book: https://mybook.to/A8X8
Transcript:
0:00Hi, good afternoon. The reason for this video is I am uh an independent author
0:08
8 secondswho published a book on Amazon uh about 6 months ago and I uh just wanted to
0:15
15 secondsjust put it out there and uh it went nowhere. I mean I ended up getting five reviews over 6 months. Um, it basically
0:25
25 secondsit was one of millions of books that get published and it it it stays in Amazon’s basement. Uh, you never make any
0:33
33 secondstraction on their algorithm. You get nowhere. You don’t sell any books. Um, I thought that, hey, alls I got to do is
0:40
40 secondsput it on Amazon, it’ll organically take off and be a bestseller. Nope. It’s not the way it works. Uh, this was the first
0:48
48 secondstime that I published a book. So then the next thing you do is you start going, “Okay, so what do I got to do to sell more books
0:56
56 secondsand you you relatively quickly learn that?” And and here’s what happens when you start searching these things. Well,
1:03
1 minute, 3 secondsnow you’re in your inboxes spammed with every AI uh courses. Uh give us money
1:11
1 minute, 11 secondsand we’ll help you sell books. And the problem is you don’t know what works and what doesn’t. Well, neither did I. So, I said, “Okay, um I want to do something.
1:21
1 minute, 21 secondsI’ve got to do something, but I don’t really know what to trust.” And of course, when you’re looking at these people’s advertisements and they’re going, “Oh, we got all these great
1:29
1 minute, 29 secondsreviews and there’s thousands of people that love us and you know, join our club. We’ve got a seat reserved for you.
1:33
1 minute, 33 secondsIt’s only going to cost you 99 bucks.” You’re like, “H, all right. Well, don’t know if it works or not.” So what I
1:41
1 minute, 41 secondsdecided to do was to create a subcontent uh for uh my book uh that has to do with
1:49
1 minute, 49 secondsuh what what works and what doesn’t. Um now here’s here’s the book. All right.
1:55
1 minute, 55 secondsIt’s called it’s about near-death experiences and it’s called uh you’re going to die someday, right? Near-death experiences reveal what happens next.
2:04
2 minutes, 4 secondsGreat book. I love it. It’s full of course. I love it. I wrote it. Um, however, it wasn’t getting any traction
2:12
2 minutes, 12 secondswhatsoever on Facebook. Um, and as you learn and you research these things, you
2:19
2 minutes, 19 secondslearn that you have to be the marketer, the promoter, the content creator, the video editor, uh, you have to learn all
2:27
2 minutes, 27 secondsof these skills to promote your book or listen to all of these pitches. Um, what
2:33
2 minutes, 33 secondsI decided to do is I I signed up for a service called Scrivy and that’s S C R I
2:42
2 minutes, 42 secondsV Y. Uh, not Scrivener, which is the software that you use to write books, but Scrivy. Um and their um their pitch
2:52
2 minutes, 52 secondsis basically we will uh use what’s called the advanced reader copy or ARC
2:59
2 minutes, 59 secondsum uh ecoulture or the the the the the network which is already set up. So here’s what the advanced reader copy
3:08
3 minutes, 8 secondsthis is how that works. Um, oh, by the way, this is going to be the long format video for YouTube. And then, of course,
3:15
3 minutes, 15 secondsI’m going to do vertical uh short versions for Tik Tok and reals and everything else. That’ll feed into this
3:22
3 minutes, 22 secondsYouTube version. So, I can take my time and relax and go, hey, it’s YouTube.
3:27
3 minutes, 27 secondsIt’s chill. Don’t have to go, you know, rapid pace. Um the way the ARC works is
3:35
3 minutes, 35 secondslet’s say you’re a massively huge um uh publishing house like Simon and Schustster or something and uh you have
3:43
3 minutes, 43 secondsan author who’s a known author with a name recognition famous guy sells lots of books cranks him out like that
3:50
3 minutes, 50 secondsmillionaire. Okay. So before the book is released, you’ll see that release date on so and so, they will send out copies
3:58
3 minutes, 58 secondsof the book and it’s typically a a maybe PDF e- version or something that people can read as a as a
4:07
4 minutes, 7 secondsmanuscript and then they will re read the book in advance of its release before the book is released and then
4:14
4 minutes, 14 secondsprovide uh reviews. Um, now the way Scrivy works is they tag into that arc
4:21
4 minutes, 21 secondsor ARC architecture. And uh, the cost per review is six bucks. $6 a book. And
4:31
4 minutes, 31 secondsyou go, well, that sounds a little steep. Who gets the money? So, Scribby gets the money. They do not, repeat, do
4:38
4 minutes, 38 secondsnot pay for the reviews. The reviewers that are in this network, um, what they get is basically free books. It’s like
4:46
4 minutes, 46 secondsthey let’s say you’re into a particular genre. Let’s say I don’t know science fiction. So when a new book comes out that’s science fiction, they’ll it’ll be
4:54
4 minutes, 54 secondscategorized and then there’s like so many of them. We need so many reviews.
4:58
4 minutes, 58 secondsWell, you can claim that as a as a as a reviewer, you can reach out and say, “Okay, I want one.” And then they will
5:06
5 minutes, 6 secondsgive it to you and it counts as, you know, you’re you’re going to you’re read the book. So it goes from those reviews have been claimed and now they’re being
5:14
5 minutes, 14 secondsread and then once the person finishes reading the book then they write the review and then that appears on Amazon.
5:20
5 minutes, 20 secondsNow Scribby is very very careful and this isn’t hugely important. They’re very very careful to comply completely
5:29
5 minutes, 29 secondswith Amazon’s terms of service. So they are not paying for reviews. The reviews are not guaranteed. There’s all kinds of
5:37
5 minutes, 37 secondsdisclaimer disclaimers that you have to check off on when you sign up for scribby to say, “Yeah, I understand that we’re doing all of these things in order
5:45
5 minutes, 45 secondsto comply with Amazon not to get sideways with Amazon.” That’s important.
5:50
5 minutes, 50 secondsYou have to watch out for things that are like, you know, other providers that I’m unaware of. I mean, I have this is
5:58
5 minutes, 58 secondsthe only one I’ve done so far, but I wanted to provide my feedback at an early stage. So what I did is I
6:05
6 minutes, 5 secondssigned up for 21 reviews. I had after 5 months I had gotten five organically and
6:14
6 minutes, 14 secondsthe way that I got those was I would take reader copies or or I’m sorry author copies that I would buy and uh
6:23
6 minutes, 23 secondsthese cost me about six bucks each if I get one.
6:27
6 minutes, 27 secondsThere you go. So I’m in for six bucks already. I would hand them out to friends, neighbors, relatives. I go to a
6:34
6 minutes, 34 secondsdoctor’s appointment. Hey, man, read my book. Oh, sure. Then I would say, you know, if you can, if you feel like it, if you feel it’s, you know, uh,
6:42
6 minutes, 42 secondsappropriate, I I I need reviews because that’s how you get traction in the ecosystem for Amazon. Without reviews, you’re you don’t get that validation.
6:52
6 minutes, 52 secondsUm, and after like six months, I got a total of five reviews. So, that’s going
6:59
6 minutes, 59 secondsnowhere. And the sales were nowhere. Um, and nothing was happening with the book.
7:04
7 minutes, 4 secondsSo, I said, “Okay, I it’s spring is here. It’s nice. It’s warm. It’s sunny.
7:07
7 minutes, 7 secondsUm, time to get going on this.” And Scribby was the first one that I signed up for. Now, I only signed up for it,
7:14
7 minutes, 14 secondsit’s only been running for a few days. I mean, 5 days, maybe 4 days. Um, and I’ve already gotten um I think the total
7:24
7 minutes, 24 secondsnumber of reviews on the book right now as of this moment are 12. Um, and these are some of them are just pure gold
7:33
7 minutes, 33 secondswhere people actually are interested in the subject. They actually read the book. Uh, they understood it and they took the time to contemplate the issues
7:41
7 minutes, 41 secondsthat are in there and uh provided fantastic reviews. Um, so far it’s been a toss between four stars and five
7:50
7 minutes, 50 secondsstars. There was one three star which was kind of an outlier. And the of the original five, there was one guy who
7:58
7 minutes, 58 secondsbasically threw a hand grenade. And and when you look at this guy and his reviews on on Amazon, he only does either one-star reviews or fivestar
8:05
8 minutes, 5 secondsreviews. And he’ll be like, “Oh, this spatula is the best spatula I’ve ever had in my life. I love it.” He loves the spatula. Gives it a five star. the very
8:12
8 minutes, 12 secondsnext thing is some other piece of something that he bought and it’s like this thing’s garbage. So that’s it. It’s either with him it’s either one or or or
8:21
8 minutes, 21 secondsor five. And uh he I could tell just by the words that he was using in the description of the book, he hadn’t read
8:29
8 minutes, 29 secondsit. He didn’t understand it. He didn’t even try. He was just like, “I didn’t like it when he did that.” He’s like, “All right, great.” He probably skimmed it, found something he didn’t like, and gave it a one, moved on. Whatever.
8:39
8 minutes, 39 secondsDoesn’t matter because that’s just one.
8:41
8 minutes, 41 secondsNow, if you’ve got a hundred reviews and one hand grenade, who cares, right?
8:44
8 minutes, 44 secondsBecause it gets siphoned out in the uh u in the averages the a the And again, I
8:51
8 minutes, 51 secondssigned up for 21 and I think I’ve gotten like six back so far, six or seven. So, from 5 to 12. Um and uh they’ve been
8:59
8 minutes, 59 secondsfour and five stars and one of them was a three. Um so, I should end up at about 26 or so if I get one review from
9:08
9 minutes, 8 secondseverybody that’s in the ARC. It’s not guaranteed that you’ll get a review.
9:11
9 minutes, 11 secondsIt’s not guaranteed that you’ll get a good review. Those are just how that’s how the system works. Um, but so far to date, I’m very very pleased with Scrivy.
9:21
9 minutes, 21 secondsNow, the reviews is just part of it. But look at it this way. All right. So, this book cost me six bucks to buy. If I hand
9:29
9 minutes, 29 secondsit out to somebody and go here, you know, just hoping that they’ll give me a review, that’s the same amount of money that I’m spending already to buy books and hand them out.
9:39
9 minutes, 39 secondswhy not spend it on a service like this?
9:42
9 minutes, 42 secondsSo, I know that people are reading the book. There are people that are signed up. They want to read books. They know that part of the deal is doing a review on it. Um, it’s compliant with Amazon
9:51
9 minutes, 51 secondsand all of that. So, so far, huge thumbs up for Scribby. S C R I V Y. And again,
9:58
9 minutes, 58 secondsto be perfectly clear, I am not being compensated by Scribby. I am not a
10:06
10 minutes, 6 secondsinfluencer. I’m not uh putting in affiliate links or none of that stuff.
10:10
10 minutes, 10 secondsThis is just a pure straight organic 100% thumbs up for Scribby. Uh they’re doing okay. They’re doing great. Now,
10:18
10 minutes, 18 secondsthere’s another part of Scrivy, which is a monthly subscription for their pro package. They give you 7 days of free access to their pro package when you
10:26
10 minutes, 26 secondsfirst sign up. After that, it’s 29 I want to say 29.95 a month or something like that. Um
10:35
10 minutes, 35 secondsuh and what they do, there’s several things in there. I’ve been playing around with a couple of things. And what this does is it manages and um uh
10:44
10 minutes, 44 secondsfine-tunes your Amazon book listing. Um and one of the things that was critically important that I did wrong was my book was in the wrong categories.
10:57
10 minutes, 57 secondsUm what it does is it it it basically reads your description of the book and the manuscript their AI in Scribby and
11:05
11 minutes, 5 secondsit says okay if your book should be in these categories and these are the top performing categories for this kind of
11:13
11 minutes, 13 secondsmaterial in the Amazon architecture. So it was like for my book clearly near-death experiences, out of body
11:21
11 minutes, 21 secondsexperiences and then the history of uh like religious studies in the history or the origins of the Bible. Um and now my
11:30
11 minutes, 30 secondsbook is not a religious book at all. Um it is about uh how near-death experiences from 150,000 years ago or
11:38
11 minutes, 38 secondsmore. uh ancient near-death experiences resulted in everything that that humans know or what we call uh God, heaven,
11:47
11 minutes, 47 secondssoul, afterlife, continuation of life after death, uh ancestors in the afterlife and all of those kinds of things. Life review um this is where
11:56
11 minutes, 56 secondsthese concepts originally came from and that’s what’s the book is about. That’s why it has that that angle to it. It’s talking about religious kinds of things,
12:04
12 minutes, 4 secondsbut the religions are what were formatted format made by humans basically after Um, but that’s a side
12:11
12 minutes, 11 secondsnote. The most important thing is the near-death experiences and the outof body experiences because that happens
12:18
12 minutes, 18 secondswith every NDE. Um, now when I first published my book on Amazon, I tried to
12:25
12 minutes, 25 secondsfind those categories and they are kind of hidden. If you don’t know where the exact category for your book is, it’s
12:33
12 minutes, 33 secondskind of hard to find. And I went fishing around in there and I could not find it.
12:37
12 minutes, 37 secondsUm, when I signed up for Scribby and I’m practicing, you know, playing around with this pro version. Um, it was like,
12:44
12 minutes, 44 seconds”Yep, right here.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s where that is.” Okay. So, I recategorized my book. I’ve changed the categories that the book is listed in,
12:52
12 minutes, 52 secondswhich is critically important. Um, and found the right ones, near-death experience, out-of- body experience, and basically religious studies and history
13:01
13 minutes, 1 secondof religion. Um, and so I made those changes. So, those two things. So now the book is being held in the right
13:08
13 minutes, 8 secondscategory which means it’s being presented to the right kind of audience and then add the reviews right and then
13:16
13 minutes, 16 secondsnow I can fine tweak the uh the KDP uh advertising and the keywords and and get
13:23
13 minutes, 23 secondsit positioned correctly. Um, so that’s and of course there’s other be just buzz me. There’s um other things that could
13:32
13 minutes, 32 secondsyou can do within scribby. I have not signed up for the 29 whatever it is a month. Um I might I probably will. I’ve
13:40
13 minutes, 40 secondsgot another couple of days where I can play with it. Uh I’m going to figure out if there’s more because it’ll do like a fivestep analysis on your entire listing
13:49
13 minutes, 49 secondsand then optimize it and then it’ll track the keyword performance. Uh, so that might be worth it if I can get the return.
13:59
13 minutes, 59 secondsUh, and again, I make like five or six bucks a book. So, I need to make that much money back on it to break even. Um, if I’m, you know, if it does better and
14:07
14 minutes, 7 secondsI’m and all of these things, the listing, the categories, the reviews, and all that stuff. Those are the fundamentals that you’ve got to do and you’ve got to get right. Uh, and if
14:16
14 minutes, 16 secondsyou’re not doing that, your book’s going to go nowhere. So if you are that person who is struggling to try to get some book sales and to generate some traction
14:24
14 minutes, 24 secondsand get some traffic and uh people looking at your book, people reading your book, people reviewing your book, this is uh one of the ways that you can
14:32
14 minutes, 32 secondsget there. Um, and uh, so far, so far, I mean, just the simple fact that instead
14:40
14 minutes, 40 secondsof spending six bucks for an author copy book that I’m giving away for free and hoping for the best or spending six bucks for a review that I’ve got a
14:48
14 minutes, 48 secondspretty good chance of getting a good solid review from somebody who can read, think, and understand stuff. Uh, and it, you know, it’s not just, yeah, I love
14:57
14 minutes, 57 secondsthe book. And, you know, one quick liner, you know, I mean, some of these reviews are really in depth. Um, and uh, that’s that’s just worth every dime so
15:06
15 minutes, 6 secondsfar. Um, and I’m going to try there are other there’s several other of these platforms that tag into that arc or that
15:14
15 minutes, 14 secondsadvanced reader copy architecture. Uh, and I’m going to try them as well. Um, and uh, see how they work. But so far,
15:23
15 minutes, 23 secondsscribby thumbs up works. Um, and you’ve got to do all of these things at once
15:30
15 minutes, 30 secondswith the reviews and the categories and the keywords and the advertising and the social media and podcasts and and
15:38
15 minutes, 38 secondsspeaking engagements and all of that other stuff that you’ve got to do. Um, that’s just book promotion, okay? Um, but if you don’t do it, your book will be in the basement. Nobody will read it.
15:50
15 minutes, 50 secondsyou could have the best book ever written in the history of human humankind and uh it will be completely
15:56
15 minutes, 56 secondsunknown. So, um take the time, figure it out and uh I hope this helps. Um please
16:05
16 minutes, 5 secondsof course like, follow, share because that’s social media. That’s what you got to say. Um if you follow uh the the the channel
16:13
16 minutes, 13 secondsthen of course you’ll see updates. So this is going to be Scrivy. up here somewhere it’ll say scribby and then you know part one, part two, part three,
16:21
16 minutes, 21 secondswhatever. I’ll figure out how to do the captions. Um and uh yeah, that’s that.
16:28
16 minutes, 28 secondsHope this helps and uh have a fantastic day. All right, bye.