I Have A Secret, Unlisted, By-Invitation-Only GR Community Where I Post My Reviews And Here's Why
It seems we've reached critical mass with the harassment of reviewers. It's funny because all this is happening just as I was thinking to myself that I *might* want to go back to reviewing publicly again.
The most frustrating thing for reviewers in this situation is the fact that often the accusations that are used to justify this abuse are taken at face value. When an author claims he or she is being bullied no one asks if there's any proof of the bullying beyond the intangible connections made up in the author's head.
It was my own personal experience with this fact that led to me moving my reviews off of my public activity on GR:
A couple of years ago, an author took issue with a 3-star review I posted, linked to the review on her private fan community and told her devoted fans that I was grudge reviewing popular M/M authors in order to promote myself. I am still shocked at how many people took this accusation at face value even when it was pointed out that at the time I was not an M/M author (later this would change, obviously) and therefore had nothing to promote. I sat there watching this controversy unfold, thinking to myself that if every grudge against me was taken out with 3-star reviews I would be a happy camper indeed. It was a ridiculous situation. Made doubly ridiculous by the backtracking that followed once some of the author's own fans called bullshit on the issue.
Then the problem became that as an author I had no right to review books. So it's especially funny to me that now we have authors claiming that readers have no right to review books either. Authors have a conflict of interest. Readers lack the necessary learning and experience to form an opinion. No one should review a book ever!
If the fact that mainstream media is actually giving legitimacy to this nonsense makes you want to tear out your hair in frustration, take heart. Truth is, passionate readers have been wading through this muck for years whereas the mainstream community is only getting their first tastes. In time they will see this for the whiny bullshit it is.
Anyway, even though I felt that keeping authors (even M/M authors) from reviewing M/M was basically saying M/M is a second class genre not for serious writers (after all who do you think does the book reviews in the New York Times? Elves?) I did agree that on Goodreads it is not immediately obvious when looking at a review whether the reviewer has an author account and that, yes, for some people this information might affect the weight they give the commentary. That made sense to me, so I agreed to post a disclaimer on all my future reviews disclosing my author status and linking back to a longer post explaining the controversy.
For the most part I thought the issue was resolved. That is until a second author took issue with a 5-star review (!!!) I posted.
Yes, that's right. You read that correctly. Even when you post glowing praise, if your glowing praise is not glowing enough the author you are reviewing will find a way to call you a bully.
The context of this situation was slightly different. It started with a 3-star review and a polite DNF. I was trying to do a buddy read of a mega-popular M/M epic with a good friend of mine here on Goodreads and I couldn't get through the book. It bored me. To tears. This was especially surprising since at that time the author in question was one of my favorites. But, what the hell. It happens, right?
I did not write a review of this book, but I did post a quick note explaining that I had DNFed it for the time being, where I had stopped and then some thoughts on why it just didn't seem to be working for me.
Later I read another popular work from the same author and felt a resounding "meh~" rise from my core. So I 3-starred it and posted a review outlining what I liked and didn't liked about the book.
Seems simple right?
However, much like Blythe Harris, I posted status updates while I was reading and it was obvious that the author was following along. As updates went from positive, to gradually more "LOL WTF?", the author started just popping into random threads to engage me. This wasn't trolling per se ... honestly I don't know what to call it. I don't know what he was thinking. At first he seemed to be capable of laughing at himself and not taking himself too seriously. I thought how nice that was. But slowly it started to shift. He would reply to comments I made all around Goodreads just to nitpick something I had said and then LEAVE. No other remarks, no other contributions to the discussion. It didn't matter what was being discussed the author was always there to point out some tiny way in which I was wrong.
Eventually I got sick of this and asked him to stop, which he did. I thought the drama was over until I plunked down my hard earned money for another one of his books and discovered that I loved it. I really really loved it. It is still one of my favorites to this day. So I wrote a glowing review about all the ways this book was awesome. I called it awesome! All caps were used.
However I also mentioned the two super popular books that I thought were bad. I did this because I thought it would give people reading the review the proper context with which to weight my praise. Yes, I loved this book but I hated these books that maybe you loved. So maybe that makes this book that much better or maybe that makes my taste questionable. It seemed to me to be a fair comment to include.
Shortly after I published that review the author in question started complaining loudly on Twitter and Goodreads about a mysterious reviewer who had posted a 5-star review that read like a 1-star review and whom he wished he could pay to stop reading his books. The only reason why I know about this is that AGAIN everyone took the author at his word and assumed there was malicious intent without any proof of malicious intent. The author's status update started showing up in my news feed two or three times in a row as all my friends liked it and coos of support and devotion poured in.
In retrospect I suppose I could have just ignored it. The author hadn't named me. The review hadn't been linked to specifically. There was little or no trolling risk. But-- putting aside the fact that I was hurt and frustrated because I really truly loved the book-- on some level I thought that if I didn't say something the situation would escalate. After all when the author first jumped in to correct me I thought it was great fun. I tried to make him feel welcome while still maintaining my right to speak my mind. We laughed about it. I thought "how nice he doesn't take himself so seriously." I told him he should do things like that more often.
Then he did do them more often and they became progressively more obnoxious and antagonistic.
I felt like saying nothing here would only encourage later, more blatant harassment. When you let people get away with shit they tend to try to get away with more shit later on.
So I pointed out that the updates on Twitter and GR were clearly about my review and told him to go fuck himself.
Then I created a private community on GR, invited all my friends and stopped posting reviews publicly.
I never announced that's what I had done. This is the first time I have admitted to the existence of the unlisted by invitation only community. I thought about announcing it, but I was too concerned that it would be misconstrued as a place where me and my minions talk shit and conspire against others. After all, the burden of proof is obviously on the reviewer to disprove conspiracy theories rather than the outraged author. When an author says "I'm being harassed" no one asks for documentation of the harassment-- screencaps of tweets, emails, links, links to archive.org ... we have procedures for this on the internet, for some reason we just give those with a platform a pass. I suppose we assume that because they have a platform in the first place someone must have vetted their claims. Someone must have fact checked.
Yet when you're in the moment it is easy to ascribe the worst motives to something that hurts you. It's easy to link events together and convince yourself of cause and effect where there is none. It does not surprise me that Kathleen Hale saw a string of negative reviews about the same time from a connected group of people and jumped to the conclusion that this was a pattern of harassment with a clear ring leader rather than the shockingly banal reality that people tend to be friendly with other people who share similar tastes and opinions.
But Kathleen Hale became Kathleen Hale because there was no expectation that she should document this supposed "harassment" and present it along side her "quirky" narrative. To this day there are STILL people on GR who think that I grudge review other M/M authors for my own benefit, even when there are mountains of evidence debunking it. Even when the moderators of the community where the accusation was first thrown overruled the author and publicly cleared my name. I still from time to time come across a comment like "the bitch trolls great authors."
I chose to stop reviewing publicly, because at the end of the day the real reason why I review books is because I enjoy talking about them with my friends. I can get that experience without worrying about who's holding the leash on these hyper-sensitive self-important egomaniacal nut jobs. So why bother?
By the way, I am told that the two authors in this post have since gone on to become great friends. Chew on that for a minute.
The most frustrating thing for reviewers in this situation is the fact that often the accusations that are used to justify this abuse are taken at face value. When an author claims he or she is being bullied no one asks if there's any proof of the bullying beyond the intangible connections made up in the author's head.
It was my own personal experience with this fact that led to me moving my reviews off of my public activity on GR:
A couple of years ago, an author took issue with a 3-star review I posted, linked to the review on her private fan community and told her devoted fans that I was grudge reviewing popular M/M authors in order to promote myself. I am still shocked at how many people took this accusation at face value even when it was pointed out that at the time I was not an M/M author (later this would change, obviously) and therefore had nothing to promote. I sat there watching this controversy unfold, thinking to myself that if every grudge against me was taken out with 3-star reviews I would be a happy camper indeed. It was a ridiculous situation. Made doubly ridiculous by the backtracking that followed once some of the author's own fans called bullshit on the issue.
Then the problem became that as an author I had no right to review books. So it's especially funny to me that now we have authors claiming that readers have no right to review books either. Authors have a conflict of interest. Readers lack the necessary learning and experience to form an opinion. No one should review a book ever!
If the fact that mainstream media is actually giving legitimacy to this nonsense makes you want to tear out your hair in frustration, take heart. Truth is, passionate readers have been wading through this muck for years whereas the mainstream community is only getting their first tastes. In time they will see this for the whiny bullshit it is.
Anyway, even though I felt that keeping authors (even M/M authors) from reviewing M/M was basically saying M/M is a second class genre not for serious writers (after all who do you think does the book reviews in the New York Times? Elves?) I did agree that on Goodreads it is not immediately obvious when looking at a review whether the reviewer has an author account and that, yes, for some people this information might affect the weight they give the commentary. That made sense to me, so I agreed to post a disclaimer on all my future reviews disclosing my author status and linking back to a longer post explaining the controversy.
For the most part I thought the issue was resolved. That is until a second author took issue with a 5-star review (!!!) I posted.
Yes, that's right. You read that correctly. Even when you post glowing praise, if your glowing praise is not glowing enough the author you are reviewing will find a way to call you a bully.
The context of this situation was slightly different. It started with a 3-star review and a polite DNF. I was trying to do a buddy read of a mega-popular M/M epic with a good friend of mine here on Goodreads and I couldn't get through the book. It bored me. To tears. This was especially surprising since at that time the author in question was one of my favorites. But, what the hell. It happens, right?
I did not write a review of this book, but I did post a quick note explaining that I had DNFed it for the time being, where I had stopped and then some thoughts on why it just didn't seem to be working for me.
Later I read another popular work from the same author and felt a resounding "meh~" rise from my core. So I 3-starred it and posted a review outlining what I liked and didn't liked about the book.
Seems simple right?
However, much like Blythe Harris, I posted status updates while I was reading and it was obvious that the author was following along. As updates went from positive, to gradually more "LOL WTF?", the author started just popping into random threads to engage me. This wasn't trolling per se ... honestly I don't know what to call it. I don't know what he was thinking. At first he seemed to be capable of laughing at himself and not taking himself too seriously. I thought how nice that was. But slowly it started to shift. He would reply to comments I made all around Goodreads just to nitpick something I had said and then LEAVE. No other remarks, no other contributions to the discussion. It didn't matter what was being discussed the author was always there to point out some tiny way in which I was wrong.
Eventually I got sick of this and asked him to stop, which he did. I thought the drama was over until I plunked down my hard earned money for another one of his books and discovered that I loved it. I really really loved it. It is still one of my favorites to this day. So I wrote a glowing review about all the ways this book was awesome. I called it awesome! All caps were used.
However I also mentioned the two super popular books that I thought were bad. I did this because I thought it would give people reading the review the proper context with which to weight my praise. Yes, I loved this book but I hated these books that maybe you loved. So maybe that makes this book that much better or maybe that makes my taste questionable. It seemed to me to be a fair comment to include.
Shortly after I published that review the author in question started complaining loudly on Twitter and Goodreads about a mysterious reviewer who had posted a 5-star review that read like a 1-star review and whom he wished he could pay to stop reading his books. The only reason why I know about this is that AGAIN everyone took the author at his word and assumed there was malicious intent without any proof of malicious intent. The author's status update started showing up in my news feed two or three times in a row as all my friends liked it and coos of support and devotion poured in.
In retrospect I suppose I could have just ignored it. The author hadn't named me. The review hadn't been linked to specifically. There was little or no trolling risk. But-- putting aside the fact that I was hurt and frustrated because I really truly loved the book-- on some level I thought that if I didn't say something the situation would escalate. After all when the author first jumped in to correct me I thought it was great fun. I tried to make him feel welcome while still maintaining my right to speak my mind. We laughed about it. I thought "how nice he doesn't take himself so seriously." I told him he should do things like that more often.
Then he did do them more often and they became progressively more obnoxious and antagonistic.
I felt like saying nothing here would only encourage later, more blatant harassment. When you let people get away with shit they tend to try to get away with more shit later on.
So I pointed out that the updates on Twitter and GR were clearly about my review and told him to go fuck himself.
Then I created a private community on GR, invited all my friends and stopped posting reviews publicly.
I never announced that's what I had done. This is the first time I have admitted to the existence of the unlisted by invitation only community. I thought about announcing it, but I was too concerned that it would be misconstrued as a place where me and my minions talk shit and conspire against others. After all, the burden of proof is obviously on the reviewer to disprove conspiracy theories rather than the outraged author. When an author says "I'm being harassed" no one asks for documentation of the harassment-- screencaps of tweets, emails, links, links to archive.org ... we have procedures for this on the internet, for some reason we just give those with a platform a pass. I suppose we assume that because they have a platform in the first place someone must have vetted their claims. Someone must have fact checked.
Yet when you're in the moment it is easy to ascribe the worst motives to something that hurts you. It's easy to link events together and convince yourself of cause and effect where there is none. It does not surprise me that Kathleen Hale saw a string of negative reviews about the same time from a connected group of people and jumped to the conclusion that this was a pattern of harassment with a clear ring leader rather than the shockingly banal reality that people tend to be friendly with other people who share similar tastes and opinions.
But Kathleen Hale became Kathleen Hale because there was no expectation that she should document this supposed "harassment" and present it along side her "quirky" narrative. To this day there are STILL people on GR who think that I grudge review other M/M authors for my own benefit, even when there are mountains of evidence debunking it. Even when the moderators of the community where the accusation was first thrown overruled the author and publicly cleared my name. I still from time to time come across a comment like "the bitch trolls great authors."
I chose to stop reviewing publicly, because at the end of the day the real reason why I review books is because I enjoy talking about them with my friends. I can get that experience without worrying about who's holding the leash on these hyper-sensitive self-important egomaniacal nut jobs. So why bother?
By the way, I am told that the two authors in this post have since gone on to become great friends. Chew on that for a minute.
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Because they think they're the Guardians of Culture and Civilization and thus entitled to a living for the good of all humanity. I watched 5 o'clock world news last week, and in one of their news they reported the public battle between Hachette and Amazon. One of the authors interviewed was on Hachette's side and he said "Amazon is really treating books as if they're toasters or wide screen television sets. But they're not." (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/authors-t...)
Isa wrote: "I'm beginning to feel that the main problem is that authors have forgotten that their books are being sold as opposed to just distributed by fairies riding magical unicorns."I probably do more than my fair share of complaining about shoddy editing and the like, but even before this latest crop of WTFery, I was starting to mull over the fact that whenever somebody mentions, for whatever reason, returning a book they weren't satisfied with, my knee-jerk reaction has always been "whaaat? you can't return a book! it's just not done! omg somebody pass me the smelling salts..."
Like, as soon as they've got your money, you just have to take your chances that the author and editor and publisher have produced something worth your time and dollars. How does that make sense?
Quite, quite seriously, this is something I am determined to work on. It's not unreasonable to expect something that reads like professionals had a hand in making it. And expecting any less than that does no one any favors.
And I'll keep posting my 1- and 2- and 3-star reviews, too. Luckily, I've only had one author pop in and take issue with something I've written in a review, and she wasn't unreasonable about it and dropped the subject when I didn't back down. Every other interaction with authors here on my reviews has been 100% positive. It sucks that this guy 1) wasn't satisfied with your positive review and 2) had to be told to go fuck himself when any sensible person would know enough to go do so after behaving so badly.
I spent a lot of time debating on whether or not I wanted to comment on this post, and honestly, I'm still not convinced it's a great idea--but fuck it...I've got a lot of feelings on both sides of this issue, because I'm both an author and a reviewer. I think most of my thoughts don't really point to any helpful solutions or answers, but I think them worthwhile enough to share anyway, so just bear with me.
I was really reluctant to get into reviewing at first because I'm one of those people who think opinions are like assholes--just because I've got one doesn't mean anyone wants to see it, because at the end of the day it's just another asshole. I think this is probably something cultivated from my years as a reader who seemed to always have taste that went against the grain and popular trends and consequently ignored most reviews. I feel fortunate that no authors ever started any controversy with me over a review, possibly this is because I didn't link my reviews to my author profile, but I did have a few fellow readers disagree with me. Normally I explained my opinions a bit more in depth and tried to maintain an attitude of agreeing to disagree, but that wasn't good enough for a few commenters, who demanded I validate my opinion in some way.
I found that to be absurd, but it really highlighted a key point about the review community for me. Namely, that everyone takes every review as the gospel fucking truth, instead of remembering what a review is by definition--an opinion. Are those useful to readers? Absolutely. Are those useful to authors? They certainly can be. Are those fact? Not in the slightest. Everyone--author, reader, reviewer--should go into a review remembering what they are and what they're supposed to be about at their core, and I think we'd have a lot less people starting drama.
As an author, I've had some reviews that clearly outlined how little I connected with that particular reader, and there have been a few that made me shake my head in disbelief. There have also been a few that felt like very personal attacks and not relevant to the work, or at least very poor decisions by the reviewer to even purchase my book in the first place. And yes, there are a few reviewers that I wish would stop reading my books. They clearly don't enjoy them or understand why anyone would, so I can't imagine what keeps drawing them in. I don't begrudge them that, they have the right to dislike anything they choose, and I know I couldn't possibly write something that would please every single reader no matter how talented i was or how hard I tried. Those reviews don't upset me, mostly, they just confuse me.
I've never commented about any of those, only commented on positive reviews I've received. Recently, I've decided to stop commenting on reviews entirely because it seems that every comment made is taken poorly, be it positive or negative. This is a personal choice for me, but I can see why others have made a different choice. It's hard to pour so much effort into something you love so much and then see all the blog posts about authors charging too much for their work, price--not quality--being the number one deciding factor for many readers on purchasing a book, how readers now have "buy" and "borrow" lists to denote which authors they're willing to pay for, and many other similar sentiments. As an author I constantly feel like my craft, not just my own personal work, is under attack and so I can see how some authors might take a negative review as a personal slight and not the honest opinion it was meant to be.
Is that cause for bullying? Of course not. There's never a call for bullying on either side. I think some reviewers publish reviews with malicious intent, and I think some authors claim harassment to punish reviewers who say things they don't agree with, and I really just wish everyone would just shut the fuck up and act like a goddamned professional for two seconds.
The explosion of the online publishing community has given people a forum to express themselves like never before and in so many ways people are just using that to prove what douche bags they are most of the time. Back in the day, before online publishing existed, it was so hard to break into the industry that most authors had heard so much negativity about their own work (oftentimes from their own editor or agent) that they developed the sort of thick skin necessary to just ignore negative reviews or treat them as advice on how to improve. Likewise, most reviewers were employed somewhere, a newspaper or magazine, and therefore had to conduct themselves with a modicum of respectability. Now, with the way e-publishing has really fast-tracked the publishing process and made the industry accessible to so many more people, we've got an influx of people who've got a book published, but really aren't tough enough to call themselves authors. Similarly, the fact that anyone can log on to any number of sites and post any damned thing they want about a book means that a lot of people now have a venue to air out all their butt-hurt whining.
Why can't everyone just take a step back and remember that we're all here because we love the books. It's about the books man, there's no room for egos anywhere in it...
That may not be a popular opinion here, but oh well, I'm an exhibitionist at heart--every now and then I just wanna show my asshole to the world. If it gets me fucked, then so be it. ;)
A.E. wrote: "I spent a lot of time debating on whether or not I wanted to comment on this post, and honestly, I'm still not convinced it's a great idea--but fuck it..."I'm glad you did! :D
"Namely, that everyone takes every review as the gospel fucking truth, instead of remembering what a review is by definition--an opinion. Are those useful to readers? Absolutely. Are those useful to authors? They certainly can be. Are those fact? Not in the slightest. Everyone--author, reader, reviewer--should go into a review remembering what they are and what they're supposed to be about at their core, and I think we'd have a lot less people starting drama."
I think it's something of a naturally pessimistic outlook. Negative validation. One one-star review outweighs multiple five-star reviews because we're looking for confirmation of our worst fears.
In my case I think it wasn't so much what I said, but the fact that the reviews themselves became super popular. Reading a negative review is tough, reading a negative review that a whole bunch of your fans think is hilarious and 100% spot on adds a whole 'nother level to it.
"Back in the day, before online publishing existed, it was so hard to break into the industry that most authors had heard so much negativity about their own work (oftentimes from their own editor or agent) that they developed the sort of thick skin necessary to just ignore negative reviews or treat them as advice on how to improve."
I agree completely on this, but I backed off saying it because I was worried it would stir up more shit than the insight was worth. I can think of at least two authors who I reviewed really harshly and then later met them in person and they were super chill and not the slightest bit upset about it (okay I'll spill, it was Damon Suede and Kate McMurray) and I remember being impressed by their professionalism. But then both of those authors are seasoned professionals in the traditional publishing world and I remember thinking that was the difference.
Isa wrote: "T'Lar wrote: "I wish authors would understand that 1) even negative reviews from honest reviewers WILL SELL YOUR BOOKS"I'm beginning to feel that the main problem is that authors have forgotten t..."
Books aren't by fairies riding magical unicorns?
*runs off to bury sorrow in ice cream*
I'm beginning to feel that the main problem is that authors have forgotten that their books are being sold as opposed to just distributed by fairies riding magical unicorns. The way the system is set up makes it so easy to lose sight of that. A check comes once a month with an invoice for number of copies sold, but few authors actually participate in the selling process.
No one would ever suggest that I was obligated to "be nice" if I ordered food from a restaurant and the delivery boy showed up two hours late with an oversalted order. No one would call me a troll for posting a review of that experience on Yelp. No one would say it was bullying if the owner of said restaurant was rude and obnoxious to customers and the customers responded by organizing a boycott ... Why is there such a large group of seemingly intelligent people who think authors should reap the benefits of commerce yet be excluded and protected from its realities?