Thalia @ Pictures in the Words

(copied directly from my tumblr--figured it was worth it to post it here as well)

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In light of the new announcement on Goodreads saying that any and all reviews, shelves, lists, or anything about an author’s poor behavior will be deleted without prior warning or time for the user to save their data, I’ve decided it’s high time I made a post about how I feel regarding author/reviewer politics. I created the Badly Behaving Authors list on Goodreads sometime last year, and ended up on the “bully reviewer” list on The Site That Shall Not Be Named because of it—even though I never shelve or review on author behavior. I am, however, outspoken against authors who behave like jerks towards people who didn’t like their book, and especially against those authors who have outed the personal information of reviewers—people who are my friends.

When I first started reviewing, I just wanted to read books. The girl I met in line at the Cassandra Clare book signing inspired me to give it a try, and while her stories of getting books for free from publishers made my eyes glaze over in joy, that’s not something I ever expected to happen to me. And I definitely didn’t expect to make a career choice based on reviewing, nor did I expect my life to literally change by starting this blog. I think I cried the first time an author asked me to review their book. And when I got my first ARC request approved from a publisher, I also cried. Now, I get author/publisher requests on a regular basis and sometimes I’ll come home to random things in my mailbox that I didn’t ask for—and all those books that I’ve reviewed *for* people have been good and bad. I’ve requested ARCs from publishers that I didn’t end up liking. I’ve given one-star reviews to things I’ve gotten from NetGalley. I’ve given a one star to a book that the author asked me to review, even though he was a really nice guy and his book just didn’t happen to be aimed at my age group. Mine was the only critical review he’d had so far, and I felt awful about it, but I couldn’t lie about how I felt (even though I heavily recommended the book to a different age group).

I’m made it clear from day one that honesty is my first priority when writing reviews. It has never occurred to me to lie to make an author feel better—that’s not fair to my readers, and it’s not fair to me to lie about my opinion. It is, after all, just an opinion. And two and a half years ago, when I decided to write reviews, I never imagined how far some authors would go to silence readers who simply didn’t like their books.

The Site That Shall Not Be Named publishes the private information of reviewers they deem “bullies” for posting honest reviews. You guys here see my nicest side, but when I’m writing GoodReads status updates, I allow myself to be as snarky as I want if I don’t like a book. Rarely am I as harsh in my formal reviews as I am in those status updates. But not all reviewers operate that way—and they don’t have to. You know what a review is? An opinion. An opinion about a book. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t mean that much. And a single one-star review won’t kill your book or stop your sales cold. Acting like a jerk and attacking a reviewer who didn’t like your book, however, definitely might.

I’ve been lucky so far—rarely have I had an author get on my case for not liking their book. But I’ve seen it happen to my friends time and time again, and I find shelves like “bba” or “will-not-read-due-to-author” extremely helpful. I may not shelve BBAs myself, but I voted for them on my list so I would remember which ones to avoid and why I voted for them. Recently, however, an author did contact me asking me not to read their book (after requesting an honest review from me) when I first began to show signs of not loving every detail. And when I finished and posted the review, the author became increasingly hostile via PM and I chose to block the author to avoid more conflict, after being nothing but polite. In the original message asking me to stop reading if I thought I wouldn’t like it, the author made it very clear that they thought I was obligated to give the book a high rating because they had given me a copy for free.

Many bloggers before me have written about author/reviewer drama or their thoughts or whatever. And honestly, I’m just throwing my opinion to the masses, but it’s scary to think of how many people out there simply aren’t aware of poor author behavior. There’s a certain *very* famous author who treats her critics *very* poorly and will post negative reviews on her Facebook page with the subtle hint that her fans should go attack. TSTSNBN is a critical example of how butthurt authors can be over negative reviews, because they post private information and cyberstalk reviewers. And recently, one specific author in that gang has declared his intentions to start a site where authors can place “bounties” on reviewers and pay hackers to dig up that reviewer’s personal information and “out” them. “Destroy the trolls” is his motto and he refers to himself as the “Dexter of trolls”. 

So here’s where I stand.

I am a private reviewer. I do not get paid to write reviews. If I did, I wouldn’t do it because I know my readers couldn’t trust me anymore. And if my readers can’t trust me, what’s the point at all? I’m just a girl, sixteen when I started, who decided to talk about how she felt about books online. That’s it. Sometimes I get free books and I still post my honest review—and I declare in all my reviews if I got a complimentary copy so the reader can determine if I’m being genuine or if they think my opinion was bought. (Although, if it makes a difference, I do promise that my opinion has never been bought.)

Therefore, there’s really one thing to say.

I do not owe anyone a positive review for any reason. Since the author previously mentioned contacted me, I’ve amended my review policy to say that you cannot back out of review requests once I’ve accepted and have begun reading the book, and now I’ve also specifically said that you are not guaranteed a positive review because I’ve accepted a review request. 

In fact, no reader owes any author a positive review for any reason. Books are, at their core, products. I am a consumer who spends her money on what she wants to. If I spend my money on something that I end up hating, I have a right to say why I hated it. And you certainly don’t see makeup artists throwing hissy fits and attempting to out the personal information of the user on IMDB who said the aliens looked unrealistic.

Books are not your babies. A book is not, in any world, comparable to a human being. I write. I have eight different novels I’ve been working on for several years, and I know how hard it is to write. I know that your characters start to feel like family, and yeah, it hurts when someone doesn’t like them. I sent the first couple chapters of a book I was working on to a friend who told me she hated my main character because she was a total Mary Sue. And you know what? It friggin’ hurt. I was upset. But I bucked up, realized she was right, and fixed my character to be a little more likable. Yeah, it sucks. But when you decide to publish your book, it stops being yours and yours alone. You put it in the hands of the readers. You cannot defend anything once someone has read your book, because you were supposed to accomplish that in the writing. And saying that seeing a negative review is like watching your baby get punched in the face is wrong and downright insulting. 

Negative reviews and negative shelves are not attacks on authors.Recently, Lauren Howard (now known as Lauren Pippa) claimed that a user on Goodreads put her book on shelves titled “author should be raped” and “author should be sodomized”. She threw her claims around and a mob stormed online to post glowing fake five-star reviews because the author had been “bullied”. What nobody cared to notice is that the shelves were actually called “aggressive male affection in prison” and “sodomy by lawn sculpture”—both of which, when confronted, the user said referred to inside jokes and none of which referred to the author, but to how painful reading the book was. And the user also got rid of the shelves when they realized they were being interpreted as threats. And nobody also bothered to notice when Lauren Howard admitted that the rape and sodomy threats never happened and blamed the whole thing on a bad bout of PMS. 

Negative shelves ARE NOT personal attacks. They are comments on the book, comments on how you, as a businessman, choose to conduct yourself by the way you act online. All of that is relevant information to a consumer looking to purchase a book. I don’t want to support an author who has posted the private information of reviewers or creates sockpuppets to comment viciously on reviews. That is relevant information to me, as a consumer. And your book is a product. It should be treated as such and you should realize that your behavior will reflect on your product.

If I don’t like your book, that is not a personal attack. I read a book by a lady I know, and well…I kind of hated it. I didn’t like the writing style, I didn’t like the main character, and I thought the plot was a huge cliche. And yet, she’s still one of the loveliest people I’ve ever met, and I still like her just as much as I did before. Just because one of my friends tries out for the talent show with a vocal performance and I don’t think they can sing doesn’t mean they aren’t my friend anymore. If I’m talking about your book and why I didn’t like it, you’re going to need to deal with it. I’m not talking about you—I’m talking about what you’ve chosen to do to make money. If I write a post about why I don’t think Taylor Swift can sing and her lyrics are cliche and manufactured, that doesn’t give Taylor Swift the right to attack me and harass me—and it also doesn’t mean that I don’t think Taylor Swift is a perfectly lovely person. (For the record, I do like some of Taylor Swift’s music, and this is just an example—considering that I do hate country music, hahah.)

The fact of the matter is that reviews are for readers! They’re not for authors. If you can read a negative review of your book and try to write better from the things mentioned in it, good for you! If you hate when someone says anything bad about your writing, then step away from the computer. Don’t read the negative reviews! How hard is that? A two-star rating (with no review) certainly won’t destroy your career, but claiming a user threatened you with rape and wished death on you when none of that actually happened is a sure-fire way to get yourself on a lot of DNR lists. (Mine included.)

I don’t review for authors. I review for myself and for my readers. Not for the author. Reviews in general aren’t for authors at all. We don’t have to be nice. We don’t have to sugar coat what we have to say. And honestly, telling my best friend during lunch why the book I’m reading sucks isn’t that different from typing out why it sucked and posting it on my blog. The only difference is that I’m reaching more people—but honestly, how many of you go to the bookstore and think to yourself, “Hmm, Thalia said this was bad last week—it looks interesting, but I guess I’ll put it back,”? I mean, I know you guys love me, but really. (;

Several months ago, I received an anonymous message that said I was too harsh in my reviews and that I should learn to like books and not see the bad in them so much. They said I acted like it was my job to point out the good and bad in books.

Well…it kind of is my job. I’ve made it my job. I want to be an editor, and you know what? Anyone interested in hiring me will probably look at my reviews to see if I can be objective enough to be a useful editor and not someone who will just go with the flow and tell the author whatever to keep them happy. I was asked to beta read for an author after posting a four-star review of her book—where I was less-than-kind in saying that I thought there were cliches and poorly developed characters. But she wanted my input on her new book exactly for that reason—and when beta reading, I didn’t sugar coat anything then either. I told her what I liked and didn’t like, and she edited as she saw fit. 

Long story short = reviewers don’t owe authors anything, shelves and reviews are not personal attacks, and books aren’t your babies. If you can’t take the heat, please, get out of the kitchen. 

So, let’s talk about Goodreads, hm?

As I said, Goodreads has changed their policy to a zero toleration of anything regarding author behavior. Goodreads has always had a policy to hide reviews that are predominantly about author behavior, which I think is fine. Readers would often not write a review and write in the comment section about why the book is shelved a certain way. No rating, no review. And that has been fine in the past.

In fact, Goodreads had a very reader-friendly stance. They’ve made it clear time and time again that GR is a place for readers first and authors second (if at all). Users could review and shelve any way they wanted, as long as reviews were predominantly about the book. GR has defended readers time and time again. They never gave in to the crazy authors (mostly self-published who felt entitled to positive reviews). 

Until now.

The changes happened kind of slowly. After Lauren Howard’s claims, and TSTSNBN spreading the rumor that GR is a secret prostitution ring, GR started playing on the defensive. A new feature was added that users could ask staff members to freeze comments on certain reviews if they were being attacked. And shortly thereafter, GR froze comments on the Badly Behaving Author list (that I created). I was incredibly surprised, for various reasons—GR never contacted me, as the list creator, to tell me comments had been frozen, and I also never requested such a thing. In addition, there had been few comments on the list as of late, and in the past, inflammatory comments and comments clearly outside of the TOS were reported and removed. 

I emailed GR—three times. I asked, very politely, why the list had been frozen, because I didn’t see anything against TOS. GR has defended this very list in the past, so I was extremely unsettled. After a week with no response, I tried again. And after a month, I tried one more time. That was yesterday—and today, GR announced their new no-tolerance policy and the list was gone. 

Now, GR claimed that they would delete all shelves/reviews/lists about author behavior. However, shelves like “cool authors”, “supportive authors” and lists like “Awesome Authors” have stuck around while simple shelves like, “due to author” have been deleted without so much as a how-do-you-do. GR never did get back to me about why comments on the BBA list were frozen and I’m kind of outraged that they blatantly ignored my emails and couldn’t even come up with a good enough reason to give my reasonable question for their unreasonable actions. And when they claimed that the author guidelines had also been changed, they still just say, “if you comment negatively on a review and it’s flagged, we’ll review your account” while reviewers, who make up GR’s lifeblood, are getting slapped in the face with emails that say, “These things have been deleted and if you continue to post things like this outside of the new policy, your account will come under review and may be deleted.” When the users were only doing something that was A-okay yesterday, and suddenly not this morning.

GR has not even allowed these users a chance to back up their reviews, the reviews they worked hard on and the shelves they spent years creating. And after many of the same users receiving the “Congratulations! You’re in the top 1% of reviewers on Goodreads! THANK YOU SO MUCH!” email are now getting their work and information taken away without a single warning, well…it’s kind of a slap in the face. And a punch in the gut. And also a little like getting hit with a baseball bat in the throat.

And as GR has been prone to do lately, they have posted this announcement on a Friday afternoon, full well knowing there would be outrage and then running away for the weekend—refusing to deal with the anger and outrage that they have created. No staff member has posted in the twenty pages of comments, and the best we got was an update added to Kara’s original post—made five-ish hours ago now. And nothing she said eased any of the concern of GR members. Basically, it said, “We’re not deleting book reviews—just stuff about authors!” Nice try, though.

So here’s what’s going on, for anyone who might not see why this is an extremely big problem.

A user reads a book and doesn’t like it. They post a one star review. That user is contacted outside of GR, threatened on other blogs, and harassed continuously. The user puts the author on a BBA shelf to warn other readers of this author’s horrendous behavior. That shelf is deleted by GR, along with the review if it mentions anything about the author—all while not contacting the user to let them know. The user is silenced. The author wins and can continue to intimidate and harass users.

It’s censorship. Plain and simple.

Sure, GR can change their TOS whenever they want. But it’s downright wrong to delete user data without even giving the user a chance to back it up, and it’s bad customer service to run away for the weekend, full well knowing that you’re going to seriously piss off the vast majority of all your active users. And you wouldn’t even know about this little announcement if you aren’t in the GoodReads Feedback group. And instead of fixing bugs, like the fact that comments in private groups are posting to your public feed if you use the Apple app, or there’s no edit button in the app, or any of the number of issues GR has right now, they do this.

Why the heck should we stay, when GR is now coddling authors—the authors who have insulted them and have harassed reviewers?

The fact of the matter is, the ONLY people happy about this are the people on TSTSNBN—the very people GR staff deleted for harassing and attacking users, for violating the TOS and stalking reviewers. They’re thrilled and count this as a victory, and meanwhile, the users who have been loyal and active to GR for years are getting slapped in the face and they’re angry and they’re betrayed. And I’m not sure how GR can see that as a good thing.

Honestly, I don’t see a reason to stay on GR if they’re going to treat their reviewers, the people who make their site popular, who add to their data, most of the people who add book data to the site and do all their “mundane” work for them—if they’re going to let the people who have attacked them and claimed they love trolls and bullies and have spread lies about them win and determine the site policies? Why should I stay? Why should anyone who cares about the rights of a reader to read or not read a book for whatever reason they choose? That’s why I’ve created a backup account on BookLikes. It would suck to leave GR—I love it there and I have families there. One family is personal, and we almost never talk about books. But the other is a family of reviewers, and they’re friends who I love and care about. And they’re being opened up to all kinds of harassment and threatening things and now none of us can do a single thing on this site to fight against that. Why should I stay with a site that lets my family be attacked?

That might seem dramatic to some people, but that’s how I feel. Many of the people posting, who have gotten data removed, are in that 1% (I, myself, was in that percentage) of reviewers that GR was just graciously thanking for all they do—and many of them are leaving for sites such as LibraryThing and BookLikes. I’m in the process of importing all my data and reviews from Goodreads. Maybe I’ll still post in a couple groups on GR, but what’s the point in cataloging anything if I can’t do it in a way that’s helpful to me? There isn’t. And that’s why, if GR doesn’t reverse this policy and realize that they’re making a huge mistake, I will follow my friends and the people whose reviews I follow to BookLikes and leave GR behind.

I’m not willing to be part of a site that censors readers to make thin-skinned authors happy and is now in the business of selling books—not making their users happy. Many people left the Amazon forums for this reason, and that’s why they’re leaving GR now. And I completely support them.