Archive for March, 2013


Okay!  This is going to crack everyone up.  We were just informed of another troll group called – wait for it – whose mission statement is to:

“Create a positive image for indie writers by not behaving like asshats while also helping non-asshat authors succeed.”

Why is this hysterically funny?  Check out the moderators:

AAIA

If you go to the page and scroll down, you will also see several other well-known bullies from our BBG page.

Now, we’re hoping everyone can see the irony here.  If not, we’ll show what we mean.  Let’s take AAIA’s moderator, , for example.  Angela is a well-known GR bully who led attacks on Sharon Desruisseaux, when Sharon politely tried to reach out to her, and on Eve Thomas, who tried to apologize to Angela and Coaxial for promoting her book.  Not only did Angela and her bully friends attack these authors, they contacted one of the author’s charities deliberately to do damage to this author’s reputation.  In addition, they threatened to write nasty reviews on her books (which many of them did.)

And this indie author, Angela Horn, actually considers herself to be a non-asshat indie author!

It boggles the mind.

Now, if that’s not enough, let’s take indie author .  We came across Elly on the Amazon fora when she met Looney for the first time:

AnnIsNice

And then Looney started to pimp her book to Elly (which is a violation of Amazon TOS, btw):

AnnPimps

For a bit of background, we covered this in our post Sanctimonious Hypocrisy that exposes Looney for being not only an asshat but a hyprocritical one at that.  In the post we show how she breaks her own “code of honour” by exchanging glowing reviews with her author friends.

Now, given this information, this won’t surprise you at all.  Just three days after the online exchange between Looney and Elly,  appeared on Lindira’s book page, written by… *drumroll* none other than Elly herself:

EllyReviewOfLindira

But wait!  That’s not all.  Now, let us draw your attention to  of a book by an author who not only has been continually attacked by Looney (even though this author has said she doesn’t even know her), but who is also one of the several authors whom the bullies have blamed for our blog (screencap is only a partial shot of the review):

EllyReviewOfRC

If you look at , this one is by far the longest and most detailed and yet, , Elly doesn’t even get her facts straight.

So… Elly.  Got an axe to grind?  Holding a grudge against someone just because your buddy hates her?  *shakes head*  Tsk, tsk.  And you really consider yourself a non-asshat indie author?  Really?

So, there you go, folks!  Two major asshats who consider themselves the pious preachers and sanctimonious example-setters of purity and honor of all indie authors in existence.  And remember, they include Coaxial, Ginmar, and Mahala (who threatened commenters with talk of a loaded gun in our post, Psychotic Comments) in their number.

*cough cough*

*choke choke*

We know many of our readers are indies, so we ask you, do you wish to be represented by these people?  What say you?

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Well, I think we got an answer to our question above.  Anonymous-at-the-moment wanted us to share a banner she made to let everyone know what she thinks of these “Anti Asshat Indie Authors”, or actually, one in particular:

true ASSHAT

Amazon Buys Goodreads

This just in.  Amazon is buying Goodreads.  We’ve been reading a couple articles published today about the purchase.  One on NYDailyNews and one on GeekWire.  We also read the Press Release on Amazon.

On GeekWire, it says:

Amazon.com is purchasing the San Francisco book social network Goodreads for an undisclosed price, adding a new chapter in the Seattle retailer’s quest to get closer to its core customers: book lovers.

The Goodreads team will remain in San Francisco where the company was founded seven years ago.

For those who follow Amazon.com history, you may recall that this marks yet another acquisition of a book social network. In 2008, it , and with the purchase of Abebooks, received a stake in LibraryThing, a social network for book lovers that now has more than 1.6 million members. (We have an email into Amazon to see if they still have an ownership stake in LibraryThing).

Here is the message from Otis Chandler:

When Elizabeth and I started Goodreads from my living room seven years ago, we set out to create a better way for people to find and share books they love. It’s been a wild ride seeing how the company has grown and watching as more than 16 million readers from across the globe have joined Goodreads and connected over a passion for books.

Today I’m really happy to announce a new milestone for Goodreads: We are joining the Amazon family. We truly could not think of a more perfect partner for Goodreads as we both share a love of books and an appreciation for the authors who write them. We also both love to invent products and services that touch millions of people.

I’m excited about this for three reasons:

1. With the reach and resources of Amazon, Goodreads can introduce more readers to our vibrant community of book lovers and create an even better experience for our members.
2. Our members have been asking us to bring the Goodreads experience to an e-reader for a long time. Now we’re looking forward to bringing Goodreads to the most popular e-reader in the world, Kindle, and further reinventing what reading can be.
3. Amazon supports us continuing to grow our vision as an independent entity, under the Goodreads brand and with our unique culture.

It’s important to be clear that Goodreads and the awesome team behind it are not going away. Goodreads will continue to be the wonderful community that we all cherish. We plan to continue offering you everything that you love about the site—the ability to track what you read, discover great books, discuss and share them with fellow book lovers, and connect directly with your favorite authors—and your reviews and ratings will remain here on Goodreads. And it’s incredibly important to us that we remain a home for all types of readers, no matter if you read on paper, audio, digitally, from scrolls, or even stone tablets.

For all of you Kindle readers, there’s obviously an extra bonus in this announcement. You’ve asked us for a long time to be able to integrate your Kindle and Goodreads experiences. Making that option a reality is one of our top priorities.

Our team gets out of bed every day motivated by the belief that the right book in the right hands can change the world. Now Goodreads can help make that happen in an even bigger and more meaningful way thanks to joining the Amazon family. (And if you want to be part of this, please check out our  for open positions. We’ve got a lot of hires to make!)

This is an emotional day for me. Goodreads is more than a company to me – it’s something that Elizabeth and I created because we wanted it to exist. Since then it has grown a lot and become a place we love working at, full of incredibly smart and passionate people who also believe in our mission. I feel a little like a college graduate – happy to come to this milestone, nostalgic for the past amazing seven years, and incredibly, incredibly, excited for the future.

Otis

Our team isn’t sure what to think of this just yet.  Being acquired by Amazon could be a good thing, but only time will tell.

Below is a post we published on August 14, 2012, about a GR Bully/Amazon Fora Troll named Anna Karenina.  Dougie Brimson was the first to spot Anna and catch her in a lie.  Since then, we’ve had several people contact us about her and the heartache she has caused them.  One victim (not an author) was even threatened by Anna.  Anna found this person’s PII and threatened to reveal it publicly, which would have caused a great deal of pain to this particular individual.  We talk about this incident in our post: Psychotic Comments.

Given that Anna has caused so much damage to other people, both on GR (as Zahara Cerise) and on Amazon (as Anna Karenina), we’ve had a couple people mention to us that they were thinking of filing a civil suit against her.  The only problem with doing that is that you have to serve someone court papers to file a suit and Anna trolls the internet anonymously.  No one knew who she was or how to locate her.  Until now.

With a little online research and IP tracking, we’ve managed to find her real name and exact location.  So, if someone comes to us and shows us that they have a valid case against her, we will give that person the information so that they can serve her court papers, but until then, we will be keeping this information private.  Contrary to what the bullies say, we do not publish people’s PII.

As for our post below.  We know for a fact that Anna Karenina trolls around under the names Zahara Cerise and Peachbird, but the other “faces” we mention are pure conjecture.  We mention them because we were given evidence by our site visitors that she uses these aliases, but the evidence is not conclusive.  For example, we know that there are similarities between Anna and Amber of BBB and that the two live in the same state, but each are located in different cities, so they might not be the same person.

Edit 3/28/2013: We have just received email confirmation from several sources that Anna is, in fact, Amelia Lucan on Facebook.  And we have this:

AmelieLucan

If you click on “Amelie Lucan” guess where it takes you.  That’s right.  Straight to Anna Karenina’s Musings.  Imagine that.

Another edit: we were just informed that the link to the page “Great Summer Reads” suddenly stopped working.  The page is no longer there.  Hmm… *scratches chin*  Looks like Amelie/Zahara/Anna is trying to do some damage control… again.  No matter, just try this google cache page instead (until she deletes this one, too, that is.)  In any case, we hope you enjoy the post below and come away with a better understanding of one of Amazon’s (and GR’s) nastier bullies.

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Our team has had several bullies under investigation for a while now.  One of them is Anna Karenina of the Amazon Review Mafia.  So you must be wondering: what is the Amazon Review Mafia and what does it have to do with the GR bullies?  Keep reading.

The Amazon Review Mafia was brought to our attention by Dougie Brimson who started the discussion,   During his investigation, he came across a particularly nasty bully named Anna Karenina, who is part of the GR bully group of author abusers (although he didn’t know that at the time).  To illustrate this, we have a clipping of her threat to authors:

AnnasThreat

What Dougie also started to notice was that Anna had several online identities, or what we call “faces” that she used to intimidate, harass, and bully other people – usually people who disagreed with her.  Sound familiar?

AnnaDenies

WeROurselves

AnnasNewThread

When Dougie found out that she was  on GR, he confronted her:

RUZConGR

Then, she conveniently avoided the question:

WhatMakesYouThinkImZC

IAskedASimpleQ

VeryTelling

IAskYouRespond

Then all the sudden, a whole slew of people (who are supposed to be in different times zones) jumped to Anna’s defense.  To derail the topic, Anna began to insult Dougie and call his credibility into question.

YouAreNotCredible

So, does all of this sound familiar?  Whenever the bullies are confronted by someone who disagrees with them, they immediately try to discredit them.  They did it to us and now to Dougie.

So, back to her counter question.  Why did Dougie think she is Zahara Cerise on GR?  Well, maybe because of this:

ImZConGR

Just like Kat, Jane Litte, and Wendy Darling, Anna shows herself to be a very subtle and clever manipulator.  Here she talks about Zahara Cerise as if she’s not her:

ICantReadHerProfile

So she claims she can’t even see Zahara Cerise’ profile and yet we all know she can simply login to GR as Zahara Cerise and see everything that Zahara Cerise sees.

“I can’t even see her profile.”  Uh huh.  Liar!  Liar!  Pants on fire!

But hold onto your hats, STGRB readers, because this gets better.  Just moments after Dougie confronted her about being Zahara Cerise, Anna went back to her original comment to HJ Leonard that she wrote in February and deleted it!  Look at the dates.  It’s the exact same screenshot, only without Anna’s comment:

Deleted

Nice try, Anna.  But you were right about one thing.  You did make the front page of STGRB.  Congratulations!  😀

Now, remember what we said before about the bullies trying to cover their tracks once their dirty laundry is discovered?  Deleting incriminating evidence like she did is one of their specialties.

Not only that, the bullies lie for each other.  Here is a shot of Mayhem (who knows that she is Zahara Cerise) coming to her defense:

MayhemLyingForAnna

So, let’s recap from here.  Dougie notices that Anna has multiple accounts and identities.  He calls her out.  Anna denies it and calls his credibility into question.  Then, she says that everyone who believes him is crazy, including us:

WeAreCrazy

So, who do you believe?

For us, it’s a no-brainer.  Dougie is telling the truth.

In addition to being Zahara Cerise on GR and Anna Karenina on Amazon, we also know that Anna is peachbird76 on Amazon as well:

Peachbird

Gotcha!

Okay, here’s the thing about liars.  Watch them long enough and they will make a mistake.  They’ve told so many lies they have to remember that eventually they slip up and embarrass themselves.  Our advice: best to just be honest.

Currently our team is reporting Anna to Amazon for using multiple accounts to bully and harass people.  If any of our readers would like to join the effort, you are welcome.

So, what are Anna’s other faces?  We have strong evidence that she is also Amber of Buried By Books.

First we have this:

BBBPic

AKMPic

We also know, by reading both blogs: Buried By Books and Anna Karenina’s Musings, that both these identities read “the classics” and are into romance and baking.  Of course, this evidence is really circumstantial.  It doesn’t prove that they are the same person, but it’s enough to make you scratch your chin and go: “Hmm …”

So, now we have Zahara Cerise, Amber of BBB, and peachbird76.  Where are we getting these?  Each week, on Anna’s blog AKM, she features a color.

Here is the one for Cerise:

COTWCerise

Here is the one for Amber:

COTWAmber

And this one for Peach:

COTWPeach

See the pattern?

The last two faces of Anna are Amelie Lucan of Facebook and Cat McKindle of GR.

 displays a giraffe:

GiraffeFB

If you read Anna’s blog, she is obsessed with giraffes.  She has a collection of little giraffe figurines that she posts pics of on her blog.  Also, many of Amelie’s FB friends are known posters on the Amazon fora.  But the most incriminating evidence of all is that when someone sent an FB friend request to Amelie, Anna and her friends began talking about it on the Amazon fora within minutes.  This is per Dougie and we believe him.

As for , well:

CMonGR

Look familiar?

ZConGR

Also, if you look at the mods for the GR group, Badly Behaving Authors, you will recognize a few of them:

BBAMods1

If you look further, you will see that Cat McKindle has five friends, two of those friends are HJ Leonard and Mayhem.

Now, let’s count the faces.  Anna Karenina, one.  Zahara Cerise, two.  Peachbird76, three.  Amber of BBB, four.  Amelia Lucan, five.  Cat McKindle, six.  Wow!  And these are just ones we know of.  There could be many more.

“I am only me.”  Uh.  Yeah.  Right.

Miranda’s Request

We just received this screenshot from a site visitor who wanted to show us a strange PM from Miranda (you’ll know Miranda from our BBG page):

MirandasRequest

There are few things that struck us about this message:

  1. She automatically assumes Punked Punx is a sock.
  2. She admits to being a bully.
  3. She’s putting pressure on Punked to remove an honest, favorable review.
  4. She’s informing Punked that the bullies are attacking the AUTHOR for an honest, favorable review written by someone else.  We know who Punked is and this person is not Aurora.

This kind of behavior – trying to discourage people from writing favorable reviews – is something we’ve heard about before from another site visitor:

DontUnderstand

So, do you all see the double standard here?  The bullies want to be free to bash both book and author as brutally as they want, but at the same time they want to dictate to others how their reviews should be as well.  That is, they want to give other reviewers a hard time for actually liking a book.  They want other people to delete their favorable reviews and waste their precious time reading books they’ll hate so they can rip them apart.  In other words, they want others to be like them.

I don’t know about all of you, but I have one word for this: PATHETIC!

Charlene’s Poem

We received a poem from a site visitor that we wanted to share with everyone.  Enjoy!

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A bully used to be the kid who always picked on the weak ones
He’d get up in our faces, shake his fist & spoil all of our fun.
He would run after us at recess yelling “I am going to catch you!”
We’d run terrified & screaming, never quite knowing what to do.

Always lurking around in the shadows, looking for someone to harm
Pushing us up against our lockers & punching us in the arms.
No! Don’t ever go to the school bathroom; We’d rather hold it all day
If he catches us in there alone, there would be a huge price to pay.

Fast forward to the year 2013 & a bully’s description quickly changes
Bully’s today show no mercy & quite simply, act like they are deranged.
Who in their wildest dreams would have expected this to occur?
Do we allow them to break a young child’s spirit, I say to this, No Sir!

This child that they now torture has by no means had an easy road
He is shy & he is lonely & he’s tired of carrying a big load.
LIFE needs to have all bullies feel the sting of every punch & ugly word
So that they may realize the agony & everything that this poor child has heard.
Maybe then they’d see the pain that they inflicted on an innocent kid
And soon would feel remorse; trying to fix every bad thing that they did.

In today’s world a bully uses deadly weapons instead of words
Even growing bold enough by bringing guns to school; Absurd!
Schools should always be a safe haven where a child can stay unharmed
But instead the only action taken is that the bully is only warned.
Cyber Bullying by computer has now grown into something that is chilling
Name calling has now been upgraded to a vicious unrelenting killing.

Kids who dare to wear their hair dyed, funky clothes & goth-like style
Are the targets of such hatred, & they begin to feel hostile.
Their only answer is to make the bullies pay for what they’ve done
So they shoot an entire school up, this is how a tragedy is begun.

Suicides are at an all time high, kids are tormented until they are crazy
Humiliated & alienated, too many jumbled feelings; it all becomes so hazy.
Finding no way out of their nightmare, they sink into a deeper sadness
Never knowing that help is out there; Yes, there is a way out of this madness!

Scream about it, tell your parents, yell it out so people hear it!
Tell your teacher, tell your counselor, tell your preacher & Holy Spirit!
Grab a neighbor, a policeman, a social worker or someone’s mother
Make the principal HEAR your words, & gain the support of others!
Go to the biggest guy on campus & tell him of your plight
Get a transfer to a nicer school, one with ‘No Tolerance’ for fights!
Do not stop until someone listens & they help you win your battle
Because a bully becomes deflated once his cage is found & rattled!

Written by: Charlene Soileau Bolton

Well, well, well.  The bullies have been very busy this week.  Very busy, indeed.  According to our eyes and ears, there have been four, I repeat, FOUR bully attacks this week.  So, instead of doing four different posts on the four different attacks, we decided just to roll all of them into one.  Much easier.

The first one we heard of was from a site visitor who pointed us in the direction of an attack on – wait for it – a 70-year old author who has a serious heart condition.  Yes, you heard that right.  The bullies went after an elderly woman who is so sick she can’t even be on her computer.  After Athena emailed her to let her know that we were there to help, she sent this in response:

ThankYouAthena

The woman’s husband then contacted Athena to let her know that he had never seen anything like the bullies’ behavior before and was at a loss for words.  Now, you have to understand that this is an elderly couple who have been involved in research and literature their entire lives, which means going back in time about 50 years.  Back then, there was an expectation of civility when responding or rebutting criticism of one’s research.  Back then, there was no internet age, no anonymity, and certainly no internet trolls who bullied and attacked whoever was unfortunate enough to get into their path.  When Athena received his lengthy email explaining their experience in detail, she responded with this:

These people really don’t discriminate when attacking others.  We’ve known them to go after handicapped people, minors (14 and under) and people like your wife, who are elderly with a heart condition.  It’s despicable.  This kind of reviewer bully culture is something that is new to the book community and we can all thank Goodreads for starting it.  It really is something born of the internet.

Thank you for offering to help out.  What we do is report what the bullies do to either Amazon or Goodreads.  Goodreads hasn’t been known to respond well, but Amazon has.  We also report on our blog what the bullies are doing so that readers will know what to watch out for.  This levels the playing field and counteracts the damage these people do to others.

The emotional support from our blog and our team helps as well.  Before, victims believed that they were alone when they were attacked, but now they come to our blog and see that this happens to people all the time and it’s not the victim that’s the problem.  It’s the bullies.

I hope your wife is well.  Good luck with everything!

Athena

So the fact is that these jerks don’t just stop at cursing out underage minors (i.e. Archer and Blythe in Bully Reviews), they go after the elderly, too.  Anyone who calls his or herself an author is fair game to them no matter how young or old, no matter what state of health.  Disgusting, ay?

But wait!  There’s more.  This week we heard of another author who was attacked simply because she requested to have excerpts from her book taken out of a review.  Although book excerpts are protected under DMCA fair use, the author still had a right to make this request and all the reviewer had to do was say no.  But did she leave it at that?  Yeah, right.  And the leader of the attack was…

*drumroll*

You’ll all know Serena from our BBG page.  Here is a snapshot of :

IveHeardBadThings

You see how she says:

“It was free and I’ve heard bad things. I’m so excited!”

Translation:

“It was free and I’ve heard bad things. So I’m excited because this means that I get to read a book I know I’ll hate just so I can bash the hell out it and the author.  This is going to be so much fun!”

Hmm…  *scratches chin*

This reminds me of something.

Now, do you all remember Kat’s “facts” that we listed in our post The World Is What You Make It?  The “facts” she claimed were true when she told all “butthurt authors” everywhere to just “deal with it”?  If not, we’ll show you:

Fact1

Fact1Cont

So, now you can all see what utter bullshit her “facts” are.  As we said before: “Why is it easy to believe that these people are bored haters who like to hate on authors and books for fun?  The answer is simple.  Because it’s true.”

Nuff said.

Now, hold onto your hats, STGRB readers, because there’s still more yet to come.  We’ve saved the best for last.  It has been reported to us (by more than one source) that Angela has been parading around under a sock puppet named ETA:soon:

I take it you’ve all seen this:

Angela, aka ETA:soon, and her brute squad are at it again.

The attack on this particular author was led by ETA and Coaxial.  What was the author’s crime?  She left a comment to inform ETA that her book had been edited.  Here is a shot from ETA’s review:

AuthorLeftComment

And what did they do to the author’s books?  Well, here are few shots of the shelves they left:

Shelves

Shelves1

Shelves2

Shelves3

Shelves4

Shelves5

Shelves6

Shelves8

Shelves8

And all this author did was leave a comment.  That’s it.  This is why we tell people to stay far away from these psychos.  And speaking of psycho, we want to show you this comment that ETA left just to show you how unhinged she is:

SockPuppet

This does sound A LOT like Angela.  (A little ironic that she’s accusing someone else of sock puppetry.)  Not only did she lead an attack on this author, she reported one of the author’s books to Amazon on some trumped up charge and got the author’s book removed!  She also stalked the author’s Facebook page and found other authors who had commented there.  She then led an attack on them as well.

A little cray-cray, wouldn’t you say?

As for Coaxial, well, if you want to see the state of Coaxial’s mental health, just take a look at the pile of gifs on .  However, if you don’t feel like losing any brain cells by clicking to her review, then we’ll show you these shots we took:

Gifs1

Gifs2

Gifs3

Gifs4

Anger management, anyone?

Thank You Messages

Below are messages we published on August 1, 2012, from readers who wanted to express their gratitude for our site.  We continue to get private messages like these everyday.

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“Bless You!  Bless You All!  I want to hug your necks, kiss your faces, bow down at your feet, and toss roses whenever you walk.  I’ve stopped responding on GR because of FEAR, after watching my very good friends go through the absolute misery of being on the receiving end of HATE.  The bully reader mentality has gotten so out of hand; reading the post about the GR bully culture made me want to cry.  You have NO IDEA what an impact you all are making doing this.  PLEASE DON’T STOP!  These are grown women doing these spiteful, hateful acts and they need to be called out and held accountable for their actions.  You have my full support.  Whatever you need.  THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart.”

 

“God bless you for this site. I have been near tears over some of this stuff. Keep up the good work! The Holy Terror, Lucy, Ridley… the whole lot of them are torturers. My Goodreads tags are just vile and hurtful. It’s unbelievable how many of my comments were taken out of context or twisted. It’s been awful. These people are totally crazy. Thank you!!!”

 

“I just wanted to say thank you for the work you are doing. I have not experienced any bullying by readers or other writers but I see it and it really is a sad situation. I feel like a second class citizen as an author sometimes. Your site was linked to on Kindle Boards and that’s how I found it. Just wanted to say that you are doing a good work.”

 

“Just contacting you to say, as an author, I think what you’re doing is wonderful. I’ve not faced bullying on GR, personally, but I know people who have. And I have been the victim of “troll ratings” (when a reader gives you one star before a book is even released in order to bring your rating down from the start, I assume, just for funsies?) Anyway, thank you! You guys are too cool for school.”

 

“I am so glad you have this site up and running. Don’t ever shut it down. It’s one thing for me to have been bullied off GR, but it’s a whole new level as they’ve attacked my personal web accounts. These people need to be stopped.”

 

“Athena, thank you! I will be watching and hoping you and yours can bring them to their knees.”

 

“This is a day to celebrate! I’ve been a victim of Ridley and co’s scathing reviews, their goading, their swearing, their pack mentality. Up until maybe 3 months ago, I had no idea this was going on at GR. After I fell into their well baited trap, I contacted Goodreads to see if there was something we could do without agitating her more. Basically they said she could say and do what she pleased. They admitted that some readers/reviewers could make an author’s life extremely uncomfortable. I won’t be going near GR again. Also, I think I’m right in believing that some of Ridley and co’s reviews and nasty comments to other readers on Amazon were recently taken down. And so the blessed wheel turns!! Thanks SO much again. Behind you 100%.”

 

“I’ve been following this blog for several weeks now and have finally felt compelled to share my thoughts on this whole… Honestly I don’t have any words for it. I’m appalled and am left speechless each time I come across anything to do with GR bullies.”

I’m a book blogger, reviewer, and also a writer. At first I was sceptical about your blog because I don’t see how pointing out and show-casing certain unpleasant reviewers is mature or going to help at all.

However, yes there’s a however, I’ve begun to come around. I’ve always known there were reviewers out there who liked to criticise negatively, but it wasn’t until I read a few of those reviews on GR when I realised how far they can go. Since I’ve read those reviews I have avoided reading all reviews posted. Not only are they not helpful, but they are also extremely rude, offensive, and I don’t understand the need for so much anger and hate. It’s inane and irrational to me to react as they do. If you’ve disliked a book that much and can’t pick up any deeper meanings then just move on. It would be the easier option, I imagine.

What I would like to express to you guys is a thank you. Without your blog I doubt I would have learnt how bad these reviews and their creators are and what reviewers to avoid, not only for their upsetting behaviour, but also because these are the type of people I wish to always avoid. If your blog has had this effect on me, I like to think it has brought awareness to other readers and reviewers.”

 

“Wow, I was shocked to find your website/blog, especially because I’ve encountered some of the nastiness of the GR gang firsthand. Recently one of my friends, a fellow author, was publicly ridiculed by a reader/reviewer, and this reviewer’s friends all joined in and mocked the book in question as well as the author. My friend was so mortified and demoralized that she quit GR altogether. She posted a blog about her decision, which I commented on, lending support. In my comment I advised her not to take to heart the nasty comments and to realize that there are times when it is not the author who is incompetent but rather the reader. My comment was not directed at any one in particular. Well, this posse of haters then came upon the blog and went after me. They began posting general updates on their GR walls warning other readers to avoid my books because I had supposedly said that all readers are incompetent. They went on to say that I would pay a price for speaking my mind. At the time all of this was occurring, I posted a blog on GR about it, but all it managed to accomplish was to draw the attention of this same group of hateful people and they began attacking me there as well. I ended up deleting the entire thread. I find it interesting that others have had these experiences on GR, and that it is so prevalent that a website was created.”

 

“I would just like to say thank for this site. I believe I was one of the first to fall victim to these people. I commented on a bashing session they did on Becca Fitzpatrick. they pounced and pounced big. Holy terror hit me first, then Cory (who I was told by one of their minions is a 14 year old high school student, and who’s parents work all day so she can do as she pleases.) This same minion told me I did nothing wrong, that they were sorry, and told me not to delete, that they would calm down. Well, it was just teamwork. I went to the woman’s profile and she laughed about how much I trusted her, that she got me to stay, and to “have at me”. Holy Terror and this other woman Lethal Lovely then threatened me publicly and in emails (I had given said woman my email to share amazon loanable books, this woman also shared that she hasn’t “bought a book in a year, she gets them from download sites”). But I digress. When I emailed goodreads with all my proof, screencaps, IP addresses, I was told I should leave goodreads. ME! So, I did. I am back now but have them all blocked. I have to be honest and say I am not sure why these women are still around. I’m surprised no one has sued them to be frank. A lot of what they do is slander, which is illegal.”

 

“I think you are doing a wonderful service for authors. I’ve been writing over 20 years, have worked with magazines, newspapers, and a variety of web sites catering to authors and writers. At Goodreads and Amazon, my books usually have bad reviews. I even participated in a Goodreads book give-away, where it is implied you will get a review from the winner, and, no review. That was a year ago. I know a little about writing and, for some reason, as soon as several titles came out, they were hit with a really bad review. One was even just an informal non-fic to help other parents (my son is autistic). The only review for it even now is 1-star that actually states I have factually incorrect information in the book (no, I don’t). Another non-fic on local history got a bad review and the reviewer didn’t even have the right price in their review. I don’t know why, but I know it hurts sales. Recently, on Goodreads, I participated in a discussion about authors and reviewers. Sadly, that got me another 2-star rating. Authors don’t really have any resource for help. Reviewing bloggers may or may not give you a review and professional reviewers commonly charge $400 or $500 for a single review. Thanks again.”

 

“I just wanted to thank you, I have almost stopped going to the site because I hated the drama. I hope they see the point when the admins of GR visit your site.”

More Bully Lies

Just recently we’ve been informed by site visitors of several troll attacks on Amazon.  Athena asked me to let our readers know that we put our team on these privately and helped the authors involved.  We have been reporting the abuse that has been happening on the fora and on book review pages to the Amazon customer care team and luckily they have been responding.  So, that’s good news.  We will not be posting about these attacks in order to protect the authors and their books.  We want to thank those who contacted us to let us know about the attacks.  Well done.

Also just recently, we received this comment on our Who We Are page:

Hi,

I’d love an email contact for yourselves. We often publish bullying related articles and would like to share them with you from time to time. You may find them helpful, inspirational or wish to share these articles with your readers and followers.

Here is an example of a recent article we have just published:

http://www.healthline.com/health-news/children-those-who-exclude-also-get-hurt-030913

Kind Regards,

The Healthline Team

Athena contacted them to share some of our blog posts and our email.  They said that they wish to support our cause and occasionally forward helpful articles on the subject.  So, in the future, we will be working with Healthline, sharing their articles and helping them to combat bullying both online and off.

In other news, coming up in the next few weeks, we will be pubbing a confidential post that will be password protected due to its content.  Readers will have to contact Athena via email () to get access to it.  We understand that this will be a bit of a hassle, but let’s just say that it’s really, REALLY important news and we want to keep it close hold.  For the time being.

Now!  Onto our post, More Bully Lies.  Back in July, we were too busy setting up our blog and reporting on the bullies’ bad behavior that we missed a few misguided articles written by authors who listened to the bullies and drew the wrong conclusions.  One of those articles was written by Terri Guiliano Long.

In this article, the author makes the mistake of assuming that the bullies were telling the truth and that we “out” reviewers by publishing their PII:

Lie1

This rumor is completely false.  We have never published this kind of information EVER.  You will never see a screenshot of us doing this because it never happened.

Now, here is the second lie presented on this article:

Lie2

The person who did this was Lucy.  Remember her?  The one that cyber-stalked an author and threatened to publish her PII.  If you don’t know what we’re talking about here, take a look at our post More Bully Reviews.  The simple fact is that Lucy lied.  No one called her.  And as Andrew Losowsky (HuffPo’s books editor) pointed out, when asked if she had contacted the police or if she had the number of the caller, she came up short.  She didn’t have the number and she didn’t contact the police.  There was also no one who could corroborate her story.  Why?  Because her story wasn’t true.

If you scroll down to the bottom of Terri’s post, she links to another article written by John Scalzi that also addresses our website: Bad Reviews: I Can Handle Them, and So Should You.

Now, we don’t even have to read Scalzi’s article to know that his premise is totally wrong.  Our site is not about fighting against bad reviews.  So, you got that wrong, John.  In a comment Athena posted on The GR Bully Culture in response to Sophie’s comment, she addresses this misconception about our site:

“Yes, not all indie writing is good, but neither is published work either–a fact which conveniently forgotten by those with poison pens. And many indie books have become literary masterpieces (e.g. Thoreau, Virginnia Wolf). So if you are being bullied, you are in good company!”

Beautiful words, Sophie!  I completely agree with you on the bias against indies in the book community as a whole.  It is unfair and I’m really hoping it will change someday.  I’m not an author but I have a lot of friends who are independent authors who suffer from this bias all the time and many of their books are just as good if not better than traditionally published works.

As for bullying, there are so many people who get confused as to what our site is really about.  We are about fighting against bullying.  Not against negative reviews, not against traditional publishing and not against readers/reviewers.  On our Who We Are page we say:

“The bullies are under the impression that any reaction to them is about critical reviews, using the argument that they have a right to express their opinions.  We are not here to fight against critical reviews.  That is not what our campaign is about.  It is about their bullying behaviour towards others which is becoming increasingly disturbing.  We are here to expose that.”

On our What Is A GR Bully page we also say:

“We do not consider honest, critical reviews of books to be bullying.  However, we do consider attacks on authors and other GR members to be bullying.  We also consider attacking an author’s book for revenge and/or rating and reviewing an author’s book without reading it first to be bullying behavior as well.”

What we are doing with our blog is calling attention to GR members who stalk, harass, and libel not just authors, but other readers as well.  These GR bullies are not just readers, either.  Many of them are authors.  And these bullies ARE the root of the problem.  Since we’ve started our blog, we’ve heard from hundreds of people that it has made a big difference.  A BIG difference.  Before our blog, abuse was rampant on GR.  Now, it’s not as bad.  Many of these people have retreated into private groups where people can’t see what they’re doing or saying, which for us is a good thing.  Much of their nonsense has disappeared from public view.  This is what we wanted.

Soon we will be re-publishing many of the old posts we have of bully attacks on authors.  In these posts, we show our readers how these authors were personally attacked and libeled by these GR members.  This is what we consider bullying.  Not negative reviews.  If you want to see what I mean, take a look at these posts:

https://stopthegrbullies.com/category/bully-attacks/

I hope what I’ve said here makes sense.  Let me know if you have any questions.

There is a HUGE difference between a bully review and a negative review (otherwise known as bad reviews, or critical or unfavorable reviews).  A negative review focuses on the book and addresses the issues the reader has with the BOOK.  A bully review usually uses profane language and always focuses on the AUTHOR.  See the difference?  Bully reviews are usually written as personal attacks on the author in order to deliberately cause damage to said author and his/her career.

Unfortunately, these bully reviewers don’t stop with just their reviews in their bullying behavior.  And when we talk about their bullying behavior, this is what we mean: cyber stalking, harassing, libeling, hacking into private accounts, personally attacking, threatening (click both here and here), leaving psychotic comments, contacting their charities, contacting their bosses, or people with which they have interviews or auditions.  The bullies have done all of these things.

So, Terri and John, we don’t mind if you want to publish articles that speak out against our blog and what we do with it.  But if you’re going to do that, we’d appreciate it if you’d get your facts straight.  And the facts are all here on our site.  The real facts.  The truth.  Not what the bullies have told you.  All you have to do is click a couple links on our site and take a look at the evidence for yourselves to see that you were and are completely and embarrassingly wrong about us and what we do.

Now, why have these misconceptions been spread around?  What have the bullies told them about us?  Well, all you have to do is take a look at  and there is a nice little nest of them and their reviews of our site (you’ll recognize a couple):

KarlynP

MineAlready

Nicolas

If anyone would like to go to WOT and set the record straight, feel free.  But it doesn’t really matter.  By this time, everyone knows that these people have been and always will be liars.

Now, what happens on GR, we found, is summed up quite nicely by Jon, a GR member who said:

SportOnGR

Now, which GR policy is Jon referring to here?  This one, that they NEVER enforce:

ContentRules

All of this is from a thread called posted by C.J, another GR member.  If you go to the thread and read it, you’ll see that the bullies did what they do best and jumped in to hijack the thread and tell C.J. what a whiney, little, butthurt, turdbrain he is (I think they used those exact words, too. :))

And to end our post, here’s a nice little form KarlynP (one our most favorite bullies) left for him:

ButthurtReportForm

Juvenile?  Why, yes, indeed it is.  Karlyn must be so proud of herself.

Bully Lies

Below is a post we published on December 16, 2012, when a site visitor named Jen caught the bullies in an outright lie.  It was great.

****************************************************************************************************

Last post we said we had some screenshots of a site visitor, Jen, who caught the bullies in a lie.  In fact, she didn’t just catch them in one lie.  She caught them in several.  How did she do it?  She’s been monitoring some of the biggest offenders for a while (on and off GR ) and found a link to a blog post by J.A. Souders, author of Renegade and a bully sympathizer.  In the post, J.A. claims that STGRB considers honest criticism of a book to be bullying.  Lie #1.  Jen then proceeded to leave a comment pointing out the error.  Of course, when she did, the trolls swarmed in and attacked.  Then, she caught them in more lies.  Another of our site visitors, Goronwy, found the discussion thread and left this comment before we had a chance to blog about it:

I take it you guys have seen this?
http://torforge.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/crying-bully/#comments
Who owns this site and why do so many big-name bullies feel the need to jump in and comment?

The answer to her question is simple.  We’ve been posting the truth about these people ever since we started our blog and they don’t like their dirty laundry being hung out for everyone to see.  So what do they do?  They try to spread lies.  Here are some screenshots of the conversation:

Comment1

Comment2

Comment3

We’ll stop here for a second.  First of all, all three of these bullies were not put on our list because of what they claim.  They were put there because they either attacked an author or tried to spread lies about an author (which is exactly what they are doing here in these comments.)  So these are yet more lies.  Another lie these bullies try to spread is that certain authors are behind our website.  This is false.  We are not authors.  Also, we have never lied on this site.  If we make a mistake, we correct it, but we’ve never lied and in fact, we frequently provide screenshots and links to show people that what we are saying is true.  Jen points that out here:

Comment4

And then they continue to spew the same garbage:

Comment5

A couple points of order (to clear up some of these lies):

1) We’ve always published public information on our site.  That’s not a crime.  When we first started, a couple of our site visitors asked us to take some of the information down, so we did because they requested it.

2) Reading wolf calls the examples we give of bullying on our site “differences of opinion.”  So, you tell us, is libeling an author to ruin his career a difference of opinion (see Zoe Gets Busted)?  Is threatening to publish an author’s personal identifiable information online with malicious intent a difference of opinion (see More Bully Reviews)?  Is misrepresenting an author in a review a difference of opinion (see The Bullying of Simone Elkeles)?  Is chewing out a fourteen-year-old girl and telling her to “fuck off” a difference of opinion (See The BIggest Offenders)?  Is trying to deliberately ruin the career of an author just for fun a difference of opinion (see The Holy Terror)?  These are only a few examples.  There are many, many more.

3) Spy-like tactics?  So, in other words, what she’s saying is that posting public information we read on social networking sites like GR, Facebook, Twitter and then talking about it on our blog is considered spy like tactics.  But when they do it – and they do it all the time – it’s considered just plain blogging and is absolutely normal behavior.  You see the hypocrisy here?  The fact is, as we stated above, they don’t like anyone hanging out their dirty laundry for everyone to see.

Here is more of the conversation, where they try to pimp their pitiful .net site (at least now we know who is behind that site – hint: it’s not just one person, it’s all of them.):

Comment6Comment7Comment8Comment9For the full conversation, click the link above in Goronwy’s comment.  If you do read the full conversation, you will see that Jen’s last comment was deleted.  And replaced with Tor Forge’s comment here, where she closes the conversation:

Comment10

These bullies have stated that: 1) we consider honest criticism of books bullying, 2) we lie, 3) we are authors, 4) we publish people’s PII (see More Bully Reviews for what PII is) and put people in danger, 5) we use spy-like tactics, 6) we don’t know what bullying is, and finally 7) we are obsessed stalkers (did I miss any?)  All of these things are false.  If you want to know who the bullies, liars, and obsessed stalkers are, take a look at our sidebar.

To give you one last example of who the obsessed stalkers are, we’ll tell you about our recent experiment with our firewall.  Now, we’ve stated that the bullies are not allowed to comment on our comment boards.  We do this for obvious reasons.  If we left the commenting open, they would come in and do what they do best – hijack it and turn it into a wankfest.  To understand what we mean by that, just re-read this post, or better yet, just go to the link Goronwy gives and read the whole conversation.

Case in point.

We don’t want to do what Tor Forge had to and shut down every single conversation.  So… the bullies are not allowed here.  Period.  Because of that, they often try “comment in disguise”, that is, pretend to be sympathetic to what we’re saying and then proceed to start a bunch of shit.  I can spot them from a mile away, but the other moderators can’t.  Just recently, Athena had to ban a visitor because of this very thing and she’s gotten so fed up with them doing this that she asked Stitch to set up a firewall.  He did and now he’s (very cleverly) collecting the bullies’ IP addresses and placing them into the firewall.  So instead of being able to access our site, they get an error message.

Now, Stitch and Athena have been keeping an eye on the firewall stats and boy are they revealing!  First of all, the bullies have been hitting the wall hundreds of times a day and yet our site stats show the same amount of visitors, which disproves their theory that our site traffic comes from them.  Secondly, we’ve seen several IPs hit the wall at an alarming rate.  One hit it 40 times in a matter of a few hours and then another hit it 51 times in one hour.

51 times!!!!

Oh.  My.  God!!!!

Now… who are the obsessed stalkers?

Uh huh.  Yeah.  Thought so.

Below is a post we published on August 22, 2012, covering the attack on Emily Giffin.  The first part is referring to Archer’s ridiculous post from the GR Bully Meltdown, Part I.  The very end of this post mentions an incident on Wikipedia involving Dougie Brimson and Minerva of STSTGRBB (did I get that acronym right?)  Anyhow, the bullies started using Wikipedia as a weapon, libeling authors with a Criticism section that said they were bashing reviewers, among other things.  They began with Dougie and then moved on to Emily Giffin.  Luckily, someone called our attention to it and we reported it to Wikipedia who shut the whole thing down immediately.  There will be more coverage of this on future posts.

**************************************************************************************

Well, we’re certainly glad to see the bullies have taken Archer’s advice to “calm the fuck down,” and “go for a walk to pull themselves together.”  Not!

We were planning on doing a dedication post to our site visitors today, but events always seem to outpace us.  So what happened?

Okay, long story short: Emily Giffin writes a book that makes the NYT bestsellers list.  Someone writes a one-star review.  Emily’s husband makes the mistake of leaving a nasty comment on it.  It snowballs and the crowd goes WILD!

Here are some screenshots:

HusbandsNastyComment

HusbandsExchange

Then Emily leaves this on Facebook:

EmilysFBPost

And then she gets blamed for supporting him by Book Goggles:

BookGoggles

And then, the rumor mill goes round:

RumorMill1

 

And round:

RumorMill2

 

And round:

RumorMill3

 

And round:

RumorMill4

Okay, we want to pause here, calm down, and take a slow breath.  First of all, for all those people who know authors, please don’t ever do what Emily’s husband did.  Please just don’t do it.  It only rouses the bullies’ ire and will end badly for your loved one.  This review was a legitimate negative review and writing negative reviews about a BOOK is not bullying.  This review, however, is bullying (we flagged this for abuse):

BullyReview1

Secondly, Book Goggles accusation that Emily is sending people over to Amazon to downvote and comment is baseless.  What we see Emily doing is setting the record straight and letting people know that it wasn’t her.  So, to all of those people attacking Emily, she wasn’t involved, so please stop.

*I say this knowing they’re really going to listen… right*

This whole episode was disturbing for us.  Why?  Because it smacks of something we’ve already seen – the whole Wendy Darling/The Selection fiasco, where Kiera Cass was attacked for something her agent did.  We said it once and we’ll saying it again.  This kind of bullying of authors really needs to stop.

Another thing we found disturbing was this comment on Emily’s Facebook post:

MerarysComment

She says:

“… leveling yourself to the level of Melissa Douthit, Jamie McGuire, and many others who couldn’t take one single criticism of their ‘precious books.’”

She immediately assumes the gossip she has heard about these authors to be true.

Now, Melissa Douthit has been pretty quiet these past couple months, staying out of all the chaos swirling around the book community, which is why we were surprised to see her finally break her silence and step in to set the record straight:

MelissasComment

(Note: Merary removed Melissa’s name from her original comment after Melissa posted this.)

Melissa is another author who was bullied off of GR and has been wrongly accused of many things, not the least of which being blamed for our site (this is a comment left after Melissa’s):

Accusing

So we decided to reach out to her today and get her permission to share some information with you.

Now, why do the bullies hate her so much?  Why are they spreading false information around about her?  Because, like Dougie Brimson, she had the courage to stand up and call them out on their behavior.  In the blog post she mentions above, , she says:

SpreadLoveNotHate

So what did she have to say about the review she read?  In her other post, , she says:

UnacceptableBehavior

And what did the bullies do to her?  Well, first they completely destroyed her book on GR with reviews like these (you may recognize these from our post Bully Reviews):

HypocriticalStalkingBitch

BiggestBitch

Then on Amazon, with reviews like this (we flagged this one for abuse):

BullyReview3

So, does she really attack reviewers?  Well, we decided to look into the reviews by Rachel of Three Lil Lambs and found one of , one of , and one of .  If you read Rachel’s reviews, you will quickly discover that they are not squee reviews.  Rachel is a tough, critical reviewer.  And how does Melissa respond?

Well, :

MelissasResponseToRachel

For an author responding to a critical review of her book, we thought this was the right approach.  So for all authors out there, if you’re listening, we want to say that if you must read your reviews and wish to respond to them, first make sure the reviewer is comfortable with it.  If they are, then we recommend responding the way Melissa did here.

So, this isn’t the first time we’ve proven the bullies to be liars.  (Note: we’re not referring to Merary as a bully.  We are referring to the bullies who initially spread the lies about Melissa to begin with.)

As for Jamie McGuire, what was her crime?  This:

Jamie

Is she guilty of the accusations made against her?  We don’t think so, but we’ll let our readers decide.

Okay, so, why do we keep talking about these authors and the bullies who attack them?  Simple.  To keep the public aware of something that we find to be an increasingly alarming issue.  In our last post, I know I was a bit snarky when it came to Minerva getting in trouble on Wikipedia and we all had a good laugh over it, but all joking aside, the bullies don’t seem to realize that libeling another person and smearing their reputation with lies is a serious offense.  A person can get into a lot of trouble for that and the bullies take it WAY too lightly, which is why, we’re sure, that Minerva was so surprised to get scolded by the Wiki people.  If you want to see her exchange with them, I’ll repost the screenshot Good Belle sent us:

Proof

So, apparently Wiki agrees with us that defaming another “living person” is a serious business and shouldn’t be taken lightly.  If any of you witness this happening on Wikipedia, where one person is adding defamatory content to someone’s Wiki page without citing proper sources, report it immediately.  The Wiki people will be on it faster than you can say libel.

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