Below is the post we published on October 21, 2012, featuring the attack on M.T. Dismuke. Since then, M.T. has been one of the few authors to speak out openly about the GR bullies and what they do to people.
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All we can say is sorry. We are behind. We’ve been meaning to do a piece on what happened to Ryan Winfield but events, once again, have outpaced us. Before we get to Ryan’s contest which will be our next post, hopefully, we want to share with you what has just happened recently to a new, independent author, M.T. Dismuke, on the Amazon fora.
(Note: Now that GR has gotten to be a better environment for readers and authors, knock on wood, we’ve been focusing our attentions on Amazon, where the toxicity level seems to surpass that of both GR and AW.)
Now, before we begin, we want to share a comment Anon left regarding Amazon’s mysteriously disappearing reviews:
I was talking to a friend of mine about this and I don’t think this is some grand conspiracy by Amazon to sell its books. My friend had some good points. One, because if this were the case, all their books would be excelling with stellar ratings and this is clearly not the case. Example my friend gave was The Lovely by J Carson Black. Also, Amazon is not the only bookstore who publishes books. B&N owns Sterling. So this idea that Amazon is acting selfishly in its own self-interest I think is wrong.
What I think is happening with these disappearing reviews is that Amazon is responding to the recent dust-up re: the sock-puppet reviews and is botching the whole thing, removing legitimate reviews in the process. This is more likely what is going on imo.
We’ve had some others send us PMs expressing the same thoughts. But we’ve also had people tell us that Amazon has been doing this since before the whole brouhaha with Ellory, Leather and Locke.
What do we think? We believe that Amazon has been deleting reviews since it began its business in the 90s, deleting them for whatever reasons – whether they found them to be false reviews or because someone reported them, whatever – but it has become much more widespread right now because of the negative attention brought to the company by these latest scandals. In its attempt to rectify the situation, Amazon is deleting legitimate, favorable reviews and in many cases, not deleting the false, unfavorable reviews that are left purposely to harm authors. In other words, Anon is right. Amazon is botching it.
Now, with that said, Goronwy recently left us a comment regarding a lynching on the Amazon fora. Then, the victim sent us this message:
Amazon thread. I posted in the forum. It was direct post asking why there are so many downloads on free books but nobody ever likes the pages or tweets. I never once mentioned it was mandatory for any of the above and least more for a review. Mainly just page likes and tweet. It blew up. I hid my identity because I feared they would attack my books and writing. Somebody found it, posted it right away. I started getting attacked left and right. Anyhow, the next thing I know is all these posters jump in, the standard bunch who have a record of hurting authors. I tried defending myself against them. It was pointless. My writing was bashed. My books were bashed. I was bashed. All my info was cast into the forum. A few tried to help me, then they, too, became targeted. We all got 1 star reviews on our books followed by dozens of ‘likes’ on them to boost their ratings. Then, all the good reviews were ‘disliked’ to remove them from the page. Then, they started trying to get amazon to remove all the 5* reviews stating they were fake. Another author and I were the primary focus.
They attacked my novel The Necro Device on amazon.
Sharon L. Reddy was the other author. It was so bad that we both had to tell them to stop the bullying. Sharon was forced to contact an attorney.
I removed all of my posts and rewrote my original post because the thread started off asking a question, and within a page or two, it flipped to a M.T. Dismuke roast. Then it just kept going. I was even tweeting other authors in the forum because that’s what I do, even the ones attacking me. It didn’t take long before I realized this was more than just a call out, they were then linking it to websites. Linking all my personal information. Listing all my work. They did the same to Sharon as well. Please take a look:
So, after receiving this, we decided to head over to the thread and view the carnage. We were too late to get a screenshot of the original post, but we did get this:
And someone sent us this (this is apparently his original question):
M.T. Dismuke is a new, self-published author who just wanted to know why readers weren’t more grateful for getting free books, which is a perfectly legitimate question, but these people being the trolls they are, who consider any new, self-published author to be dirt underneath their feet, honed in on him and the onslaught began. If we had known M.T. before this, we would have warned him to avoid the fora, but with this post we hope to show others what to watch out for. G. Faso words it best:
Now, what happened after the thread blew up? A one-star review suddenly appeared on his book talking about how poorly written it was:
Within less than 48 hours, sandygene, who had “nothing better to do” downloaded his book and read it. And… and… wait for it… her review was voted to the top, along with all the other bad reviews of the book, while all the good reviews were down-voted. Wow! Big surprise, huh? And if you look at the comments on her review, you’ll notice some familiar names (hint: check out our right sidebar.)
Now, sandygene, who is obviously one of the Amazon fora trolls, had this to say when she was confronted:
So, does any of this look familiar? Have we heard about these tactics before? Of course we have. It’s what Deltaforce said in Author Beware (post to come):
I’m so familiar with the BBR tactics that campaigns are easily for me to spot now. Simply click on successful indie ebooks on Amazon or GR and you are likely to see a pattern of the negative review business. They instruct the reviewers to:
1. Point out any formatting problems, and punctuation or grammar errors.
2. Excerpt any potentially controversial text inside the book, cut and paste it in the review. Taken out of context, it will make the writing look awful or silly.
3. If there are no obvious formatting or grammar problems then just say the book is boring and you wasted your very valuable time reading it. Never mind that you didn’t actually read the entire book, saying that you did is enough to deter potential readers from wasting their time (and dollars) on an indie book.
4. When the author has several books in a series, make sure to write that the book has a lot of unanswered questions, dead-end plots, and loose ends that went nowhere. Although books in series aren’t supposed to tie up all the loose ends until the end of the trilogy or series, the consumer isn’t likely to remember that when reading about how you were left hanging and frustrated at the end of the horrible indie book.
5. Don’t forget to mention that the author would benefit from proofing, editing, formatting, illustrating, publishing and marketing by a paid professional in the publishing industry and how this would never happen if the indie author weren’t too stupid, lazy or talented enough to get an agent to PROTECT said author from negative reviews. (Tsk, tsk, either hire a pro indies or expect to be attacked! Protection rackets are so lucrative, aren’t they?)
6. Dare an indie author or any of the author’s supporters to debate your criticism, because if they make any rebuttal whatsoever, no matter how innocuous, they will be banned from Goodreads and blacklisted across the world wide web as BADLY BEHAVING AUTHORS.
7. Be sure to vote on Amazon reviews by down voting good reviews of all unprotected indie books and up voting negative reviews. With enough down votes the good review will be hidden from view as offensive so consumers won’t even see the good comments unless they take the extra time to look for them and they won’t. It will also boost the negative reviews as “the most helpful comments” pushing them to a prominent position on the author’s book page. This way the first thing potential customers will see is a nasty comment or review.
8. Tag the book with nasty comments or label them as self-published, badly behaving authors, etc. to alert other reviewers to the fact that this book has been blacklisted. On Goodreads, place the book on a bookshelf labeled with similar tags such as “Do Not Read” or “Terrible Book,” so any reader or librarian who stumbles across will know the book has been blacklisted.
9. Remind any author, artist who attempts to fight against a negative attack that they are only hurting their career. This warning sometimes works wonders and you’d be surprised at how many targets actually end up apologizing to their attackers just so they’ll be left alone. They may even attempt to join the group by helping to attack other victims!
10. In the event that you are accused of being paid to review – DENY, DENY, DENY! Here’s a sample script that usually works, “I’m just a sweet little schoolteacher, stay-at-home mom, grandma, customer, grandpa, retired editor (you fill in the blank) who is tired of wasting my valuable time reading awful books and I just want to save the public from ever having to see these awful books by indie authors.” Yeah, that usually makes the accuser back off.
11. Last, but not least, tell all authors to grow a thicker skin. Nobody wants to see their “baby” attacked, but that’s too bad.Reviewers are encouraged to search the Internet for any dirt they can dig up on an indie author or supporter who complains about the tactics of the Badly Behaving Review groups. Copy and paste any dirt found in Amazon, GR and other book forums and connect it all with multiple links for maximum harassment of the indie author who has been targeted. Emails and calls to the target are encouraged. Attempt to befriend the indie author so the fool will spill potentially useful personal information about themselves or other targets. All is fair in love and war and badly behaving reviewers have made a sport out of hunting down indie authors. Hey, why not have a little sadistic fun while we’re getting paid an hourly wage or compensation to write reviews?
Anyone who tells you to toughen up and grow a thick skin is someone justifying abuse. There is no justification for it and an enlightened, intelligent mind doesn’t need to express an idea with sadistic glee. When was the last time books caused a ruckus? They didn’t cause this ruckus. Greed did. Our world has room for all types of art and literature, but there are those who want to control what art and literature is published so they can get a piece of it. Let the public decide. One vote, one review per IP address and no more negative campaigning! So, what more proof do we need before it we decide to act and put a stop to the business of reviewer cyber-harassment and negative campaigning against indie publishers?
Now, we know from running our “tests,” that there are foxes in the hen house, that is, people working in the lower echelon of the Amazon corporate machine that side with BBR members. Now whether or not these Amazon fora trolls (the AVS per G. Faso or the ARM per Dougie Brimson) are Price Fix Six employees or Amazon employees or whatever, we won’t say for sure unless we can prove it, BUT these people are over there on the Amazon discussion threads ALL DAY, EVERYDAY. Seriously, they are there ALL THE TIME.
So, it’s easy to understand why our site visitors like Deltaforce believe that they are hired employees. Because it’s really hard to believe that these people could have lives that are really that pathetic. To have nothing better to do with your time than to troll the Amazon fora 24/7 looking for new authors to attack? To us, that seems more far fetched than Deltaforce’s “employee” theory, but then again, there are people like Looney Tunes, who feel the need to jump into every fray, and who, speak of the devil, is over there on M.T.’s thread right now, pimping her books:
Any other author would get slammed for spamming, but she doesn’t. Why? Because she’s one of them.
Anyhow, getting back to M.T., in the end, this poor author, who is definitely the victim in this case, was made to feel like he was “a monster” for asking a simple question. This is what he said to us:
I usually don’t use the forums – ever. I only knew of your website because somebody linked it in the thread and told me to report here. I didn’t know. I asked a question, I thought I’d get some responses. I did in one forum, I got attacked in the other. Since it started, I got a 1 star review that was liked over 50 times and boosted while all my other reviews got ‘disliked’ to the ground. I had a 4 star review get removed from a blogger I sent my book to a while ago. Either way, I’m done there even though they’re still at this very moment asking for me to apologize to them for being rude. Sadly, I thanked them, TWICE for feedback despite the fact they were dragging me through the mud. I apologized to those who took offense. I don’t know what else they want. I don’t even feel like a victim. I feel like I’m a monster for being upfront and forward. I thought I had a legit question. I guess I wasn’t aloud to ask such things. Not only that, they posted all my info in another forum in the Romance section with all my info. I got put a blacklist in the forum for my post and god only knows where else they got me listed as bad author.
Our message to you, M.T., is that you are not a monster. They are. These people have been doing this to authors for a long time. They are good at it. They have it down to a science. Best thing for you to do, for any author to do, is just to avoid the Amazon fora like the plague. The toxicity level there goes beyond anything we’ve ever seen.
