Below is the post we published on October 16, 2012, covering the attack on Ryan Winfield. What is unique about this attack is that Ryan actually made a small mistake that inevitably caught the bullies’ attention, but in the end, he handled it nicely by not responding to their instigations. This is why we always tell victims to NOT ENGAGE with these people. Never, never. It gets you nowhere. They won’t listen. They won’t change their minds. All they want to do is hurt you.
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We’re back! Today, we’re going to talk about a contest held by Ryan Winfield a couple weeks ago. We’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but have been so busy we’re just now getting to it.
Thank you to everyone for the positive feedback of our BBA Listopia list. Per your requests, we are now creating a new page for it that will be updated periodically. The page will have links to the voters’ GR profiles so that all our site visitors have to do is click the link and block the bully. Click and block. It’ll be that simple.
Okay! So… what happened with Ryan Winfield? If you don’t know who is, we’ll fill you in. He is a a very successful indie author of the bestselling novels and . For all those who have read his books, he is a very talented author as well as being a really cool guy. A couple weeks ago, he decided to run a contest for his readers, offering a list of prizes, one those being kindle:
And boy did this set the Amazon trolls off:
Then, after that bit of Ryan bashing, Straightforward LG decided to write this review:
And how did people respond to it?
The commenters are right. LG not only didn’t read the book, but his review has nothing to do with the product at all. It’s also misleading. It makes it sound like the author was giving away these gifts in exchange for reviews, when really he was making it a condition be being able to enter his contest.
We know that Amazon TOS does not allow authors to give reviewers compensation for reviews other than a free copy of their books, but we wondered if entry into a contest would be considered compensation. So, Athena contacted the managers at Amazon and asked them. Their answer was, yes, it is considered compensation.
So, what did Ryan do wrong? He used Amazon reviews as a condition to enter his contest. It’s not wrong to have a contest to promote your work. In fact, many indies do this, but it is a violation of Amazon TOS to involve Amazon reviews in that contest. Now, if contestants choose to read the book AND write a review of their own accord, there is nothing wrong with that. There is no rule against someone choosing to write a review on their own. So we recommend this approach.
Now, what did Ryan do right? He didn’t respond to the trolls when they attacked him and as a result, the whole affair dwindled into a non-issue. Good move, Ryan. We recommend this. The trolls seek attention. Don’t give it to them. We’ve come to realize that many of the trolls are jealous of others’ success. As Teacher Mommy says here, she considers it a personal “battle” to stop successful authors who hold contests:
And if you don’t think that these Amazon trolls stalk the fora just looking for authors to attack, we suggest you read some of their comments, like this one:
This seems to be their main objective for being there in the first place. So, if you witness an attack, please let us know. We’ll cover it on our blog and try to help the victim as much as possible. With that said, we want to end with this screenshot. We thought it was funny. We have to give G. Faso credit for his sense of humor:
Why is this funny?
Because it’s true.
And why is it not funny?
Because it’s true.
