Below is a post written by a site visitor who witnessed an attack and wrote about it in STGRB fashion.  Since we have been so busy lately, we want to thank this visitor for taking the time to do this.  If any of you witness something similar and want to write about it or if you just have something to say about the bullies, go for it.  Send us your thoughts, ideas, experiences, etc., and we’ll post them for you.

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The recent attack on Hugh Howey (author of the amazingly successful Wool) glaringly illustrates a number of important lessons for independent authors.

Here is a timeline of the events:

April 3 2013

Hugh Howey makes a blog post entitled ‘The Bitch From WorldCon’.

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In it, he talks about his encounter with a snake oil peddler at WorldCon. This woman was going around telling unknown writers that she could make them famous if they only listened to her. When Howey disagreed (without telling her who he was) she condescendingly dismissed him. He then proceeded to indulge in a passive aggressive fantasy about winning a Hugo and telling her to ‘suck it, bitch.’

This naturally drew a very critical response, most of it from certain, er, notorious Goodreaders, who poured onto the comments section of his Goodreads blog to attack him. The comments are fortunately (or un-) all gone now because on the 12th, Howey deleted his post and with it the comments. He replaced the offending post with an apology. That apology is now gone as well, replaced with this one.

Why? It seems the first apology was not satisfactory, and was predictably attacked by , , and .

There are doubtless many more, but these reviews and (especially) their comments will suffice. The brawl spilled over to the Amazon BBA thread, where guess who had this to say:

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But wait! There’s more!

Things wouldn’t be complete if some publicity-hungry indie didn’t try to garner some publicity at Hugh’s expense.

So what are the lessons to be learned from this?

#1 Be careful what you post on social media.

You might think you’re expressing an opinion or harmlessly venting about an unpleasant incident in which you were clearly the injured party, but not everyone is going to think so. The online bully community is made up of self-appointed gatekeepers like the ‘bitch’ from WorldCon: unsuccessful publishing industry professionals and ‘experts.’ It’s natural that they would defend one of their own and past experience has shown that they never work alone.

Howey had some fans who tried to defend him (and were shouted down) but a less successful author is in real trouble. So be careful what you do or say on social media: ‘they’ are watching. Some things, like complaining about reviews, asking people to vote on reviews, or discussing possible lawsuits, should be done in private.

#2 Aggressive-aggresive is better than passive-aggressive.

It’s baffling why Howey didn’t take the easiest route and politely inform the woman at WorldCon of his identity right then and there. Not only would he have had the satisfaction of watching her squirm, but he would have provided an invaluable service to independent authors everywhere. The world of publishing is full of self-professed ‘experts’ and gatekeepers like this woman, and many unknown authors are too inexperienced to see through them. Those indies witnessing the scene would have had the lesson brought home to them: be careful who you trust. And the snake oil peddlers who heard about it would have learned to be a lot more careful in the future: after all, you never know who you might run into when you’re at one of these conventions, trying to bamboozle authors.

Instead, Howey’s passive-aggressive reaction completely obscured the lesson, and allowed this predator to be portrayed as a victim.

#3 If you find yourself at the center of one of these bully firestorms, don’t respond and, above all, DON’T APOLOGIZE.

This case is as glaring an example as any we’ve seen that apologies don’t work. Nine times out of ten, they are deemed insincere, and provoke further attacks. And some publicity hungry indie will always find a way to ride your coattails by dissecting your apology on their blog and wagging their finger at you.

Silence is golden.

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