Archive for May, 2013


Something Rotten at the Core of GR

Filed Under: Goodreads by Johnny Be Good — 94 Comments
May 23, 2013

We have some very interesting news for ya’all today.  Our man inside of the Asshat group, which is no longer a private group btw, tells us that Kathy (from  convo in Asshats Will Be Asshats) had started a thread in the Asshat group asking if she would be ostracized for reading a blacklisted book.  After assurances that nothing would happen, Kathy posted a five star review and was kicked out of the group by Angela.  After that an internal shake-up occurred and Angela herself left the group in a huff and joined forces with Coaxial and a few sock friends to launch a tirade of fake one-star reviews on BBA blacklisted authors, including the one that Kathy reviewed.  Suddenly all of Kathy’s reviews and messages that included recommendations disappeared.  She started to rebuild her bookshelves and added the blacklisted books in protest, then her account was deleted.  It’s clear that someone high enough in the administration of Goodreads to have access to personal bookshelves and group messages has been assisting boycotts for the BBA group.  This has escalated to the level of organized crime with Goodreads staff at the center of illegal activity.  Kathy herself wrote to us and explained the selective deletion of her messages.  In the email, she said:

“I thought you were all just crazy, paranoid f**kers. Now I wonder if you’re paranoid enough. There’s something rotten to the core at Goodreads and I hope the site implodes.”

We were also given this:

Kathy

Then, Tink sent us these shots which are only just a two cases of Angela’s tirade yesterday launched against BBA blacklisted authors:

AngelHorn2

AngelaHorn3

So… guess Angela got a little pissed off by our post yesterday.  Hmm…

But wait!  There’s more!

Remember when we told you Eve Thomas returned to GR after the launch of her new book, Fifty Shades of Abuse?  Eve Thomas who was accused by Angela of sock-puppetry (among other things) of which she was completely innocent?

Well, out of nowhere, Eve’s GR account was deleted and she has been banned from GR.  We received this from a site visitor who was in contact with Eve yesterday:

EveBanned

We wrote to Eve and asked her what happened.  She said:

EvesResponse

Eve sent GR an email back, telling them that she had no idea what they were referring to, that she hasn’t ever attacked anyone on GR.  So far, no response back from them.

Now, as for Eve’s blog post that was so offensive to GR, here it is:

EveBlogPost1

EveBlogPost2

So, what was the real reason she was banned?  It’s because she spoke out and told the truth about GR.  And GR can’t handle that.

Gosh, does this kind of remind you of events that have happened to others in the past?  I can think of one author who reported a bully review via GR’s reporting system and was banned from Goodreads for doing so:

HowFarDoesRotGo

We have no doubt that Angela and Coaxial are behind these recent events, but the facts tell us that people high up in GR staff itself are also involved.  Without a doubt, we now know for certain that there is indeed something rotten at the core of GR.

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Fueling STGRB

Filed Under: Bully Reviews, GR Bully by Johnny Be Good — 29 Comments
May 19, 2013

Well, it looks as if one of the bullies :

FuelingSTGRB1

FuelingSTGRB2

And what do we have to say about this?  Well, we agree with her.  Of course there are a few points we’d like emphasize/convey.

“Does that sound like a fair, unbiased, objective review to you? Doesn’t to me. I know that most SPA books are, in fact, quite atrocious, to the point that everyone’s talking about how horrible they are as a rule. But to go into a book deliberately looking for things to criticize is not ‘reading a book’.”

True.  Although, we disagree about most SPA books being atrocious.  Some are.  Some aren’t.  In fact, many of us here have found that the majority of SPA books we’ve read are actually quite good.  So, for us it’s the opposite.

And we don’t agree that the authors she mentions at the end are loathsome.  These are authors we hold in high esteem because they had the courage to speak out against the bullies and what they do.

“I’m sure someone will argue that a reviewer has no obligation to write a fair, unbiased, objective review, but what value does the review have, then? It’s just one person throwing rocks at another, screaming, “You’re such a doodie head! I’m going to try to sabotage your career now because you’re personally such a loathsome douche nozzle!”

Aren’t reviews supposed to be about the BOOKS?”

Uh… how long have we been saying this?  It’s good to know you’re finally getting it, though, Ederyn.

“As for the fake reviews, we have to trust that an actual customer will eventually buy that book, be totally disgusted with it and leave an honest, untainted review of said work, questioning the legitimacy of all the gushing 5-star reviews. So leave it to the real customers. ”

Or how ’bout this?  We have to trust that actual customers will eventually buy the book, love it and leave honest, untainted reviews of said work, questioning the legitimacy of all the nasty, vitriolic one-star reviews that are posted because your troll friends hate the author.  So, let’s leave it to the real customers, shall we?

“I hate to be in the position of defending BBAs. I mean, errrgh…I seriously HATE being in the position of defending BBAs, but the ATWR is exactly the kind of crap that gives STGRB credence.”

Bingo!  If the trolls didn’t behave the way they do, we wouldn’t have even started our blog.  But you have to remember, we didn’t just start our blog because of bully reviews.  That was just part of it.  We started our blog because of the blatantly vicious attacks on authors who just tried to make things right.  A few examples:

  1. The hate campaign against Kiera Cass started by Wendy Darling when Kiera tried to apologize for her agent’s behavior, but Wendy ignored her and stalked Kiera’s Twitter, taking screenshots back to the “hive.”  Then, she went to Publisher’s Weekly and had them write up an article on it.
  2. The attack on an author led by Kat when said author tried to explain her position.
  3. The attack on Eve Thomas when she tried to apologize.  Story in Apology Not Accepted.

I mean, the list goes on: libeling, stalking, threatening, harassing, breaking into private accounts, outing their PII, et cetera, et cetera.  THIS is what fuels our blog and the more they do it, the more we have to write about.

“So what’s an honest review? A review that comes from a customer off the street who stumbles across a book, discovers it’s horrible, and leaves a scathing review. It doesn’t have to be constructive, polite, or helpful to the author in any way, for reviews, as we all know, are for the customers. A simple “OMG THIS SUCKS!!” is a perfectly objective review…IF it comes from someone with no prior experience with this book or this author. If you read the book BEFORE the train wreck and hated it, but never posted your review, then of course your review is perfectly legitimate, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t post it now. Just don’t give me that shit that you “…don’t hate the author. I have no feelings about the author whatsoever. This is entirely about the work.” Oh, badger shit.”

Again, here’s another example: a review that comes from a customer off the street who stumbles across a book, discovers it’s great, and leaves a favorable review.

It’s very telling that even Ederyn, who seems to get the whole bully review thing, automatically assumes that the review is going to be a bad one.  This is really a fundamental axiom on which the bully mindset is based.

Now, what happened to  after this post went up?

EderynsBook1

Trolls2 EderynsBook2

EderynsBook3

You see, the snakes are eating each other again.  We’ve seen this several times before.  In fact, Ederyn was booted out of the Asshat group because of this post.  If you pay close attention to the Asshat group’s member number, it is rapidly dwindling, which is certainly due to the bullies’ erratic behavior.

Again, snakes eating each other.

Really, if you want to know how stupid these people are, we know of several authors (who shall not be named here) who’ve posted fake books on GR just to see what the trolls would do.  And of course, the one-star fly-bys, the revenge reviews and the derogatory shelving began as soon as the books went up.

That’s right!  On FAKE books.  It’s like catching a bunch of stupid piranha’s with fake bait.  Hilarious!

And speaking of stupid piranha’s, we’ve had confirmation from one of our site visitors that Angela is indeed operating behind multiple socks on GR and Amazon.  More on that to come.

Now, we want to end with this, Coaxial’s confession.  It’s hilarious.  As you read, notice the gross grammatical, spelling, and punctuational errors in her comment:

Coaxial

Now, is this someone who is really qualified to line edit anything?

Oh, irony at its best!

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Pete Morin Review Swapping

Filed Under: Amazon Fora Trolls by Tinkerbell — 14 Comments
May 19, 2013

It is a truth universally acknowledged that review swapping is a bad thing.

A few months ago, a noted Amazon poster had this to say:

“Last week or so I went through the threads where they were swamping (sic) reviews and put them all on my do not buy BBA shelf.”

Another one in the same thread said:

“Maybe we should have shelves that say: DNR~Author Swaps Reviews.”

What is review swapping? It’s when two authors exchange reviews, usually positive ones (of course). For example:

Morin7

And:

Morin8

Here we have author Orest Stelmach reviewing a book by author Pete Morin, and Pete Morin reviewing a book by Orest Stelmach. On Goodreads.

Some authors find that swapping reviews really works for them, so they start to do it many, many times, any place they can find. Such is the case with one of the above authors:

Morin1

And:

Morin2

Here we have the author Pete Morin swapping reviews with another author, Stephen Woodfin, this time on Amazon. Pete Morin must really like swapping reviews because here he is doing it again:

Morin3

And:

Morin3(2)

And again here:

Morin4

And:

Morin5

But isn’t swapping reviews against Amazon rules, you say? Here’s what Pete Morin thinks about those pesky Amazon rules:

Morin6

Read that sentence again:

“I do not know (or care,frankly) if my review of this novel comports with Amazon’s review guidelines”

Wow, Pete. If the Amazon Review Mafia heard you say that! They … well, they wouldn’t do very much at all, apparently. Because Pete is pretty tight with the Amazon Review Mafia, so he can review swap compulsively without a peep from anyone. How did he get to be so lucky?

Pete first came to the attention of the ARM sometime in the May of 2012, when he got a two-star review because his book had too much cussing in it. He responded by saying that the reviewer had a perfect right to their opinion. somebody pointed out his good behavior in the forums, and a legend was born. starting a whole thread to praise him over this incident.

Isn’t that just lovely?

But something strange happened. If you click on Anna’s link, you’ll get Amazon’s famous ‘Looking for something?’ message. That’s because Pete’s two-star review disappeared back when Amazon was purging itself of shill and fake reviews. A lot of people were complaining that perfectly legitimate reviews were disappearing along with the shills.

Maybe Pete was a victim.

Or maybe that two star-review was a shill. It sure sounded like a ‘fake negative’ review. The complaint, that there was too much cussing, is one of those old standbys, like saying there’s too much sex, which attracts more people than it repels.

Or here’s another possibility: it was a fake negative review designed specifically for Pete to worm his way into the heart of the ARM. Think about it: author has friend write fake review, author responds exactly the way the ARM thinks authors should respond, somebody points this out to the ARM, and voila! The author is in like flynn!

If you search ‘Pete Morin’ on the forums, the earliest posts about him is this:

Morin9

And this:

Morin10

They can still be found on .

What’s wrong with them, you may ask?

Nothing much, except that they’re dated May 20 2011, almost FIVE MONTHS before Pete’s book came out.

Hmm….*scratches chin*

If you’re an unknown indie author, what are the chances of some total stranger(s) spontaneously plugging your book and trying to create a buzz like this? That’s right: approximately none.

You’d have to get a friend to do it.

And you’d have to be pretty far-sighted to think of doing it five months in advance. We’ve all seen authors who publish their books to Kindle, and two days later someone just happens along on the forums to tell everyone what a great book it is. Such people are quickly labelled as friends of the author and run off the forums for spamming.

This wouldn’t happen to them if they’d thought of it five months earlier.

Now Danny Gillan did his plug on the Meet Our Authors Forum, which is allowed. But this other poster didn’t:

Morin11

Suzy’s , where such blatant spamming, even by non-authors, is usually, uh, frowned upon.

And who is Suzy? If you check out her profile, you’ll see she goes by the moniker ‘Swedish-Irish Bookworm.’ Someone by that name reviewed Pete’s book…as well as a book by Danny Gillan. It’s a small world, isn’t it?

So to recap:

-Five months before his book comes out, a friend of Pete’s, possibly tag-teaming with a second friend, shills it in the MOA.

-About a week before the book comes out, another friend of Pete’s shills the book on the Kindle Forum. And nobody complains!

-At various times, Pete swaps reviews with various authors. All of them are four or five-star.

-A few months after the book is out, a two-star review appears, thanks to which Pete is brought to the favorable attention of the Amazon Review Mafia.

-Almost a year later, a top-ranking Amazon reviewer, who has been impressed by Pete’s indefatigably good behavior, .

-And boom! The reviewer gives Pete a five-star review. Everyone who’s paying attention is thrilled that Pete actually got a review he didn’t have to swap.

Ask yourself: is a guy with at least two helpful ‘friends’ and who obviously has a far-sighted and subtle approach to stealth spammi…er, marketing, capable of planting a fake two star review in order to further his marketing campaign?

Nah.

But back to the review swapping. Pete really is out of control, but at least he’s not a hypocrite. Check out the little homily he gives over on the notorious BBA #3 thread:

Morin12

Did you see anything there about swapping reviews?

No sir.

Pete knows when he’s living in a glass house.

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Archer Adam Pring & Lissa Bilyk

Filed Under: MISC by Johnny Be Good — Leave a comment
May 12, 2013

This post on Archer & Lissa was published on August 5, 2012.  It explains how this engaged pair were not only guilty of reviewer hypocrisy, but also of leaving nasty, premeditated one-star reviews on other authors’ books, provoking them into fights, and then reporting them to GR in order to get them kicked off the site.

Edit 1/15/2014: Archer and Lissa are no longer on Goodreads.

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

We know that many of you have asked us to profile Archer and Lissa, two DEFCON 1 bullies, and we’re sorry that we are just now getting to it.  We meant to do it a while ago but events sort of got in the way.  So we hope this post will satisfy your requests.

Now, you’ve all seen Archer on STGRB before: here in Bully Reviews where he tells a 14-year-old girl to f*** off, but what you don’t know about (or maybe you do) is his other half, his fiancee,  and their united assaults on both authors and readers alike, chasing them out of Goodreads.  Instead of using guns, this Bonnie and Clyde pair use harmful words and fictitious accusations to harm the people who cross their path.  Here is an example of the many messages we’ve received from people who have had experiences with these two:

I found your site via The Passive Voice blog. It’s so strange that I was directed here on today of all days. This morning I woke up to find an abusive comment on my personal blog from a cowardly anonymous troll. I did some research and found the commenters IP address was in Australia. Last year I was bullied off Goodreads by Archer and Lissa. 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. This is my Anon name, by the way, but my real email address. I’d love to hear from you and if there’s anything I can do to help just let me know.

Please note that this bully couple lives in Australia.

So, what reviewer hypocrisy are they guilty of?  The Goodreads Follies say it best:

Back in January, before we took a hiatus from the craziness of GR, we wrote a post called Acceptable Author Behavior. We realize, because of a comment on that post, that we should give a specific example. We will also point of the hypocrisy of GR reviewer brigade.

Goodreads author and reviewer  has several books listed on Goodreads, including .  The reviews on Lissa’s book include:

—A by her boyfriend/fiance/possibly husband by now, Archer. Archer does not reveal his close personal connection with Lissa in the review. Archer is a frequent and vocal complainer about “bad author behavior”. Hypocrisy, thy name is Archer.

—GR member , also of Cuddlebuggery Book Blog, of posts a . She at least posts a semi-critical review and mentions that Lissa is a GR friend of hers, but remember, according to the GR Reviewer Mantra: author’s friends are not allowed to review them.

—GR member , whom we have blogged about before, leaves a five-star review with the disclosure that she beta-read the book.

—, another of Lissa’s GR friends, leaves a .

And those are only the names we recognize as having connections to Lissa and the militant GR reviewer clique that we have mentioned before; there are yet more reviews we have not tracked down the source of.

We take from this that if the GR clique is hypocritically inconsistent. When Kiera Cass asks friends to merely like positive reviews, she was excoriated over 30 some pages of comments, yet when a friend/member of the GR clique has friends and family members write positive reviews, she is….nothing. Crickets chirping. It’s not a problem.

After skewering other authors for having glowing friend reviews on their books, take a look at how many friend reviews can be found on :

AngelasReview

KarasReview

KarensReview

KirasReview

SkylasReview

And a review written by Lissa herself on her own book:

LissasReview

And Archer’s review:

ArchersReview

When Archer wrote his original US Amazon review, he made no mention that he even knew Lissa, let alone that he was her fiance.  Unfortunately, the original review went mysteriously and conveniently missing, but we did find this one on Amazon UK:

ArchersAmazonReview2

Hmm, very interesting, that!  G. Faso says it so well, doesn’t he?  Isn’t Archer’s review deeply unethical?

Why, yes!  Yes, it is, at least according the bully squad.

So… to end, people keep asking us: why are defending these authors who are clearly this or that or who deserve to be bashed for what they wrote?  Here’s the deal: readers really need to start differentiating between the author and the book.  Why?  Because of another “punch face” threat we stumbled upon just recently while we were investigating a GR bully attack on an author.  Unfortunately all the evidence was deleted, but we did find one of the bullies reviews on ARe:

PunchFace

And this written by Hana Joy in the PW article vilifying Kiera Cass (see Wendy Darling):

HanaJoy

Okay, so, pause, breathe, count to ten and calm down.  If a book makes you this mad, please don’t become like Annie Wilkes in Misery, okay?  Don’t stalk and torment the author.  Don’t say you want to sue them or do bodily harm to them.  That’s just crazy.  These are JUST books.  If you get that angry, go grab a hard copy of the book and take a hammer to it or something, just leave the author out of it.  That’s all we’re asking.

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New Development on Amazon

Filed Under: Amazon, News by Johnny Be Good — 20 Comments
May 9, 2013

Good news!  It appears as though Amazon has implemented a feedback feature into their review voting interface.  The feature only works when you click “No” on a review.  It asks you for a reason why you didn’t like the review by giving you a radio-button menu.  Here is an example:

We think this new development is a step in the right direction and we ask our readers that whenever you are voting on a bully review (i.e. a review that is clearly designed either to defame the author or to do deliberate damage to the book’s ratings without being a genuine, honest review), to please let Amazon know why you are down voting it.  Hopefully, if Amazon gets enough feedback on these reviews, they will start to see the pattern of abuse that is so widespread on their site.

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Reviewer Subterfuge, Part 3

Filed Under: Amazon Fora Trolls, Bully Attacks by Johnny Be Good — 5 Comments
May 9, 2013

We’ve just recently heard from a site visitor who has been doing some investigating into the smear campaign Kathryn W. waged against Katherine Ashe.  After reading our posts, Reviewer Subterfuge and Reviewer Subterfuge, Part 2, where we first discovered it, this particular visitor decided to find more evidence for us to share on our blog.  She says:

I wanted to share this with you because I think you will find this interesting—that is unless you have already been down this evidence trail.  And of course, how difficult is it to discover who hosts and writes the posts for the blog?  I couldn’t find any names on the site but through links, we discover who they probably are. The domain name for this blog was “History Exposed” but they have changed the name.

http://historyexposed.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/the-bat-shat-on-the-tin-hat/

When you click on the next link, you will discover all the sites linked to Stranger than Fiction and when you click to most of those sites, a picture emerges that reveals alliances and some of the players in the Amazon flame war that was waged against Katherine Ashe.

http://www.alexa.com/site/linksin/historyexposed.wordpress.com

Stranger than Fiction has been turned into a shell for the bullies to lob missiles at their victims and use that shell as a shield that protects their real identities and sites – most of those that are linked to Stranger than Fiction – from discovery.

If you click on the Way Back Machine at Alexa, you will discover Stranger than Fiction doesn’t have much of a history and was active twice in April when it was used as another weapon against Katherine Ashe.

There are thirteen sites linked to Stranger Than Fiction. Four of them belong to Kathryn W. – the obvious mastermind behind the Katherine Ashe Amazon Flame War where the goal was to destroy the credibility of an author writing on some of the same historical topics.

edwardthesecond.blogspot.com

edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2012/11/demolishing-myths-about-edward-ii-part_27.html

edwardthesecond.blogspot.co.uk

edwardthesecond.blogspot.co.uk

edwardthesecond.blogspot.com.au
edwardthesecond.blogspot.com.au/2012_11_01_archive.html

edwardthesecond.blogspot.com.es
edwardthesecond.blogspot.com.es/2012/11/demolishing-myths-about-edward-ii-part_27.html

I think the next blog belongs to another one of the trolls from the UK — specifically Ireland – and she may befriends with Kathryn or a friend of Kathryn’s.

sarahshistoryblog.wordpress.com

sarahshistoryblog.wordpress.com

If any of you come across something like this – evidence of one person being targeted by a group of bullies and their reputation smeared – please report it to us immediately and we’ll do our best to share the information with our readers as soon as we can.

To end, we want to say that the people who engage in this kind of bullying on Amazon and GR are what many have named cyber sociopaths.  This word seems to come up a lot when people talk about the GR/Amazon bullies.  We think it’s a fitting description.  So be very, very careful when you are online.  If you haven’t already done so, please read Anne R. Allen’s, Gangs of New Media, which is so far the best article we’ve read regarding online bullying happening in the book community.

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Gangs of New Media by Anne R. Allen

Filed Under: News by Johnny Be Good — 6 Comments
May 7, 2013

Just recently, we received this comment from Anon on our latest post, An Encouraging Message:

Have any of you heard about the attack on Barry Eisler?  Anne R. Allen mentions it in her blog post, Gangs of New Media: Twitchforks, the Hive Mind, and “Social Lasers of Cruelty.”

http://annerallen.blogspot.com/2013/05/gangs-of-new-media-twitchforks-hive.html

And this one from Karig:

I was about to paste the link to that post into the “Contact Us” form. The Passive Voice linked to it today, and when I read it, I thought that it should be recommended reading for people here, for more reasons than its mention of Barry Eisler.

The link to the Passive Voice is here.

Anne’s blog post addresses the very problem that Stitch talked about in the GR Bully Culture where he compares the GR bullies to modern urban street gangs that form packs and roam around terrorizing anyone who crosses them.  If you haven’t already read Anne’s post, we highly recommend it.  Below, we highlight some of the more poignant points she makes regarding the gangs of new media.

She starts off saying:

I spend a lot of time here telling writers how and why to use social media, but I don’t often address the dangers. Yeah, they exist. I don’t know why, but otherwise sensible people can morph into irrational brutes when they’ve got their fingers on a keyboard and a connection to the Interwebz.

Bad behavior abounds in all social media. In an article in the NYT last week, Henry Alford said Twitter can be like “a crowded barroom that bristles with a certain kind of white male rage…marked by a hostility toward anything poetic or naïve.”

The easy anonymity of the Interwebz is usually blamed for the nastiness—and I admit things have felt safer here since I disabled anonymous comments—but I think the most egregious abuses spring from something far more dangerous: mob mentality. A gang of self-righteously indignant “groupthinkers” can do more damage than one lone anonymouse, even a sociopathic one.

“Groupthink” is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a pattern of thought characterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values.” It’s also known as “the hive mind.”

Writers new to social media need to be aware that anybody can become a target of one of these groups—often people who have done nothing wrong—and we all need to be careful not to jump into online dogpiles of crazy, no matter how righteous the cause appears to be.

Here is a comment many who read our blog can relate to:

If you’ve ever become part of one of those mobs, you probably felt awful later. And if you’ve been the victim, you know their power to hurt, especially if the crazy invades your real home and affects your health and livelihood.

Anne goes on to talk about her own experience with cyber mobs and mentions research done on monkeys in social situations.  The research points to the natural instinct to “go along with the crowd” and how that can be dangerous in the cyber world, leading to witch hunts using the “cyber version of torches and pitchforks” that she called “Twitchforks.”  She cites two such attacks.  One on Barry Eisler:

A minor, but significant attack by a cybermob with Twitchforks happened recently at the Pikes Peak Writers Conference. A bunch of agents, objecting to a keynote speech by author Barry Eisler, set off a swarm of nasty Twitter barbs against Mr. Eisler during his presentation.

The incident reverberated through the book community and serves as an embarrassing example of how even respected professionals can morph into a mob through the magic of the Internet.

And one on a reviewer:

Another more disturbing mob attack happened when superstar author Anne Rice had an over-the-top reaction to a bad review on Facebook and sent her fans to attack the reviewer—a young UK blogger with fewer than 100 readers. Rice’s hordes called the reviewer obscene names and pelted her blog with classy comments like “I hope you get herpes.” Kayleigh, the blogger, took the barrage of anger with grace. (I’ll bet she got a lot more followers out of this.)

One particular part of her post to which we wanted to draw attention is her warning about the hive mind:

That hive/gang mind that can do so much good can also be one of the most dangerous forces in the universe. It can make people do things they’d never dream of doing as individuals.

The hive mind is what powers pogroms, gang rapes, witch hunts, lynchings, war and genocide.

There’s a reason some of the most horrifying SciFi villains are semi-human creatures that share an unreasoning, destructive mind: like The Borg on Star Trek and Dr. Who’s Daleks.

I’ve seen dozens of good people attacked by gangs on social media in the past year or so. Usually for unverified infractions of murky rules. I’m not sure the people who sent me death threats even knew what I was supposed to have done. (I’m still not clear on that myself.) They only knew somebody told them the hive was under attack, and I was the designated villain.

Plus they were getting a rush from their own smug, self-righteous rage.

It’s that rage-induced high and feeling of superiority that is probably at the root of the problem. Anger management specialists tell us that self-righteous rage can trigger brain chemicals that mimic the high of cocaine. And it’s just as addictive. The angrier people are, the better they feel, so they feed their rage, often with unsubstantiated rumors their rational mind would recognize as lies. It’s why radio-ranters and conspiracy theorists are so popular.

Unfortunately a lot of those rage addicts feed their habit on the Interwebz.

What we call bully attacks, Anne calls “hive attacks” that she talks about here:

I saw one of those lasers aimed at an Internet friend this week. She was a much less high-profile target than Barry Eisler, so the “social laser” could get away with a lot more cruelty. She was erroneously accused of piracy (a buzz-word guaranteed to set the hive-mind swarming.) The accuser didn’t deal with her directly. Instead he tweeted a call for the hive to attack. The victim was humiliated and castigated by dozens of authors (some of whom I know to be otherwise sensible individuals.) One rage-fueled smugster even posted the home address where the accused author lives with her disabled child.

The victim had the sense to call the FBI. Which is what I should have done when the crazies started sending me photos of my house and telling me they were armed and they’d “get me.”

She and I join the hundreds—probably thousands—who have had our homes and families targeted by mindless attacks by various branches of the online book community. Yes, these people are our fellow writers, readers, and reviewers. And I’m sure they all think they’re doing good.

…

Terrorizing victims and their families in their homes seems to be a pattern with the booky hive-mind. As is the fake review attack.

Posting addresses and photos of family seems to come from a twisted misunderstanding of what used to be done to silence anonymous trolls—stemming from the outing of hatemongers like “Violentacrez”, who terrorized Reddit a few years ago. Some clever person discovered his real name and residence and posted them online to keep the troll from continuing to pollute the site with anonymous hate speech.

But somehow these literary vigilantes don’t see how that’s different from posting the personal addresses and family details of a fellow author or reviewer who is NOT anonymous in the first place.

You see that?  “Posted home address” and “homes and families targeted.”  Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?  A bit like what happened to two people we know (one a reader and one an author) that we mention in our post, More Bully Reviews.

The last point she makes is about “fake review” attacks on authors:

The other weapon of choice of the book hive is equally stupid and clueless. Wielding one-star reviews as weapons to assault the author’s character undermines the whole literary community by rendering customer reviews worthless.

Mind you, these cyber-militias claim to be standing up for the “integrity” of the writing community. They think writing fake, libelous “reviews” of books they haven’t read is a great way to show how honorable they are.

So true.

At the end of her post, Anne talks about what we can do about cyber gangs and how we can avoid being victims:

How can we avoid becoming gang victims?

You can’t. Not entirely. Barry Eisler’s speech was anything but incendiary. The accused “pirate” was actually promoting her favorite authors’ work. I was attacked for writing a piece on my own blog to help fellow Boomers who aren’t Web savvy. I admit I was naïve. But we’re all naïve about something.

However there are some things I could have done.

1) Contact law enforcement if your safety is threatened. The FBI has a hotline to report cybercrimes.

2) Delete out-of-control threads in your own blog before rage escalates. If a thread on your own blog gets out of hand, or a bunch of commenters gang up on another, just hit the little trash can icon. I used to think it was better to hang in there—and it probably was in the case of the Anne Rice fan attack—but when things get nasty on your blog, it can reflect on you. A lot of the stuff that made people most angry at me were things other people said in the blog thread, which were later attributed to me in the subsequent game of blog telephone.

3) But don’t delete messages and comments that are actually criminal. At least save a screen shot. You may need them for evidence. (I made this mistake. I thought deleting them from my computer would delete them from my mind. Doesn’t work that way.)

4) Stay away from gang-infested forums and websites. Any forum that projects a them/us mentality can be dangerous. For some reason, the oldest forums seem to be plagued with the most groupthink and snark. A whole lot of writers no longer feel safe at Absolute Write, so I’ve stopped recommending them. Ditto the Amazon Forums (the Kindleboards tend to be a bit more civilized, but don’t expect many warm fuzzies.) Reddit could be toxic in the days of Violenticrez. I don’t know if it has improved. I’ve also heard some Goodreads groups can get pretty nasty, but I belong to some great ones.

5) Look for community at moderated, helpful forums like Kristen Lamb’s WANAtribe,  Nathan Bransford’s forums, CritiqueCircle.com and SheWrites. (If you know of more good ones, do let us know in the comments.) I’ve left all the LinkedIn writing groups I belonged to because of idiots taking over the threads to stage one-on-one combat (and the misguided guys who think it’s a dating site) but I haven’t seen overt gang activity. Maybe some of you know some good groups there.

6) Be careful where you post comments. Some blogs are heavily weighted pro- or anti- self-publishing or pro- or anti- author and may be controlled by a hive mind. If you see name-calling or blanket dismissal of a whole segment of the population by a blogger, you have wandered into a private clubhouse of snark and your time will be better spent elsewhere.

The internet book community is ours to create. We can become a jungle of irrational, violent thugs, or we can behave like literate, civilized adults. If you have a personal problem with an individual, consider talking to him or her about it in a reasonable, non-accusatory way. If the person is misusing a forum, or you see criminal activity, leave the group temporarily and contact the appropriate authorities.

So, to end we want to say kudos to Anne.  We agree with her on all points and we do recommend her post as required reading for those who wish to have a pleasant online experience whether you’re an author, a reader, or both.

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Protected: An Encouraging Message

Filed Under: Guest Post, Opinion Piece by Johnny Be Good — Enter your password to view comments.
May 6, 2013
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More Bully Stories

Filed Under: Absolute Write, Amazon Fora Trolls, Bully Attacks, Bully Reviews, Goodreads, GR Bully Culture by Johnny Be Good — 6 Comments
May 2, 2013

Okay before we begin today, we want to share a couple things with you.  First, this one will crack you up.  It’s a new list the bullies made called  and guess who are among the ABB on this list!  That’s right.  Looney and her good pal Elly Helcl.  You remember Elly, the one who tried to pretend she was her ex-husband to get the password to our GR & Copyright post.  When I saw this list, I about spit out my coffee all over my laptop.

So, if any of you have a few authors you want to add to this list (i.e. authors they hate, muhahaha), by all means, have at it.

Now for some sad news, we just recently found this story, I Quit, on the Passive Voice about an author who quit writing.  If you ever see this happen, either to an author you read or someone you know, please give them all the support they need to keep going.  When it comes to writing, the golden rule always applies: Never give up!

*sigh*  Sadly, we have four new bully stories.  The first one comes from an anonymous author who was targeted for being a very successful self-published author.  That’s the only crime she committed – she was self-pubbed and successful.  Go figure.

SuccessfulAuthorTargeted

Another author we heard about is Sophie Monroe who was targeted by Coaxial and ETA:soon:

SophieMonroe

We don’t know what Sophie did to incur their wrath but it probably wasn’t much knowing the nature of these two trolls.  The link to Coaxial’s (Shoshana Bick) review is  and ETA’s, .

The other targeted author this week was Martin Hopkins:

MartinHopkins

Here is the link to the , here’s , and here’s his .

(Note: we want to say thank to our eyes and ears out there who keep informing us of the victims.  It’s helpful.  This way we can let these people know that it’s not them; it’s the bullies.  It helps victims to know that they are not alone.  That there are others out there who have been targets like them.)

And last but not least, we heard from another person (an author this time) who was just recently banned from Absolute Write.  If you all remember our post on The Banning of Robin Sullivan, we warned people to stay away from Absolute Write.  Well, this person sends the same warning.  Her first message to us was this:

NewBullyStory

When Athena asked her about her story, she sent this:

AWMods1

AWMods2

AWMods3

She ended the story with her final thoughts:

FinalThoughts

She is right.  Successful writers don’t spend their time engaging in this petty shit.  They spend their time actually writing.  And stay far away from the Absolute Write Water Cooler.  The AW mods are vipers.  They’re the worst of the worst.

So, in conclusion, let this be a lesson in our continuing bully education: beware on GR, on the Amazon Fora, and on Absolute Write.  These are common online hangouts for the bullies.  Please spread the word (quietly) to those who may not know.

Who knows, you may end up saving a life.  :)

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The Bullies Go Mad

Filed Under: Bully Lies, Goodreads, GR Bully Culture by Johnny Be Good — 13 Comments
May 1, 2013

Wow!  Now I think we’ve seen it all… okay well maybe not, but this is pretty crazy.  This just shows to what lengths these people will go.  We were just tipped off to this  where there is a screenshot of sock-puppets with our names leaving one-stars and derogatory shelving of Dougie Brimson’s book (these socks have since been deleted):

BullySockPuppets

Okay, it’s obvious this isn’t us and Dougie knows that as well, but this just proves that the real sock-puppeteers are the bullies themselves.  Ever wonder why the bullies are so quick to accuse others of sock-puppetry?  It’s the same reason why liars are the first to call other people liars.

Self-projection.

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