Archive for June, 2013


J.S. Cooper vs. Jane Litte

Filed Under: Bully Attacks by Johnny Be Good — 11 Comments
June 30, 2013

Well, apparently, the notorious online social manipulator and self-appointed author policewoman, Jane Litte, has struck again.  We just received this email from Anon:

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As for J.S. Cooper’s FB post, it can be found :

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And Jane’s original email :

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To read Dear Author’s twitter, go .

So, Anon says further:

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“Let the badly behaving Goodreaders and the troll bloggers

of the world keep themselves busy discussing how important their

opinions are.  The rest of us will spend our time selling books.”

Very well said!

On a side note, we wanted to share a couple other messages we received from visitors regarding the Badly Behaving Goodreaders, troll bloggers and the Amazon fora trolls:

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And Jane and her ilk are right there among the worst of the worst.  Here is an example of one of them on DA saying how she actually approached an author to solicit a response from her about a nasty book review one of the DA reviewers wrote.  She did it just to bait the author into a fight:

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So keep a sharp eye when you’re out there in cyberspace.  These trolls are usually lurking in the shadows somewhere just waiting to pounce.

Now, as for the dust-up between Jane and J.S. Cooper, Anon is absolutely right and this isn’t the first time Jane has crossed the line with her audacious behavior, believing she is some kind of authority with jurisdiction all over the publishing world.  There is a reason she has been blocked on Goodreads, Twitter, and Facebook by so many authors.  It’s the same reason she is on our Biggest Offenders list.  She is a very well-known cyber-bully.

And we’ve given plenty of examples of this.  Here’s another one.  You all remember Amazon’s Beautiful Disaster emails that were sent out back in March and how Jane started the false rumor (by publishing it on her Dear Author blog) that Jamie McGuire used song lyrics without the band’s permission?  If you don’t remember that, see our post Beautiful Blunder: Dear Author Strikes Again.  You can also visit The Passive Voice where PG covers the incident as well.  If you take a look at some of the comments on PG’s post, you will see that a few of his visitors were able to see through Jane’s smoke and mirrors right to her malicious agenda of character assassination on an author she doesn’t like.  Here is one:

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So, J.S. Cooper, if you’re reading this.  You’re not alone.  Not by far.  You are actually in very good company, right up there with other best-selling authors of whom Jane has been jealous for quite some time.

So, don’t sweat it, girl, and just keep on rockin’ with your awesome books!

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Goodreads Premium Author Program

Filed Under: Amazon, Goodreads by Johnny Be Good — 7 Comments
June 30, 2013

Just when we thought Goodreads couldn’t get any more corrupt, they pull something like this.  Apparently, they are offering authors something called a Goodreads Premium Author account where authors can pay — yes, you read that right — pay to have reviews either removed or hidden.  This past week, we received this email from Lost:

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Then shortly afterward, we received this comment from Anon-a-mouse:

I don’t know if you’ve posted about this but certain authors have been getting e-mails from GR asking if they are interested in an elite author program, which includes having certain reviews removed. The catch is the author has to pay to be part of the program. So, instead of cleaning up the act, Amazon is now making GR more corrupt, and for profit.

We haven’t seen one of these emails yet, but we did come across this where Patrick talks about the Premium Author account:

And we were sent this screenshot by a visitor who is a GR author and clicked on the in Patrick’s comment:

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So instead of removing the trolls and their author-hating non-reviews (like they should), they want to make money off of authors who want these reviews either removed, hidden, or buried by other reviews that they choose to have at the top of their book pages.  The idea of capitalizing on this is so disgusting, we don’t even know where to begin talking about it.  So we’ll let our visitors do that.

Feel free to leave comments, letting everyone know your thoughts and feelings regarding this corrupt GR author program.

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Goodreads: A New Venue For Prostitution?

Filed Under: MISC by Johnny Be Good — 28 Comments
June 15, 2013

We received a very interesting email just recently from a site visitor called Rosebud.  Rosebud decided to contact us after witnessing what happened to Emma Paul just a few days ago.  Fed up with the abuse on GR, this visitor wanted to inform us of a prostitution ring that existed (and may still exist) on Goodreads.

So, what did Rosebud have to tell us?  We’ll let you read it for yourself:

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We haven’t yet seen any evidence of this but have nonetheless forwarded Rosebud’s email to the authorities through our contacts.  If this information is true, it needs to be investigated immediately.  If any of our readers have any information on this GR prostitution ring, please let us know through our Contact Us page.

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A.H. Jumps At Shadows

Filed Under: Bullied Author, Bully Attacks, GR Bully by Johnny Be Good — 6 Comments
June 15, 2013

Just recently, we received this message from Bully Watcher:

Have you all seen this?

This author tried to defend a reviewer and that psychotic bitch Angela labeled her BBA!

WTF?

To which Goronwy responded:

I think Angela has reached the meltdown stage. Like all these authors who are so loudly opposed to BBAs, she originally hoped that her stance would attract more readers. When this doesn’t work, they become progressively more aggressive and unhinged until they stop making sense altogether and just scream dementedly in public. Just look at Ann S..

Goronwy’s reference to Looney is correct.  It’s how Looney got her name.  But ever since we showed our readers that she hypocritically broke her own “” several times, she’s suddenly gone silent.  See Sanctimonious Hypocrisy and Bully Wank.

And we’re not complaining!

We think Goronwy is absolutely right.  Why?  We’ll let you read for yourselves how unhinged Angela is becoming.  Here is the review and comments that set her off:

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As for Angela’s own review of the author’s book, check it out.  She actually accuses the author of setting up the whole thing:

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As we said, she’s jumping at shadows now, seeing BBA everywhere she goes.

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GR Silences Authors, Part 2

Filed Under: Abuse, Bully Hypocrisy, Bully Lies, Goodreads by Johnny Be Good — 18 Comments
June 15, 2013

Before we begin with our post today, we want to share with you a new development on GR.  Apparently, GR wants to know how customers rate them:

RateGROne of our visitors already filled out the form and had this to say:

I received a GR “survey” today and was happy to tell them my low opinion of their pathetic, anti-writer site.  They’ve done nothing less than create a stalking and trolling playground for sociopaths.  It’s beyond me what the point of all this mass hatred of writers is.  I don’t know if it is fueled by other authors, or just the usual conspiracy of dunces.

Anyway, it’s good to know you guys are here.  I think the best way to influence Goodreads is to stop using their site completely.  Those of us who do well with Amazon may want to see if we can influence things on that side of the great divide.  Beyond that, I think GR is a lost cause.

If any of our readers want to join in and let GR know what you think, just click on this link.  We’ve also posted a link to the survey on our sidebar.

Now, on to business…

In our last post, GR Silences Authors, Part 1, we showed you the story of an author who spoke out against the abuse on GR and was banned for it.  Now we want to show you the whiny feedback discussion started by , one of the bullies on our BBG list.

As you read, please take note of a couple points.  One, everything these bullies accuse authors of doing (i.e. stalking and harassing, getting their friends to stalk and harass, etc.) is absolutely false.  We never see authors doing this.  But!  We’ve seen on countless occasions the bullies doing it not just to authors, but to anyone who stands against them.  Two, these dumb asses still seem to think the reaction to them is about negative reviews.  It’s not.  It’s about their vicious and ceaseless personal attacks against others.  This is a point they never seem to get.  Finally, we have honestly lost track of how many times we’ve caught the bullies in their pious hypocrisy, not to mention their incessant lying.  In the from the GR feedback forum, you will see this come out glaringly in their words:

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Then Kara responds with this:

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We’d like to draw your attention to where she says:

Blog posts on Goodreads that seek to harass or intimidate individual reviewers do violate our Terms of Service and the appropriate action will be taken.

Gosh, that’s funny, Kara, because that’s exactly what Angela did in  and yet strangely enough, nothing happened to her post or her account.

Oh, but wait!  That’s right!  I forgot.  She’s one of you, isn’t she?  So she can harass anyone she wants and get away with it.  Silly me.  I should have known.

Anyhow, back to the whiners:

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Now at this point, we would tell you why all of this whiny bullshit is so hypocritical, but we don’t have to because Annabeth took the words right out of our mouths:

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Well said, Annabeth!

And then the whining continues.  Notice how Jim says something very insightful here.  Apparently, he gets it — there’s a reason these bullies end up on troll alert lists.

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Oh no!  He said our name!  What are we going to do?  We’re supposed to be the blog that shall not be named!  😀

After this ultimate faux pas by Jim, the bullies truly go crazy.  Guess he really hit a nerve:

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STGRB is vile trash?  Why?  Because we tell the truth about you?

You notice the outright lies these people tell when our site is mentioned?  That we do all of this shit that we’ve never done (also referring to Lucy’s phantom phone caller).  This is their usual MO.  They’ve been trying to discredit our site ever since we started.  By this time, their lies have gotten old.

Finally, after the discussion degenerates into an I-hate-STGRB frenzy, Emily ends the conversation because it has become “unproductive”:

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And that’s it!

Whiny, whiny, whiny bullies!  They will never grow up.

But in all seriousness, we believe that this is just the beginning to a bigger issue that we see evolving on GR.  That is the growing hatred of authors and the silencing of their voices when they try to speak out against the abuse and injustice that is done to them.

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GR Silences Authors, Part 1

Filed Under: Abuse, Bullied Author, Bully Attacks, Bully Crime, Bully Hypocrisy, Goodreads by Johnny Be Good — 21 Comments
June 14, 2013

A lot has been happening on GR recently, not the least of which a campaign being launched by the bullies to silence authors who speak up about the abuse on the site.  And not surprisingly, the GR mods are playing along.  But before we get into this, we have some news for you, some good, some not so good:

1. It appears as though our Twitter stalker (remember her – the one who stood in line to get concert tickets while she furiously sent us insane tweets one after the other?  Yeah, her!) has finally gotten her just desserts.  We were contacted by one of our sources who told us that she and her husband are being investigated by the police for crimes against an author (i.e. death threats, etc.):

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It’s true, if you check her blog and , they’re completely gone.  This isn’t the first time the bullies have physically threatened someone.  Just take a look at our post Bully Threats and you’ll see a few there.

2. An author (and her husband) who was attacked last year, with whom we have had contact ever since, has just recently reported to us that someone has been consistenly hacking her Facebook and email accounts.  She and her husband have the FBI looking into it:

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And again, this isn’t the first time the bullies have tried to hack into accounts (this time succeeding).  We’ve shown that they tried it on our hosting account in Bully Crime.

3. We were informed just recently that another author we know has had her books banned from Dear Author because she “associates with that site.”  Apparently Jane Litte seems to think that authors who are affiliated with our site are too much of a danger to her reviewers.  We died laughing when we heard that.  She doesn’t realize that they are a danger to themselves because of the way they behave, like harassing and baiting authors for instance (click here and scroll down to view screenshots of this).

Give it up, Janey!  Everyone knows about you and your reviewers.  They can see right through you.

4. We were given a link by a site visitor to an article written by Tamara Ward about a Q&A session between authors and GR staff.  Tamara’s post starts with this:

Hello, WG2E-land! Last week, Goodreads staff held office hours, an online session where both the Goodreads author marketing coordinator, Cynthia Shannon, and director, Patrick Brown, answered questions from writers. Writers could ask questions live or post them beforehand on the discussion thread.

I’ve tried to hit the highlights of the office hours in this post, but if you want to read the blow-by-blow, visit the group discussion on Goodreads at . Better yet, join the group at ! Though discussion on last week’s office hours has been frozen, perhaps, in the future, Goodreads staff will have another session.

If you scroll down a bit on the page, you will see that a few authors who know what’s really going on chimed in with their concerns:

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If you read the Q&A session by clicking the links Tamara gives, you will notice how they conveniently avoid talking about the real problem that plagues GR, namely the GR bullies and their consistently vicious attacks on authors.

And this brings us to the point of our post.  Look at the link Rick left to a Goodreads feedback discussion called .  You’ll see some familiar names.  This is just the beginning of what appears to be a growing campaign on GR to silence authors.

Once such author, , was silenced by the GR staff when the trolls began an attack on him and then reported to him the GR mods on trumped up charges:

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Why was he reported and banned?  Because he wrote blog posts (on his own blog!) speaking out about the GR/Amazon trolls:

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The Trolls Arrive!

And the attack ensued:

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And then:

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And there you have it!  GR does not allow authors freedom of speech.  If they speak up about the abuse happening on the site, they are silenced.

For tomorrow’s post, GR Silences Authors, Part 2, we will be talking more about the GR feedback discussion mentioned above called .

Stay tuned!

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Unprofessional, Thy Name Is Goodreads

Filed Under: Abuse, Bullied Author, Bully Attacks, Bully Reviews, Goodreads, GR Bully Culture by Johnny Be Good — 13 Comments
June 11, 2013

We just recently received this link from Goronwy (and also by email from an anon):

Slightly OT, but does anyone know what happened here?

I don’t know who Emma is.

We don’t know who Emma is, either, but apparently she is an author who started a GR feedback thread called   Her original post and comments are gone now because she deleted her account and left GR, like many authors before her.  But from what we can gather from the comments, Emma defended another author who was being attacked and then had her BOOKS labeled as BBA, whore author, attention whore, etc.  You get the picture, the bullies’ usual MO.  In one of her comments, Emma said:

This isn’t about them liking my book, I could care less. This is about being verbally assaulted. They are calling me a whore, not my book!

Do we agree with her?  Is creating BOOKshelves that verbally assault the author a form of harassment?

Answer: absolutely!  It’s the same as writing it right into the BOOK review, which the trolls did with such fervor before GR published its reviewing policy last year, attempting to put an end to author bashing in reviews.  And it didn’t even put an end to it.  Those reviews are only being hidden and some not even that, even when you flag them.  It appears from what we’ve heard that if you flag them, the person doing the flagging will get their account deleted.  Hmm…

Of course the trolls will argue that they have the right to shelve their books anyway they want.  What they don’t seem to get is that these shelves are supposed to be BOOKshelves.  Key word there: BOOK.  They’re not authorshelves.  But apparently these dumb asses can’t seem to tell the difference.

Edit 9/24/2013: We now have a screenshot of Emma’s hellish crime *sarcasm* that set off the attack below.  It was a comment she made in the GR Feedback forum where she stated she would report abusive reviews:

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If you all want to read the convo from what’s left of Emma’s thread here it is:

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And this is how Kara ended the thread after Emma deleted her account and left:

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Did you all get that?  The thread was no longer productive, so she closed it.  In other words, the author bashing in this thread was over because the author had left so the thread was no longer productive, i.e., harassing/attacking/humiliating/etc. an author is considered productive on GR.

Now, we want to show you how Kara ended another thread that we featured in our post Kara Shuts Down Harassment Thread.  A little background on this post: author C.J. Anderson was being harassed by a reviewer who decided to behave like an asshole.  When C.J. couldn’t get a hold of the GR mods, she started feedback thread called .  As soon as Kara found out about it, she shut the thread down and said this:

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You see the difference between what she said on Emma’s thread and this one?  On C.J’s thread, she tried to protect a reviewer who was acting like an ass and on Emma’s thread, she shut it down because the author was no longer there to be harassed, so the thread was no longer productive.

For most of our readers here, this will not be surprising and we’re not surprised either, but quite frankly we still think this attitude toward and treatment of authors is a bunch of bullshit and we will continue to say so.

Therefore, we want to end this post by telling you a little story.  A site visitor we have come to befriend just informed us that he recently finished a book (congratulations, btw!) and was organizing a blog tour through a blog tour company.  He reads our blog religiously and told the blog tour manager about it, warning her about the GR/Amazon trolls, many of whom are blog owners.  The manager’s response was so simple and right on, we were surprised we never mentioned this fact before.  She said:

You don’t need to worry.  We don’t associate with unprofessional blog tour hosts.  Our hosts blog about books, not about the latest gossip, and they certainly don’t bash authors.  If we ever see anything like that in our hosts, we automatically take them off our recipient list and never work with them again.

And there you have it!  The words of a REAL professional.

These trolls will argue that they are not professionals and can therefore do whatever they want and treat authors any way they want, calling them whores or worse… and Goodreads allows it, even encourages it.  As Kara so subconsciously points out, it’s considered productive.  But what Goodreads is forgetting is that it IS a business (which is why Amazon bought it) and this business depends on a product: books.  The people who write those books are authors.  So, basically, Goodreads is shitting all over the very people who make their business possible.

As one of our site visitors so astutely put it:

Unprofessional, Thy Name is Goodreads!

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Something Rotten at the Core of GR, Part 2

Filed Under: Absolute Write, Asshats, Bully Crime, Bully Hypocrisy, Goodreads by Johnny Be Good — 48 Comments
June 8, 2013

When we said that there is something rotten at the core of GR, we were right.  To recap from our previous post, Something Rotten at the Core of GR, we told you about what happened to GR member Kathy when she and Angela had a disagreement in the then secret Asshat group.  (To read that discussion, go to Asshats Will Be Asshats).  After we published their disagreement on our site, Kathy suddenly found that her account was being tampered with by one of the moderators at GR.  That is, her reviews and messages started disappearing.  When she tried to replace them, her account was deleted altogether:

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What’s more, Eve Thomas who had announced she was back on GR to promote her new book on domestic violence, suddenly found that out of nowhere, one of her blog posts had been deleted and then shortly after that, her account was completly blown away as well.

What do these two women, Kathy and Eve, have in common?  They both had run-ins with Angela.

Not only that, shortly after our publication of Something Rotten at the Core of GR, we had a wave of people contact us to let us know that when they had shelved  as Badly Behaving Author, their accounts, too, were booted from the site (which made me almost choke on my wine when I read .  Can we say that Angie is just a tad hypocritical?  Why, yes, I think we can!).

In the comments on our last post, speculations went flying everywhere about the Goodreads staff being involved in the corruption and criminal activity.  Now, given a new piece of evidence, we know for sure that they are.  A site visitor sent us this screenshot of a  taken from Angela’s review of Kristin Michelle Adam’s book:

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For all those who don’t know what TPTB stands for, it’s “The Powers That Be”.  So, now we know that Angela is one of “The Powers That Be” on Goodreads, which means that she is either a moderator or some kind of manager.

Is this all starting to make sense now?

Now, let’s give you a little taste of what Angela is like:

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As you can clearly see, she is a very angry woman.  To read more about Angela, you can go here and here.

So what is our message today?  Why are we showing you this?  Because, these are the kind of people who are running Goodreads.

We’ll say that again, this time a little more loudly:

THESE ARE THE KIND OF PEOPLE WHO ARE RUNNING GOODREADS!

With Angela being TPTB on GR, the site is really getting to be exactly the kind of snake pit Absolute Write has become with Macallister Stone as its owner and moderator (if any of you don’t remember our post on AW, please read The Banning of Robin Sullivan).

So, on that note, we’re going to end this post with a comment left by Karig:

Aaaaand this is why Goodreads is utterly worthless for authors: The inmates are running the asylum over there — or, at the very least, one of the inmates has access to the security office.

You’re absolutely right, Karig.  The nutters are indeed running the asylum.

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An addendum.  We wanted to show you by A.H. showing her reaction to GR friends with whom she has just had a falling out.  The post is very telling about her character:

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We now have her listed on our Biggest Offenders list and on our Scary Run Fast sidebar.

Whatever you do, watch out for this one!

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Amazon Thinks You’re Stupid

Filed Under: Amazon, Opinion Piece by Johnny Be Good — 24 Comments
June 7, 2013

Through a tip from one of our visitors, we found someone who is just like us: readers who are sick of the bullshit review policy on Amazon.  The tip came from Jack:

Check this out everyone. A friend and fellow writer posted it on Facebook. In particular note the hashtag one star thing for Twitter. I just did it:)

http://greenembers.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/why-amazon-thinks-youre-stupid-opinion-piece/

This reader, Green Embers, starts off with:

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Then:

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Even Joe Konrath says much the same thing in his blog post, Amazon Removes Reviews:

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Finally, Green Embers ends the post by encouraging everyone to join in a twitter campaign against this asinine review policy:

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We agree and we’ve all tweeted Amazon a big fat one star with this hashtag.  We encourage others to join in.  Now, we just need to start another twitter campaign for GR.  :)

So, we’d like to end this post with a little message composed by all of us here at STGRB:

Amazon if you’re reading this, pay attention.  That goes for you, too, GR (i.e. Patrick, Kara, Emily and anyone who is daft enough to protect the GR bully community).  We’re not stupid.  We are all readers on this site and can tell by reading reviews which are genuine and which are obviously put there by trolls who just want to ruin an author.  Green Embers and Joe Konrath are right.  You aren’t improving your review system by deleting honest favorable reviews and refusing to remove those written by obvious trolls.  All you’re doing is insulting your customers.

Furthermore, we would never dream of treating authors the way the trolls who infest your sites treat them.  We don’t expect authors to give us freebies, or kiss our asses, or bend over backwards to please us.  We will always show respect and admiration for those who put so much of themselves into their hard work for our reading enjoyment and who are brave enough to place their hearts and souls out there for public scrutiny.  Even if we read a book we think is crap, we will still show respect in our behavior and our reviews.  We will not take it out on the author in an attempt to ruin their reputation and writing career.  And we will never attack an author for something they have said because we’ve taken it the wrong way, twisted it beyond recognition, and shit it out into the social networking toilet rightfully known as the GR and Amazon fora.  Why?  Because we are the true GOODreaders.  Because we choose to show respect, integrity, and gratitude in everything we do, to everyone we know, that is, everyone who is a non-troll.  A person would expect professional organizations like yours to do the same, but instead you don’t because you’re either too stupid, lazy, corrupt or just plain f’d up.  It’s time to clean up your act, Amazon/GR.  It is long overdue.

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