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:
If you all want to read the convo from what’s left of Emma’s thread here it is:
And this is how Kara ended the thread after Emma deleted her account and left:
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:
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!
« Something Rotten at the Core of GR, Part 2 GR Silences Authors, Part 1 »
That was or is Emma Paul:
and these were her own books shelved which she found harrassing:
I wanted to add, that Mrs. Joseph and the Jennifer in this thread are currently in a particularly nasty mood. Joseph attacks where she can full-scale, and this Jennifer (she seems to be another from the one on your list?) is like a nasty weasel, biting from below where she can get away with it.
You might look at the discussions about removal of all author blogs ( http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1358339-removal-of-all-author-blogs ) and disabling author ratings ( ), proof of an author-hatred which is now taking on stunning proportions.
Thank you for all of this information!
The only ones who shelved the book with nasty labels were Angie Horn’s two accounts, one being her sock puppet soon:eta, and someone called Grimlock.
What does that tell you? AH is behind most of the drama shit on GR. She’s the queen B who rules the drones.
The first thread has been closed down by Kara because it’s no longer ‘productive.’
Because they named us! Oh no!
Omg! Bitch, whine, moan. It’s floors me that these people don’t see the hypocrisy of their words.
Yep.
You missed the phase when she was ‘Slutty Robot Pants.’
An appropriate name for Shoshana Bick would be “Hairy-Faced Troll Monster.”
I would like to see charges pressed against one of these people eventually.
So would we.
That’s the only way it will stop them. I believe they honestly think they are entitled to say and do as they please. If any of them were to say this stuff face to face they would be arrested for the threat.
Just to let everyone know. We updated Emma’s post recently to show the screenshot of her comment that set the trolls off. See above.