Are you an author?  Are you thinking about joining Goodreads?  If so, there are few things you should know.  Joining Goodreads may actually end up harming your career rather than advancing it unless you know who to avoid.  On the site, there is a group of individuals commonly known as the GR bullies.  For names and links, see our page Badly Behaving Goodreaders and our right sidebar under Amazon Fora Trolls (you will notice that many of these people troll both the GR and Amazon fora.)  To learn more about them, we suggest reading our pages: What Is a GR Bully?, The Bully MO, and The Biggest Offenders.  These pages will tell you what they are, who they are, and how they operate.

To see firsthand what they have done in the past, check out our posts featuring the attacks on:

James Austen

Kiera Cass

Emily Giffin

Rebecca Hamilton

MT Dismuke

Lynne Copeland

Emma Paul

Eve Thomas

Sharon Desruisseaux

Nadege Richards

J.S. Cooper

Katherine Ashe

Hugh Howey

Ryan Winfield

Simone Elkeles

C.J. Anderson

Judyann McCole

L. Kirstein, Part 1

L. Kirstein, Part 2

Lauren Howard, Part 1

Lauren Howard, Part 2

Nathan Bransford

Melissa Foster

Melissa Douthit

Karen S. Bell

Mandy Baldwin

These are just the ones we’ve covered.  There are many, many more.

If you would like an example of the bullies’ bully reviews, click here, and if you want to see an example of the bullies cyber stalking an author, click here.  To read about Peter Pan’s experience with these people, check out his post, From Fool to Furious.  And finally, to read about them from Stitch’e POV, go to The Bully Culture.

Why are we showing you this?  Simple.  To warn new and aspiring authors of the dangers of joining Goodreads.  If you run into the wrong people (i.e. the bullies), the GR moderators will not help you.  In fact, they will side with the people who are antagonizing you.  In this post, we will give you a few examples of that, but before we do, we want to show you this comment Patrick Brown (Goodreads executive manager) wrote, talking about what he considers “freedom of speech” on Goodreads:

Patrick

You see where he tells Ridley she should feel free to say whatever she wants about an author?  The problem is that there is a difference between freedom of speech and libel carried out with the malicious intent of harming someone’s career.  Wikipedia seems to understand this and take it seriously.  Goodreads does not.  (See Minerva Gets Burned where the bullies tried to libel Dougie Brimson on his Wikipedia page and got in trouble for it.  They later tried to do the same thing to Emily Giffin.)

We began our blog in early July 2012, to report on the bullies’ behavior and warn others about them.  Our site was recognized by the Huffington PostUSA Today, Forbes, Goodereader.com and The Passive Voice.  As a result of the negative media attention, Goodreads had to take action, so they publicly announced the publication of their TOS (GR Rolls Em Out).

Edit 1/28/2014: In September of 2013 they then announced a new anti-bullying policy.  You can read the summary here on the Goodreads Wikipedia page under Criticism:

Criticism

So… did GR really clean up its act?  Nope.

We’ll give you a few instances of what GR has done in response to this criticism:

1) Simone Elkeles.  A GR member names Elle wrote a mocking review that was a parody of author Simone Elkeles.  Simone responded by requesting to both the reviewer and the GR moderators that the review be removed or changed as it was a misrepresentation of an author and violated GR reviewing guidelines.  As a result, she was bullied in the comments of the review and her books were attacked.  You can read about it in our post, The Bullying of Simone Elkeles.  We checked back on Simone a few weeks later and found that Elle’s review was still there along with all her comments and the comments of the people who bullied Simone.  What was missing was Simone herself.  Her account and her comments had been removed from GR altogether.

2) Athena just recently spoke to a best-selling independent author over the phone and what this author had to say was shocking.  A few months ago, Patrick Brown approached this author to ask her if she would endorse Goodreads.  Because this author had read our blog, she told Patrick that not only would she NOT endorse Goodreads, she would tell the media that the information found on GR about books and authors is unreliable and she would tell them why.  The following day, this author’s GR account was deleted from the site.

3) A GR member flagged a review that was a violation of GR TOS (according to Patrick Brown, “review the book, not the author”) and suddenly her account was deleted from GR:

HowFarDoesRotGo

4) Below is a message we received from an author who was attacked by the bullies for something she said on her blog.  She appealed to the GR moderators and guess how much help she received.  That’s right.  None.

I’m really upset over my Goodreads comments, rate/reviews, and shelving. They scarred my product pages forever. I’ve reported them to Goodreads two and three times now and they still won’t remove them. Even the one with curse words. They will not remove it. Their TOS specifically states you cannot use slander or harassment or anything to mentally or physically hurt Goodreads members. They STILL will not remove the posts. What the hell is wrong with them?

I’m thinking Goodreads is not a friendly place for authors. Most of my friends on Goodreads are authors. I’m not really meeting the reading/buying market there. I’ve been paying for advertising on Goodreads, and so far, it isn’t paying off at all. I’m thinking that’s a waste of time. It sucks because I feel like I’m paying to have these trolls trash mine and others’ books. It’s bad enough I’m not getting sales from the clicks, but then to think I’m actually PAYING Goodreads to let these librarians and members trash books.

Last but not least, we wanted to show you some screenshots of by a site visitor:

KdpConvo

We’ve had several site visitors speculate as to the same thing – that people within the industry are doing this to deliberately “bury the indie,” as the one commenter puts it.  Is it true?  We don’t know but it very well could be.

As for Goodreads itself, it was founded in 2006 by Otis Chandler and ever since it began, it has created an atmosphere that is hostile to authors.  An anti-author atmosphere where the bully culture was born and thrives.  The bullies we talk about on our site are the ones who are largely responsible for this author vs. reviewer mentality that permeates Goodreads and thus the book community as a whole.  As far as we’re concerned, it doesn’t have to be this way.  As far as we’re concerned, this author vs. reviewer war should not exist.  It is a fabrication created by the bullies themselves (many of whom are also authors or wannabe authors.)

As we’ve said before, we here at STGRB are not authors.  We are GR members and reviewers who are respectful of and grateful for all the hard work of those who put their hearts and souls into writing books (i.e. those authors who are not part of the bully crowd.)  We would never dream of treating them the way these bullies have for so long.

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