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:
Rebecca Hamilton
Sharon Desruisseaux
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:
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 Post, USA 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:
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:
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:
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.
You know how I like you, STGRB, but for the first time I disagree with something on here.
In my opinion, I do not think Emily Giffin was bullied. It started when her husband posted rude comments to a reviewer who gave Emily’s book 3 stars IIRC.
Emily posted about it on her Facebook page, then she found a bad review written by a random blogger. I read the review, it was not the least bit rude or mean. Emily posted a link to that review from Facebook, and her fans went nuts and harassed the reviewer. Later, Emily tried to “call off the dogs” but it was too late. I believe the reviewer was genuinely traumatized from her experience, from what I’d read on her blog.
On Emily’s FB page, someone wrote that the reviewer’s life had been threatened, and Emily dismissed it by saying the reviewer should remove her post. That’s like blaming the victim.
Emily never apologized in person to the girl. Other people did, if you could call it that, but Emily did not. Emily posted some terrible things on her FB page about the girl, then deleted it. She also demanded that others delete their posts, and stop talking about it altogether.
Emily, in this instance, was the bully. She strikes me as another one of those entitled divas.
This is my opinion of it.
No worries. You can state your opinion. After analyzing the evidence, we took a different view than yours:
https://stopthegrbullies.com/2013/03/18/the-attack-on-emily-giffin/
Yes, feel free to say what you think. We realize that not everyone is going to agree with every post we write.
Thank you Athena, and Johnny be good.
Emily Giffin didn’t deserve the backlash, I do agree with that much. Still not sure, in my humble opinion, that the reviewer wasn’t victimized. She may have posted about the “death threats” on her blog because she needed to get it off her chest, and needed her friends’ support.
I guess both parties have played their own part in the drama, and neither is completely innocent.
As always STGRB, keep up the good work. You’ve done an excellent job in raising awareness of the bullying problem. Kudos to you for that!
HappyAnniversary, there was reason to believe that that woman who claimed her life had been threatened was lying. I know someone said they had evidence she was lying but I’ve never seen it. Others say they have. In any case, I thought she was lying simply because she posted on her blog about it. If someone really threatens your life, the last thing you want to do is announce it to the world. Also by reading her posts, I just didn’t believe her. She wasn’t credible.
You’re right, AM. If someone threatens your life, you don’t go and plaster it all over your blog antagonizing the aggressor and provoking them even more to come after you. You contact the police.
I agree. There was something phony about her claim.
Yes and I do agree that it seems many reviewers lie about being threatened. A lot of it does seem phony, and they give real victims a bad name by crying wolf.
Real victims should be pissed off at the ones making shit up. It’s sad that it comes down to this, the fact that when someone says they’ve had death threats, that it’s hard to believe them due to bullies who lie and say the same thing.
I thought by the tone of the reviewer’s post, that she sounded genuine, and genuinely scared, but who really knows?
I tend to think Emily’s has some diva-like tendencies. Seemed like being #2 wasn’t quite good enough for her, when she already had 5 (?) other best-selling books. She gives the word “over achiever” new meaning, not that that’s a bad thing.
I do remember the Emily Giffin and reviewer fiasco. I followed closely as it happened when I heard about it and looked as an outside party looking in. It started with her husband responding to a bad review. I often read comments on her fanpage. She was being harassed by a reader on her page. You would be amazed at what people can find on the internet. This person dug up her address and left nasty messages about her and actors from the Something Borrowed movie. I think Emily has three or four kids. Its very disturbing and scary for someone to look up such personal info as your address. Her husband apologized stating that Emily was being harassed for months by the same person and he mistakenly thought the reviewer was that same person. Hence the use of the word “pyscho”. She has written books for years and has received bad reviews on every book. And its not like every review has some sort of bad response it. I looked at those bad reviews and there are no counter responses. So his story about mistakenly thinking that particular review was from Emily’s stalker messing around certainly adds up. A blogger got involved by changing her review on Amazon from 4 stars to 1 because she didnt like the whole fiasco. That is how that blogger got involved. I was so confused by that part of it. Why would a grown woman get so incredibly involved and moved in something that has nothing to do with them? The whole thing became a perfect storm of anger, confusion and attention whoring. The blogger wrote some pretty awful comments that she never screen shotted and placed on her website. I dont really believe the whole thing about receiving threats and prank phone calls though. I didnt see anything come out of that. Nor did we see screen shots to support that or hear anything come about with the so called police report. The blogger is a photographer who also runs a website where she accuses her fellow local photographers of stealing to sink their businesses and leaves awful reviews on Yelp. It is sad how far a person will go to ruin a person’s career. It is incredibly insecure. It says a lot of bad things about a person. There was a lot of blame to go around in that particular case but I never saw why it should rest solely on the author. Her fans who got involved and started to leave comments on the blogger’s blog are to blame; they are adults. Is it possible that we all choose the wrong things to get upset about?
Good summary, Loren. You remember more about what happened that week than I do. Yes, the woman’s claim didn’t feel real to me, either, even though I didn’t know anything else about her at that point. Thank you for bringing it to light!
HappyAnniversary, Johny Be Good, Athena–I really have enjoyed reading your comments and these blog posts this morning. I had no idea so much has been going on on goodreads and amazon. Now I know better than to be swayed against buying a book or product online based on a review. I will use my own intuition.
I can understand the big five doing this, but why should Amazon? It earns money with all authors’ books regardless.
That’s a good question. But we’ve seen Amazon do things that give us pause sometimes. Like when they started removing reviews of books written by independent authors. They’ve also shown that they don’t really care about authors or readers. What they want to do is take over the publishing industry and corner the market. Why do you think they bought Goodreads? Why do you think they try to force indies into kdp select so they won’t publish their books anywhere else? Amazon cares about Amazon.
I heard a theory that Amazon sees the forums as a way of keeping customers on the site longer. The longer they stay the greater the chance that they’ll make impulse purchases. It doesn’t really see them as a way to sell books, so it doesn’t care what happens there. Also, moderating would probably require hiring more people and spending more money.