Oh Linda, Linda, Linda.
What am I gonna do with you?
Let me give readers a short summary of what I’m talking about:
This is your own account, taken from your blog. And this has you feeling angry, discouraged, demoralized and helpless. You’re also having trouble sleeping.
My response to you is:
Why all this drama llama, when so many worse things haven’t bothered you at all?
Take the recent events surrounding young author Gavin Who?
I noticed you kept your mouth firmly shut during that debacle.
Let me summarize said debacle for anyone who’s missed it: a young indie author, Gavin H., introduced himself to the gang of marauding reviewers that run wild on Goodreads and Booklikes (and sometimes, still, Amazon) by attacking another author deemed a BBA. For this he was praised and feted, until a bad fairy pointed out that Gavin had a ton (okay, twenty-two) obvious sock-puppet reviews, and another ton of very suspicious Twitter followers. Gavin went through the charade of contacting Goodreads to have them ‘look into’ the ‘fishy’ reviews, which he claimed had nothing to do with him. And Goodreads removed them. He also wrote a huge post explaining that the reason he had so many Twitter followers was because he does a lot of charity work.
So what did all the scourges of the BBAs – you know, Spare Ammo (Mahala), Grimlock, TinaNicole, Nemo Moonlight Library, Shelby, Barbara Lindt Ninja, etc. – do? They ACTUALLY PRETENDED TO BELIEVE HIM when he said he had nothing to do with those sock-puppet reviews! They COMMENDED him for doing the right thing in having Goodreads ‘look into’ them! They believed all that twaddle about his charity work!
To be fair (I don’t know if that’s really the word, but I’ll leave it for now) you were one of the few who stayed silent during all this. I have to congratulate you for not dignifying this appalling farce by joining the chorus of Gavin believers.
But if you can stay silent during the Gavin H. debacle, then you have to allow others the same privilege. You can’t demand that anyone else ‘speak out’ when something you consider wrong is being done. That means that nobody, not The Girl Who Loves Books, not any other blogger, should feel obligated to out the author you’ve been talking about in your last three posts.
For anyone who wants to read all about it, here are the posts I’m referring to:
BookLikes post
Whoever you are, I think you’re a chickenshit coward
Sucker Punched
You ask:
Has the credibility of every single review everywhere now been called into question?
Oh, please.
The credibility of reviews was called into question a long time ago, when you and your friends started 1 starring and fake reviewing authors who you’d taken a weird dislike to for whatever bullshit reason, or just because you were in a shitty mood that day. Or maybe because they wrote in the same genre as you, but were more successful, so you decided to one star them, just because. The credibility was totally destroyed when you and your friends defended the right of people to rate and review books you hadn’t read. In fact, credibility probably went out the window when Stacia Kane wrote her memorable blog post which you and your friends love to defend:
Readers have the right to say whatever the fuck they want about a book. Period. They have that right. If they hate the book because the MC says the word “delicious” and the reader believes it’s the Devil’s word and only evil people use it, they can shout from the rooftops “This book is shit and don’t read it” if they want. If they want to write a review entirely about how much they hate the cover, they can if they want. If they want to make their review all about how their dog Foot Foot especially loved to pee on that particular book, they can.
So don’t get your knickers in a twist over the credibility of reviews. They never had any, but it’s not for the reasons you think.
You say:
No author can call out a reviewer and say, “You’re dishonest; you protected a scammer,” without risking retaliation. And yet every author out there has been harmed by this, the good as well as the bad.
Oh, please. Nobody with any sense was harmed by the little incident in question. But you, on the other hand, are harmed when you let the hypocrites who defended Gavin make their hypocritical comments about honesty all over your blog post. Or you would be harmed, if you still had a shred of credibility.
I guess this is as good a place as any to call out these commenters, such as Spare Ammo, Grimlock, Barbara Lindt Ninja, and others, and say to them:
You’re dishonest. You protected a scammer.
What else is there to say?
