As we said in our previous post, we are very late in posting this. For those who haven’t heard about the Guardian’s article that talks about Anne Rice signing , which now has well over 4,000 signatures:
Here it is:
We’ve heard about this kind of thing before, in particular the threats. Case in point: Lauren P. We also mentioned it in our post on Charlotte Dawson and we covered the abusive reviews and threats that were directed toward Veronica Roth in Jane Litte Defends Violent Reviewers. Sadly, the online abuse that Anne is talking about has been allowed to continue for too long. Fortunately, some of the commenters on the article agree:
But it didn’t take long for the trolls to migrate over and begin slamming Anne and everyone else who agrees with her. As you will see in their comments, they’re still trying to pretend that the issue of author abuse is all about reviews:
The Debbie to which Heather is referring is Debbie S. of BookLikes who seems to think that threatening an author in a review shouldn’t be considered bullying:
And here are a few more of them voicing their very self-important opinions:
The troll mentioned above is . who was a member of Angela H.’s Asshat group before AH was banned from Goodreads for abusing others. Pathetically, Rick has started his own Change.org petition which calls upon Bezos to protect members’ anonymity. We agree with Heather that it’s very telling these people want to protect their anonymity:
The fact that they want to hide their real names says a lot about their intentions. If they can’t say something about authors while using their real names, then maybe they shouldn’t say it? Or maybe they’re people who choose to create fake accounts just to troll authors they don’t like. This happens quite often.
To end this post, we’ll give you a perfect example of this. It’s why Todd Barselow and Anne Rice are right and that Amazon will do well to remove the anonymity of its members. Here is a perfect example of a review created by a sock. You will notice Mahala (another well known Amazon and GR troll) harassing a commenter who points out that the reviewer is a sock. Then Mahala accuses the commenter of being the author:
This is the kind of crap that needs to stop.
This is worth a read.
http://janedevin.com/2014/03/07/rices_petition_to_amazon/