Just this last week, we’ve seen a gang attack on an author the likes of which we hadn’t seen in a while. The victim was author Mandy Baldwin.

It seems the trouble started with this complaint (now deleted) which Mandy made on March 20 2014 on the KDP forums.

A word of warning: KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) forums are forums provided by Amazon for authors who publish on Kindle. Many authors think they are private. They are not. Like all other public discussion forums (Goodreads groups and threads, Amazon forums) they are NOT a safe places for authors to vent. It is a sad fact of life that nowadays all public discussion groups are monitored by trolls looking for authors to attack. When you join these groups, assume you are talking to a hostile audience, and adjust your behavior accordingly.

Back to Mandy Baldwin’s story. Her KDP complaint first attracted the attention of the trolls, but she made the mistake of repeating it on Goodreads about a month later

Baldwin deleted her posts, but thanks to the ever-vigilant trolls (in this case Spare Ammo, AKA Mahala on Amazon and Goodreads) we have the screenshot of her original post. All screenshots .

Complaining on Goodreads triggered a .  You can spot many of the usual signs of a Linda Hilton troll review:

#1 Grumble that formatting, even though correct, somehow impedes the reading experience:

“Block paragraphs made the reading experience choppy, without an easy flow. Formatting matters.”

In a later blog post, Hilton goes on and on, as is her wont, about why she doesn’t like block paragraphs.

“Block paragraphs work well for non-fiction if the author is presenting distinct information and wants the reader to take a tiny pause to think about what she’s just read. But fiction, when the author should want the reader to get into and stay in the story, any pause is just an opportunity for the reader to remember she has something else to do. While you as the writer may allow her a convenient bathroom break between chapters, you don’t want to be giving her those breaks every single paragraph.”

#2 Complain about the POV. Better yet, say while “there is nothing inherently wrong” with the POV chosen, while insinuating that there is, in fact, a lot wrong with it.

“Although there’s been a passage of time from the end of chapter one to the start of chapter two, the amount of time passed isn’t defined, leaving me as a reader bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla”

At this point, Mahala got into the game with a blog post of her own where she claims to have discovered that some of Mandy’s reviewers, Naomi and Becky, were not quite on the up and up. When a commenter on STGRB pointed out that she is hardly the one to talk given that she has championed sock-puppeteer author Gavin Hetherington, Mahala gets mad.

Given the treatment she’s meted out to authors who’ve displeased her (names omitted for their protection) you don’t want to get Mahala mad!

But by this time, Mandy’s days were numbered. Look at the ratings and shelvings of her books. You’ll see some very familiar names.

For easy reference, compare them to the names in the ‘Badly Behaving Goodreaders’ section. If they’re not all there, they should be.

So what have we learned from this? The same old lesson: NEVER complain about reviews on a public forum, at least not under your author name. It’s an invitation for the trolls to attack you. Mandy made the mistake of trying to argue her point. Her books were trashed as punishment.

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