Professional jealousy is a topic that has been brought up several times on our blog in reference to some of the bullies. These are the bullies in our lists who are not just readers, but also authors who seek out other authors to harass, threaten, bully, and otherwise destroy their careers. Namely, these are authors like LH, AH, AS, etc. They are the ones who’ve bullied other, more successful authors like Jamie McGuire, Jessica Park, Amanda Hocking, EL James, Anne Rice, etc. More than once, our blog readers have made the comment that professional jealousy plays a HUGE role in this bullying and we at STGRB have to agree. However, we’ve never shown you actual proof of this fact until today.
Now, ever since Jenny Trout was banned from Anne Rice’s blog a few weeks ago, we’ve been keeping a close eye on her blog. If you all don’t remember that wonderful episode, we covered it in Anne Rice Bans the Bullies. Basically, Anne left a link on her Facebook page to our blog post covering Carpet Bomber #9, Nenia Campbell. Upon hearing of this, Jenny Trout, along with several other of her bully friends, hopped on over to Anne’s Facebook page, harassed her, and tried to get her to believe lies about about our website in order to discourage her from supporting us. Anne, being the intelligent woman that she is, saw through their nonsense and did what all victims should do when they are under a bully attack. She deleted their comments and banned them all from her page, including Jenny.
Now, in Jenny’s recent blog rant on author Anna Todd and Anna’s immensely successful book, After, Jenny Trout not only harshly criticizes Anna’s book (or more appropriately, her manuscript) for very minor, very fixable problems, she insults Anna personally, coming very close to calling her a plagiarist. Then, Jenny admits to being jealous and tells her readers why.
Hmm… okay. Here’s a secret that one of our oldest and wisest blog readers shared with us: you don’t have to write like Shakespeare to tell a compelling story. Because that’s what readers care about. THE STORY. It doesn’t really matter if there are a few punctuation or grammatical errors in the manuscript, readers want a good story. And there are authors out there who tell compelling stories and their voices resonate with large audiences. No one really knows how or why. It just happens like that sometimes.
In Anna’s case, she wrote a compelling story she loved and she shared it with her friends on Wattpad. It resonated with A LOT of people. She did it ON HER OWN and built HER OWN author platform. That’s the kind of thing publishers like to see and capitalize on and they do. Does it matter that Anna’s story was similar to another that we know? No. There’s a phrase that comes to mind — there’s nothing new under the sun. Ideas and story elements get recycled. It happens. Sometimes when it does, the story catches on and acquires a large readership. And this is what happened with Anna’s book.
It also helps that Anna Todd is a really cool person. She has a lot of online friends and followers. She’s not a bully or a condescending grandmother type who pats people on the head and murmurs, “Oh, my sweet, summer child.” She doesn’t write jealous, disgruntled blog posts bitching about other people’s success. And we’re pretty sure she’s never been banned from Anne Rice’s Facebook page, or anyone’s Facebook page for that matter.
So, Jenny, here’s our advice: GET OVER IT. STOP comparing yourself to other people and their career success. Down that path lies madness. If you go down that road, the ugly green monster of envy will consume you. START focusing on yourself, your writing, and your career successes no matter how small they are. Whether it’s an email from a favorite fan or the sale of a new book, any success you have should be celebrated. Because really, it doesn’t matter how successful you end up being, there will always be someone who is more successful than you and who’s chosen a path to success that you, in all your wisdom *rolls eyes*, don’t approve of.
So, what are you going to do? Constantly bitch and moan about other people’s success and sit in your corner of the room with your arms crossed and a scowl on your face? OR are you going to be an adult and choose to be happy with yourself and your life and your own success regardless of others who are doing better than you?
It’s your life, your happiness, and your decision.
Make it a good one.
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P.S. If you think Jenny’s post was bad, the comments on her post are even worse. The professional jealousy in all of them is VERY apparent:
Instead of blaming the author, she should blame the publishing industry. Even she admits that it’s publishers who have been peddling lies about what it takes to get published. And it’s authors like Jenny Trout that believed them. I can understand their being angry, but they’re angry at the wrong person. There was a great article in USA today a while ago that said (among other things) “The book business, on the other hand, is steeped in inefficiencies and illogic, with few fans among writers, whose books it generally fails to promote and sell, or readers, who, amid endless consolidation, long ago lost any sense of the meaning of once-vaunted publishing brands and imprints.”
Here’s the link http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/wolff/2014/06/01/the-battle-between-hachette-and-amazon/9761817/
In her post, Jenny does complain about publishers, but if you read the rest of her blog, she has a very unhealthy obsession with Anna. She is constantly talking about her and ripping her book. She is so green with envy, it’s sad.
She’s ripping Anna’s book and constantly talking about her because Anna and her book are the subject of the blog.
Blog, not blog post. Check out the rest of her blog. In other posts on her blog, you’ll notice she has an unhealthy obsession with Anna. It’s jealousy.
She has an obsession with Anna because they all have an obsession with successful fanfic. Jenny T. is not the frist person to stalk a successful p2p author. Their obsession with fanfic and p2p is a whole subject in itself. But Jenny T. seems to think of herself as a ‘real’ author- you know, one who goes to conferences and hones her craft and blah blah blah. Authors like that need to realize that all this going to conferences where agents or editors read your manuscript (for a fee) and recommend workshops (which they or their friends teach, also for a fee) or creative writing programs (ditto) is just playing along with people who make money off of authors’ aspirations. Whether or not they think these authors have any potential.
Agreed.
It is jealousy — a big part of it. They can’t understand why no one wants to read their perfectly spelled, grammatically correct crap (which is due to the fact they can’t tell a story to save their lives), so they go after anyone with a readership or a following. I’ve dealt with these people forever. They’re in fan fic circles, they’re in amateur fic circles, they’re everywhere. They have a post-and-praise little bully circle-jerk set up that supports their delusions of grandeur. They honestly think they can convince the public they are “good” by surrounding themselves with fawning lackeys and sock puppets. It’s sad. They do not seem to understand that people know when they like a story without being told what to like. And that everyone’s opinion is valid, not just theirs.
“They can’t understand why no one wants to read their perfectly spelled, grammatically correct crap.”
*cough*Linda Hilton*cough*
I follow Anna on Twitter and I was surprised to see she and Gavin (the author you were talking about recently) have been tweeting each other since you guys posted this. It was so random.
That’s awesome of Gavin to support her. Did you see the post Gavin Hetherington Apologizes? Gavin is turning out to be a really good guy.
I did see. I’m actually really glad he has realised his mistakes. If this is the kind of person he is when he’s tweeting young authors such as Anna, then I don’t know why he stumbled with those bullies a few months back. He can evidently do much better.
I noticed he tweeted her after you guys posted this about Jenny Trout picking on her, maybe he saw this post? If so, it’s good to know he is turning out to be a good guy. We need more good guys and it’s a shame there aren’t more. Soon though, very soon
I was just speaking with an author who has her bully followers as well as her genuine fans. Her world has fans that hugely outnumber the bullies, even with their ‘trollettes’ and socks trailing on their heels. We came to a unanimous conclusion… It all boils down to jealousy.
True readers see reviews filled with spite and angst knowing enough to ignore and go on and read other, saner opinions. But readers also know, they will choose their reading material by reading a blurb and/or the preview if online or read a chapter in a book standing in a bookstore aisle. True readers make their own decisions and a blow out pity party in a review disguise will not move them.
For a bully in full melt down because the publishing companies has ‘betrayed’ them makes a great satire story.
Jenny Trout said:
I suspect part of the reason that publishing houses demand near-perfect manuscripts is that they used to get such huge numbers of manuscripts from aspiring authors that they had to find ways to cut down on the manuscripts to read through, so the slush pile reader uses any excuse to reject a manuscript so he can get past it and move to the next one on the pile. If you printed your manuscript on the wrong kind of paper, or used the wrong font, or used one-and-a-half-line spacing instead of double spacing, that would be an excuse to reject the manuscript and send out the “Sorry, but this isn’t for us” postcard.
This kind of pickiness is part of the reason why so many authors have turned to self-publishing once they could self-publish online and didn’t have to pay a vanity publisher to print up a thousand copies of their books for them to try to sell out of their garage.
I looked into this “Anna Todd” Person. I didn’t realize how much she actually does and sacrifices for the writing community and her own fans. When I realized what kind of person she was, I wondered, “How can anyone attack her?”
What’s strange is that this woman, Miss Trout, has been known to criticize places like STGRB, which actually makes her somewhat of a hypocrite.
Regardless of how one feels about exposing others online, it cannot be disputed that, at the end of the day, both STGRB and Miss Trout are both creating articles that make comments about others (publicly)
The difference is that STGRB has chosen to report on the actions of the individual, and to my knowledge, I have yet to see STGRB make a post claiming that any writer doesn’t deserve their own success, or any reader, reviewer, blogger, etc.
So, basically, you’ve got this woman performing the same activity as STGRB, only she’s doing it in a way to insult young writers, whereas STGRB does it to expose bullies.
The worst part is that she herself is a writer. A writer who makes blogs to ridicule and degrade other writers.
Snake in the grass, anyone?
I CANNOT express the amount of dislike I have for this Jenny girl right now. Like I don’t understand. You don’t know Anna, you probably haven’t even read the book. I have spoken to Anna before on twitter, she’s lovely and followed my friend when I asked her if she could. Don’t go thinking I’m friends with her because I’m not, but I’m an avid fan of her work and she really knows how to talk to her fans and friends – she is amazing. About After basically glorifying abuse – it does NOT. Harry does make Tessa upset in quite a few of the chapters, but to be completely honest doesn’t that happen in real life to every single one of us? Someone upsets us so we cry. That must mean we are ALL abusive, which we’re not, therefore that point is shit and only used because there’s nothing else that can be considered bad about it. After doesn’t glorify ANY kind of abuse.
Additionally the 1D fandom is NOT full of 11-12 year olds with nothing better to do. Most of us are 15+ girls and boys who actually do have social lives and are getting really good grades in school. We’re not brainwashed and we are not obsessed. Yes, I’ll buy After when it gets published (it gets published in the same month I was born! yay!) but not because I’ll imagine the character as Harry. I’ll buy it because it has a plot unlike 99.9% of fanfics on Wattpad. It drags over 3 books yes, but it’s so much more than Hessa’s relationship. You learn more about the both of them as time passes and this is something people overlook. The main reason us fanfic writers include smut in our books is because it’s realistic. People have sex. So why not write about it? Does that make us shit writers? No, it does not.
About a book’s success in general, all I have to say is that to make a good author you need to be imaginative and have a good plot to your story. Grammar and spelling does count and I don’t read stories that are extremely poorly written because I can’t understand it, but in Anna’s case it’s hardly noticeable apart from the misplacement of commas (or lack thereof), but that doesn’t bother me that much. I proof-read my work too, yet sometimes I do read too fast and still miss some mistakes. That can happen. Anna’s not perfect, none of us are. Her book will be edited and cut down when it is published as she has said herself and her publisher.
Oh, and After is most definitely NOT like FSOG at all. It’s very, very different and people assuming that it’s the same or saying that it in fact IS the same, have clearly not read the book.
I don’t understand this world of jealousy because at the end of the day who cares how others are doing? Focus on yourself and what you want to achieve. Do you want to be as famous as Anna and have a growing fanbase? Then PUT SOME EFFORT INTO YOUR WORK! That’s the way it works. You won’t get famous by bitching.
Amen, Alex. Well said!
Well said, Alex!!!!
Jenny (Master of Her Craft) Trout has has misused “laying” in her post. There are clear rules defining the difference between “lay” and “lie.” It’s rudimentary!
And she might sell more books if she’d stop spewing hate all over the internet. Simple.
I am not surprised. You can be sure of one thing: all these turds who complain about OTHER people’s spelling and grammar are functionally illiterate.
A lot of hate and negativity comes from people’s own insecurities.
I’ve worked with three publishers in the past, meaning I’ve written books for a couple of publishers under my pen name and another I worked as a staff writer-(along the same principals as a ghost writer.). I’ll be signing on with another publisher in the near future. My strength is in my plotting and storytelling. Publishers accept stories that sell. When I got attacked the first time I was so distraught. My publisher asked me one question that put things into perspective, she said, “I have OVER thirty years experience as a successful, multi-published writer and literary agent, don’t you think I would know a thing or two about good writing when I read it?”
One more thing, as published authors, whether through a house or independent, we need to help aspiring writers reach there dreams not tear them down. Bravo to Gavin for reaching out to Anna.
Exactly, Queen!!!
It seems there are times when other authors are willing to lend aspiring authors / authors just starting out a hand, like Gavin there. What I have just realised on my daily browse of BookLikes is some like Edward Lorn who feels the need to give his opinion (sometimes very harsh) about the topic of editing and proof reading and yada yada yada. He seems to not care about helping anybody but himself while he tries to make himself sound like this big successful author when he still has to click publish on Amazon himself.
Just saw Edward’s post about this (http://edwardlorn.booklikes.com/post/900108/full-blown-rant) which I think has to do with Grimlock’s reading progress of Gavin’s book here (http://allhailgrimlock.booklikes.com/post/898723/reading-progress-update-i-ve-read-10) that has some part caused this post by Gavin here (http://abyssalsanctuaryofficial.booklikes.com/post/900885/goodbye-booklikes).
Just because, this is the bit Edward says:
I continuously hear whiny-ass authors complaining about how they can’t afford editing. Too fucking bad. Don’t publish it. It’s not the reader’s fault you’re broke. Oh, you’re giving your trash away for free, are you? That makes it better then. Because, you know, a reader’s time isn’t valuable or anything. At least that’s what you’re saying when you make the excuse, “But… but… but… it’s free!”
And on Grim’s post, Gavin mentions in the comments how he could only afford a friend to look through his book for errors and also mentions how his book is free. So yeah, that’s what I made of it.
Good job he’s deleting BookLikes, he doesn’t need that. As for Edward Lorn, I never liked him anyway. He’s proved he’s not a nice person countless times. He shall fade into obscurity in a few years anyway.
When Trout said “If authors seem butt hurt when something like this happens … Yes we’re jealous and we’re frustrated and we’re disappointed,” along with everything else she said afterward.
You know what? I totally agree with what Trout said, minus any bullying. Otherwise she’s 100% right. I’m sorry, but she IS right, dammit. I have already quit writing professionally due to the blatant unfairness of the entire business, and I’m currently in the process of dealing with my disappointment and underlying bitterness, and attempting to get on with my life. This is me being honest, and that’s all I can say.
Thank you, Jenny, for saying what many of us authors have been thinking for quite some time.
Self-publishing seemed a great idea at first, but now it’s the worst thing that ever happened to those who took the craft seriously.
Sorry, but we can’t agree with you on that one.
I’m sorry you’ve felt such disappointment. I think most of us have felt that at one point or another. It’s a hard business to succeed in. Not everyone is meant to make money at it. I think you have to truly love the craft itself and put aside the aspirations of monetary gain to some extent in order to find your place in the writing world. If you end up with something that takes off and becomes a hit, great. Until then, if you don’t love what you do, it’s not worth it.
Thank you for this.
I was just going to say this. If you are angry and bitter because of others’ success, then you are writing for the wrong reasons. You have to love what you do first. Success comes later and you will be all the more blessed for it.
Create your own definition for “success.” Every new reader I gain, every fair review I receive is another field goal in the game. At least that’s how I see it.