Censored by Goodreads

Responses to the recent policy change on Goodreads regarding reviews that focus exclusively on author behavior.

[hiddenreviews]

Amazon Takes Aim At Scammers But Hits Authors

“Amazon is an extremely innovative company – and usually quite responsive to self-publisher’s concerns – but sometimes it gets things very wrong too.Today is one of those times.I’ve received several reports from writers threatened with having books removed from sale, and heard even more worrying stories from others who had their titles actually removed from the Kindle Store without notice.What were these authors guilty of? What crime did they commit for Amazon to adopt such heavy handed treatment? Something completely innocuous: the Table of Contents was at the rear of their books instead of at the front.Yep, that’s it.”

[hiddenreviews]

Again, this feels like bailing out the ocean. Even though Amazon for sure doesn't care about falsely positive reviews -- they're a merchant, not a critical platform -- they have to maintain the impression of credibility.

[hiddenreviews]

Not even sure what to think about this. There seems to be such a huge iceberg of paid reviews that this feels pointless?

[hiddenreviews]

Apparently, all it takes these days to get banned from Goodreads is to shelve a book as "Nope".

[hiddenreviews]

Counterpoint to the Ethical Author badge that was developed by the Alliance of Independent Authors. I agree, insofar as I think no badge is going to get people the behave ethically if they are not inclined. However, as a process of education for (especially) newbie writers, the badge may have merit. Food for thought. From the post: "Let us say you are the kind of person whose response to a bad review is to stalk the reviewer online, lie to get her home address, drive to her house. We’ll call you, off the top of my head, ‘Kathleen’. Does anyone really believe that Kathleen, who was happy to lie and stalk, would hesitate at breaking an internet pledge? Or that Kathleen, who wrote a self-congratulatory article in a national newspaper about the whole thing, would have the insight to see that she could not in conscience sign an Ethical Author pledge in the first place? And it’s not just lack of insight. Does anyone believe that someone who is prepared to copy-paste someone else’s work, go through and change names, plonk a probably stolen cover image on it and sell it as their own would hesitate to claim an Ethical Author badge to which they aren’t entitled?"

[hiddenreviews]

I'm not entirely sure what the reasoning is, because short stories published digitally by Tor.com are safe, but those by Strange Horizons -- including the short story that won the Hugo award this year, Selkie Stories are for Losers -- have been deleted. Of course, Goodreaders who have had their reviews deleted along with the book page have not been alerted, nor have the reviews been returned to them. So back up your reviews! She said for the millionth time.

[hiddenreviews]

Are You An Ethical Author? | Self-Publishing Advice

Why all authors, however they publish, should consider ALLi's Ethical Author Code. By Jane Steen

An Ethical Author Code has been developed by the Alliance of Independent Authors (or ALLi, puzzlingly), in part due to Kathleen Hale and Richard Brittain stalking and assaulting reviewers, respectively. 

"The Ethical Author Code is not industry regulation from the top down. We believe all authors, however they publish and however much they earn from their efforts, have an equal stake in a diverse, well-informed, professionally conducted publishing industry."

And how. 

[hiddenreviews]

Amazon is making some ominous noises regarding older reviews posted on their site. Just a friendly reminder that Amazon is a store, and they don't have any reason to archive your reviews for you if it doesn't help their bottom line. It's good advice in general: back up your writing!

[hiddenreviews]

I'm relying mostly on gossip and innuendo at the moment -- grains of salt all around -- but it appears Goodreads has deleted and banned at least two users who were numbered in the original 21 GRs who had reviews deleted for "author behavior". There may be more deletions.

[hiddenreviews]

What happens when The Guardian lets an author gloat about stalking a blogger (with images, tweets) · BookThingo

Note: This is a record only of tweets that assume the blogger is somehow at fault (and curated replies). The good news is that most people were pretty upset when they read the article, and were not afraid to say so.

[hiddenreviews]

Ok, so I'm a little late getting this up before the official start of NaNoWriMo. Some bad advice about how to interact with your readers for the aspiring writer, or the already published! Advice #4: Correct negative reviews There are only two types of reviews: the positive kind, and the kind where the reviewer didn't understand the book. A bad review of your book is actually a cry for help! Whenever you see a negative review that makes you say to yourself, "I should reach out to this person, perhaps in a borderline illegal fashion," by all means do so. Find out where they live if you want! Show up on their doorstep and offer to politely explain how they simply failed to understand your novel. Make it clear that this is something they need to resolve within themselves and not a reflection on your work, and also that there's no need whatsoever to call the police, so please put down the phone and stop crying.

[hiddenreviews]

The first request to take down a review under the EU’s “right to be forgotten” law. The review in question is a tepid assessment of pianist Dejan Lazic’s performance in concert. The Washington Post reviewer, Anne Midgette, notes Lazic’s talent and competence, but felt he didn’t perform to his potential. I don’t know if criticism is covered by the law, but if so, that’s pretty terrible. Lazic’s appeals to “the truth” are ridiculous in the context of professional opinions. From the article: It’s a question that goes far beyond law or ethics, frankly — it’s also baldly metaphysical, a struggle with the very concept of reality and its determinants. Lazic (and to some extent, the European court) seem to believe that the individual has the power to determine what is true about himself, as mediated by the search engines that process his complaints. Accordingly, in the three months after the “right to be forgotten” ruling went into effect, Google approved 53 percent of take-down requests on first application, and an additional 15 percent upon further review.

[hiddenreviews]

Lovely psychological and economic analysis of fandoms and writers. If book bloggers are only valued insofar as they can be used by PR departments to sell products, and not as engaged members of a critical community, then Kathleen Hale's actions make sense. They were ecomonic sanctions against a voice Hale believes she owns. And it worked; Blythe has been silenced. "In a sense, all of a culture’s fandoms and spaces are ‘competing’ for resources in the form of new members. A literary culture built to service the needs of fans will develop values that protect fans and allow them enough space to find themselves and do what they want to do. Conversely, a literary culture built to service the economic needs of a professional literary class will seek to restrict fans’ agency to the point where they are merely passive recipients of PR and economic resources to be exploited by those deemed worthy of entry to the professional classes. Is a literary culture that emphasises the passive nature of its non-professional participants really more ‘competitive’ than a literary culture that allows non-professionals the space to express themselves freely? Would a 14-year old version of you rather invest in a cultural space where they are expected to sit still, pay up and help to sell stuff or a cultural space that allows people to find their own voice regardless of what it might have to say? I am not convinced that a literary culture built to service the needs of a professional literary class is as viable as a literary culture built to service the needs of book readers everywhere. I think that frowning on negative reviews whilst turning a blind eye to attacks on reviewers silences voices and makes it much less likely that fandom will attract new voices to replace those who have been silenced in the past."

[clairesrousseau]

The Guardian has an Editorial Code of Conduct and the article they published last week-end in which Kathleen Hale describes stalking a reviewer breaches it in several ways.

The piece itself is a scary read but of course the comments are worse. So many people are commenting on this piece and...

[bisexual-books]

So I’ve been mulling this over in my head for a while, but given the conversations that have been happening in the book blogging world about Katherine Hale, now seems like the time to try to put my thoughts into words.

I’m surprised I haven’t seen more about the Hale situation on tumblr because...

[hiddenreviews]

A very, very good point, one I have not seen made before in considering Kathleen Hale's stalking of a book blogger: Blythe Harris's review was critical of Hale's treatment of LGBT subjects, PTSD and rape. For example, Harris points out that there is a sexual relationship between a 16 year old and someone well over the age of 18 -- I haven't read the book, so I don't know the exact age -- which is indeed statutory rape. So when Hale thinks to herself that there is no rape in her book, which she did in the article, she's indicating that she doesn't think of statutory rape as "real rape". This opinion is all the more horrible in a book aimed at teenagers.

"Stalking and harassment like Hale demonstrated are silencing tactics.   They are meant to intimidate Harris as a person and that Guardian article sends the message “this could happen to you too” to every other blogger that might sit at that intersection of books and social justice.    It discourages others from speaking and writing critically about rape and disability and sexism in media.   Marginalized people like me read an article like Hale’s, see her connections to power and privilege in publishing, and hear “you could be next if you make me look bad by calling me out”.  

Implying as some have that this problem could have been solved by Harris (and by extension other book bloggers) not being so critical or snarky is not the solution.  As Elie Wiesel said once, “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”  

[hiddenreviews]

For better or worse, I have always been a fighter. For the people and principles I care about most, I will go to the mat, and the more unfair a situation becomes, the more energized to set things r...

"But for me, the lesson here is explicit: there are publishers and authors who are more than willing to exploit the value of readers to promote their books and then equally willing to participate in the ruination of that valuable resource, should it not seem valuable at the moment to them. Many of us are used to the systematic devaluation of female voices in, well, virtually every community you can name. But this feels like a sucker punch to the gut, and now that I’m getting my wind back, all I can say is congratulations to any of you who helped, supported, or cheered while Kathleen Hale — or anyone like her — lashed out at a reader-reviewer. Not only have you helped diminish the serious implications of real bullying (because wishes are not ponies and negative reviews are NOT bullying), but you are fundamentally damaging the community you simultaneously rely on for its honest, spontaneous enthusiasm about books. You are, in fact, poisoning the very well from which you’ve been drinking.

That there are authors who are endorsing Hale’s behavior is reflective of how twisted the power relationship between authors/publishers and readers is. Authors who are professionally producing commercial products for profit feel entitled to hunt down those who have expressed their dislike of those products, but authors are the powerless ones here? This skewed dynamic, by the way, is one of the reasons I think it’s so important to fight the ‘specialness of books’ rhetoric – because the more we buy into that kind of exclusivity, the more we seem to be removing authors (and publishers) from the realm of commercial producers, and, therefore, from their role as business people and even corporations unto themselves. And let’s not forget how many of these business people see no harm in purchasing positive reviews or hiring marketing services to promote their work, regardless of the ethics or legality of such endeavors. Apparently the decision to ‘put food on the table’ by writing books has become license to stalk. Good to know the rules, although for readers this is no game."

[hiddenreviews]

A number of book bloggers are not reviewing for the next week, until October 27, choosing instead to focus on why they got into reviewing in the first place: their love of books. Dear Author's Open Thread for Readers is a nice place to start. This is in response to the essay by Kathleen Hale in the Guardian about how she stalked a book reviewer. 

There's a lot going on with the Kathleen Hale disaster, but I think a facet of it is the undeclared war between the literary establishment and book bloggers. Kathleen Hale is incredibly well connected in the establishment scene: her fiance is Simon Rich, who is a writer, and whose parents are Frank Rich and Gail Winston. Frank Rich is regular op-ed columnist for the New York Times, and Gail Winston is an executive editor at Harper Collins, which (maybe not so coincidentally) is also publishing Hale's book. She's got the bluest of blood running through her veins, the privilege to write a completely uncorroborated personal narrative in the Guardian, and the audacity to call it "investigative journalism".  

Hale's narrative might have been fine had she obscured the identity of the target of her stalking -- the essay is well-written, and gripping in the way that dramatic monologues by damaged narrators are gripping -- but that is not what she did. She went on a personal vendetta against a book blogger. In addition to misusing the term catfish -- which refers to someone pointedly and personally obscuring his or her identity in a romantic relationship, not a writer using a pseudonym for fear of the scads of rape and death threads literally any woman on the internet will receive -- Kathleen Hale obscured the timeline of events, pulled some really spectacular rhetorical flourishes -- my favorite is the time she segues from a gchat discussion with an StGRB member about how reviewers are evil to a discussion about what heckling is -- and as far as I can tell, just made shit up. Investigative journalism is based on facts that can be corroborated by sources other than the writer; that is demonstrably not the case here. 

So what is going on? It doesn't take someone particularly insightful or bright to note that publishing has become, and this is a technical term, a complete and total clustercuss: reviewers against writers, critics against bloggers, everyone against Amazon except when they're on that gravy train, collusion, circle jerking, the usual. Much of this flash and bang isn't new, but more precisely adding more gasoline in a quickly flaming Twitter world of 140 characters summarizing a novel's worth of words.

Heretofore, there have been a lot of spurious and bullshit think pieces about how blogging has or will ruin criticism, but this is not the problem. The genres most affected by book blogging -- young adult, romance, various genre fictions too filled with either girl or nerd cooties -- never were considered seriously by establishment reviewing in the first place. It's somewhere between ironic an infuriating that Hale, a young adult writer, stands atop a heap of privilege when the rest of the blogosphere is writing things like Against YA. In another context, one where Hale's professional and personal connections didn't insulate her from the consequences, Hale would be laughed out of the tower for writing books for children. Who even gives a shit some adult didn't like your teeny book? 

Which, of course that's terrible, but that's the landscape we inhabit, apparently. Publishers have been relying heavily on book bloggers in the "damaged" genres -- those writings not fit for the academy or "real criticism" -- which is fine when they butt the hell out. The Guardian basically fired a warning shot into the chest of book blogging, their pretty, white, Ivy League educated writer of books for the youth of America a stand-in for all of those ivory towers. The layers of identity politics here give me a headache.

Kathleen Hale could stalk and cause Blythe Harris to be hounded off the Internet because Blythe Harris doesn't count. She's not a person, because a person, in this paradigm, can't be afraid lunatics might come to her house, leave serial-killer like presents, and then doxx her on an International platform. No one who is a person who counts is afraid, because all of the people who count have the power. If you've got nothing to hide -- like children, or a job, or judgmental in-laws, or a harsh, bible-belt location, or a non-binary sexual orientation, or political views out of step with your community, the kind that will get you jailed or killed in many countries -- then you're catfishing some lady whose book you read once. It's all about the woman with the power. 

No blogger would get away with kind of selfish, privileged bullshit for long. People would just ignore it for the egregious click-bait it is. Let's see what the establishment, other than the people Hale is directly related to (who are, admittedly, a lot of people) think about this in the long run. My cynical sense is that Hale will feel no real consequences, and this monstrous and unfeeling cruelty will continue.

The worst thing about it is that book bloggers do it because they love it, and while they might pause and go back to basics, in the end, they're going to go back to blogging. They're going to go back to the machine of ARCs and cover reveals and book tours, because it's too good to pass up as someone who legitimately loves books. Maybe we'll tighten up our defenses and get that PO Box we've always considered, but we'll go back to it. And cynically, which I don't always necessarily want to be, we'll do it despite the fact that they think we're shit, that we're not worthy, that we don't count. That we deserve what's coming when we get doxxed and threatened and stalked. I'm not advocating silence -- nolite te bastades carborundorum -- I'm just noting that speaking is a dangerous thing when so many forces are stacked against you. 

Be safe, in all the ways you can.