Random I know...

I had to escape the puppy

He’s bigger now and he casts. I have ‘hairy throat’. Gags. 

So just kicking back today, jotting down some book ideas (no need to panic I’m still hard at work on Borrowed Ember… OK, not today, but usually!), checking emails etc.  Haunting Goodreads :-p

I have an addiction to Goodreads and I had one of those domino moments, like, oh hell - an hour and a half ago! I’ve been trolling for an hour and a half?

OK, I’ll explain what happened. I went onto Goodreads and saw on my home page that a Goodreads friend had given a book that’s releasing soon (and one I had greatly been looking forward to) a one star. *Wince*. Curious to see what could possibly be so bad about this book that it warranted a one star I checked out the review. From there I discovered ‘BAD AUTHOR BEHAVIOUR’. *Gobsmacked* seriously… this spiraled (dominoed) into discovering one YA author after another who has acted like… well, yeah, I’m just gonna say it, acted like a dick. It was like each link led me to a new one. And not just indies. No, no. The majority were traditionally published :-\

You know how this makes me feel?

Yup. Blue. I feel blue.

I wished I hadn’t read the articles but you know it was kind of like a car crash… I couldn’t look away. I was reading screenshots of authors calling reviewers bitches and other nasty words and publicly asking people to click on the ‘don’t like’ buttons on reviews from amazon and Goodreads. What the effing efferson?

I’ve deleted the books of those authors from my reading piles on principle alone. And no, it’s not just because I love bloggers (truly, I don’t know where I’d be without them) and respect their opinion whether it’s positive or constructive, but because I love the writer’s community and this dickish behavior just makes all authors look bad.

You know what makes it worse? The reviews that were attacked weren’t even that snarky or anything. Okay, a couple of them had snark but they were fair and they were constructive. Even if they’d been really mean and unnecessarily nasty, I still wouldn’t agree with an author or agent publicly reacting to the review. It’s so unprofessional. I’ve had bad reviews. I’ve even had some personal comments made against me but I either take the constructive bad reviews and use them to make my work better or I roll my eyes at the person who made an assumption about me without even knowing me. I don’t try to turn Goodreads and Twitter and Facebook into a battleground.

My question is… who exactly are these authors writing for then if they quite openly turn their noses up at YA bloggers? Don’t they know that’s who they purport to write for, who they say they want to entertain? My bullshit meter is going off… their attitude tells me they have no care for their actual readers and just want to be the next big thing.

Insert snort of derision. Uh, try getting to the big time without your YA readers, Numbnut.

*clears throat* Okay, I got a little carried away there. Sorry, I’m just still in the moment. Still shocked. Still P O’ed.

Breathe.

There are lots of awesome authors out there who are professional. I follow a lot of them - check out my sidebar. I think I can speak for them when I say we appreciate our readers, we appreciate social sites like Goodreads, Twitter and Facebook that allow us to communicate with our readers, to have fun with them and still maintain a professionalism that makes the reader feel secure in the knowledge that they’re dealing with a writer who truly takes them seriously.

OK. Moment over.

Get me a ladder, I'm coming down.

I scratched my new car today. Boo. Stupid bag with little metal corners I didn’t notice. It’s Okay… kind of. It’s a shallow scratch so I can fix it. I had a donut and it helped.

Maybe that’s how reviewers should end negative reviews:

“I didn’t enjoy your book but I’d be happy to give you a donut. It’ll help.”

It really will.

Sam x