Quote:
Originally Posted by Sil_liS
The article is distorting the facts. It linked to what it described as a good wrapup of the Howard saga but presented the story differently.
The story started because of ratings of interest. GR allows (allowed?) people to rate a yet unpublished story to show interest. In this case a member showed lack of interest by giving the book a 2-star rating. The author proceed to ask about it. I don't know what language she used for the question, but she 4 1-star ratings from people who didn't like it and 75 5-star ratings from people showing their support. Well actually two of the 75 5-star ratings were from herself one on an old account and one on the new account. |
Yeah, I remember wading through that mess when it was still fresh. God knows what prompted me to do it. I don't think there were a huge number of 1 star reviews, but it was inside the reviews in the comments section where everything was happening.
She queried, there was a retaliation, she tried to back down, someone threw in the "special snowflake" comment and the author got offended and it seemed to devolve from there. It was all pretty embarrassing, but apparently you can find this in several places at GR if you know where to look. I usually only find out about them here, and if I feel like watching a car crash for any reason, I can always go over and have a peek.
I don't think it was a case of a GR author bullying people, it looked more like someone who had let herself get cornered lashing out. I could almost see the distressed look on her face as I read some of her posts at the time.
But some of her retractions felt like she was trying to reinvent history so that she could just make it all go away. I do feel kind of sorry for her - it was a bit of a baptism of fire for a book that hadn't really been fully launched yet. And now, if the recent decisions are really related to that case, she's in a worse predicament. The whole situation has become immortalised and replayed. It must be her worst nightmare coming true.
Before, there was a relatively small swarm ready to blank her on the site - if she becomes the poster child of people's shelves getting deleted etc.. I think she should probably pick out a new
nom de plume if she still wants to write. Painful lessons.