Quote:
Originally Posted by caleb72
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.
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I found a website who had a
screenshot of the beginning.
So what happened was: bad rating -> author asking the reviewer about the rating and giving herself a 5-star rating -> reviewer calling the author "speshul snowflake" -> someone suggesting to the reviewer to go and put his hand in a blender.
In the comment section the only aggression was from the author and her fans. The author's comments made it seem like she had been threatened with rape, and the blogs on her side insisted that there had actually been threats which had been removed in the meantime. There hadn't been. The author said so herself. She excused her aggression as PMS.
After the ordeal, after
GR removed the one offensive shelf and the author-based reviews, the author
wanted to change the cover of the book to change her name on the cover. She was told that even if she changes her profile name it will be changed back. She seem cheery when she made the cover change request. I don't know what made her change her mind about publishing, but it wasn't because of the comments on GR.