Nice Girls Don’t Review Books

That's my cat! He's now a LOLcat.

This year has been convoluted at best, ugly and frightening at its worst. What started as a series of flameouts and dramas involving authors behaving badly, took an unexpected turn in the form of a blogger plagiarizing. Worse, now we’re in the presence of something that’s disturbing and demoralizing: the Stop the Goodreads Bullies (StGRB). They are a group of people who created a website dedicated to hating, intimidating and bullying, all in the name of a twisted version of good used as an excuse to hide their hateful ways. They consider negative reviews as bullying and personally attacking authors. They say they want everyone to be nice, when in truth what they really want is revenge. These are people who went off their rockers and decided to punish, intimidate and demoralize reviewers (1). Let’s focus on the “be nice” part.

Even before the creation of the StGRB site, the phrase “be nice” kept showing every time there was a drama associated to a negative review. And I kept wondering what “be nice” means. Is it just writing positive, good reviews? Is it not calling attention to authors/bloggers behaving badly? Is it possible to write a negative nice review? More important, do we have to be nice? I have several things to say about this (and about the bullies), so I made a list:

1. “Be nice” is used as a poor excuse to thwart critical analysis.

2. Yes, we should be nice... To the readers! How? By giving them our honest opinions. Readers may use that review to buy a book or to compare and talk about their own reading experience. Disguising a review to make it nice is not nice.

3. Reviews are opinions. The only adjective that goes with “review” is “honest”. We don’t have to be nice about it.

4. Respectful and nice are not the same thing. We should always be respectful, which means leaving the author out of it, no personal insults, no personal anything.

5. I understand when authors refer to their books as their babies. I may consider it an exaggeration, but I understand the hard work and passion that goes into it. Books are an important part of an author’s life.

         5.1. I also understand the passion that goes into reading. I invest time and money in books and every   time I pick one I do it expecting to love it. If I don’t love it, I have the right to be angry about it, to say so  and to explain why. Books are an important part of my life. 

6. I can read. I can understand what I read. I can form my own opinion. I can decide for myself whether a review is honest and reliable or not. Negative reviews are often more helpful than the gushing, positive ones.

7. I love books. I don’t want them to suck. There’s no malicious intent behind a negative review. This is true to most reviewers, even those who write the snarkiest reviews. Those who do have malicious intent are easy to spot and ignore. Give the reader credit.

8. Negative doesn’t mean bad.

9. I understand that not everyone likes negative reviews, especially if you’re the author or a fan of the book. However, articles of public consumption are constantly subjected to criticism. If you can’t take it, don’t put yourself in the position to receive it. Or at least try to ignore it. How? Don’t read the reviews.

10. Disagreeing with someone is not bullying. Other things that are not bullying include: 

• Negative reviews.
• Snarky reviews.
• Special shelves dedicated to authors behaving badly.
• Being an asshole.
• Throwing a temper tantrum when someone gives your book a negative review.
• Telling people when someone who got a negative review threw a temper tantrum.

11. Things that are bullying:

• Posting personal information about a reviewer including where they live, work and places they frequent.
• Creating a website whose only purpose is to target people and incite violence.
• Making threatening phone calls.
• Making people feel unsafe.
• Endangering people.

More Someecards here.

The problem with the StGRB isn’t that they are upset about negative reviews. There’s nothing wrong with that. The problem is that they are stalking, posting personal information of reviewers and inciting violence. They are endangering people.

Finally, I want to say that just as one blogger plagiarizing doesn’t define the rest of us; the people behind the StGRB site do not represent other authors and members of the community. Bulling and plagiarizing is a reflection of who they are as individuals, they don’t behave in such reproachable and vile ways because they are authors or bloggers, they do it because they are hateful. They would have found a way to hurt others regardless of their job description and platform. 

(1) A lot has been said about them and much more eloquently than I could ever put it. So I’ll just link to some excellent posts, including this one that I think everyone should read because it shows just how bad these people are. For more info there’s Dear Author’s take and Foz Meadows’. The train wreck that was the Huffington Post's Blog publishing an article written by the people behind StGRB, their subsequent poor apology, and Foz Meadow’s response. The Book Pushers wrote an excellent post about the issue of "be nice".

ETA: another great post about Goodreads, this time by Sunita.