I learned at an early age that you never know who may be listening to your conversation. When I was a teenager, I was talking to a group of fellow music students and I was complaining about the gent who taught me how to play the flute when I was 7. One of the assistant music teachers overheard me and asked who I was talking about. I told her. Turns out that the teacher I was complaining about was her brother. Boy was I embarrassed. But the lesson stuck with me.
My point is that you never know who is listening, or reading as the case may be. My point is that public places are not private, even areas you may think of as private like a music practice room, or an author loop or an author forum.
I have witnessed some very unprofessional behaviour on forums by authors lately. In one case, I saw a forum post by an author who was possibly looking for sympathy because she posted a negative review about another author and an author's friend called her out on it. She posted the negative review with a Goodreads account that was under a different name (not her author name). She created the account so she could write reviews for her own books and could suggest her books to readers to avoid running afoul of the "Author Guidelines" for the site. After reviewing her own books, she then decided it to review other people's books.
I will let you ruminate on that.
The thread dissolves into a discussion about reviews and whether authors should review at all and if they do, should they only post positive reviews. I figured I would weigh in here. Having talked to a lot of readers the consensus is this:
- If we see you only give positive reviews, we ignore you.
- If we see you (a self pub) review other self published authors and give them positive reviews, we ignore you. We are wise to that cross-promo tactic (I won't even touch the tag sharing BS).
The review pandering/swapping has gotten so bad that I no longer trust a self-published book that has only 4 and 5 star ratings. I tend to check to see who the reviewers are, but I am always suspicious of the reviews being from the author's friends or other self-published authors. I also know that this distrust is spreading amongst the reading community.
This is not to say all is lost. I do trust my wider network of reader friends on Goodreads and on Twitter for recommendations.
On to the first example I used of clerks complaining about a paying customer, it is relevant, I swear. I was poking through the forum because I had this blog post in mind and I discovered a recent thread about reviewers altering reality. I clicked on it. It took me a moment to realize that I was the reader the author was complaining about--I had quite innocently posted a question/query on my Goodreads comment field that the author took umbrage with. The amusing part is I had not really said anything negative.
I bring this up for a few reasons: 1) any trust I had of the author to respect me as a reader and consumer has been broken and I will not promote this book or the author so I will not give the book access to my own social connections and 2) authors seem to be totally unaware that readers may read their quite public complaints/whining/bitching on public forums.
Authors, we do read them. We share them. A good rule of thumb is to be professional at all times. This is how you lose customers.
