Last year an author lost a book deal after it was discovered she had created a bunch of fake Goodreads accounts in order to give her forthcoming novel great reviews and to give a bunch of bad reviews to the books of authors she apparently thought of as her competition.
Sadly, this is not the first time something like this has happened. A similar story pops up in the media every few years and it happens on smaller scales all the time.
I halfway get it. I get the desperation that might drive an author to post positive reviews for their own work in an effort to drum up some kind of hype and compensate for the lack of marketing support from a publishing house. I wouldn’t do it, but I understand.
I do not understand why anyone would open fake accounts in order to give negative reviews to the books of other authors, particularly when those books are in the same genre or could be viewed as a “comps” for their own.
I have never been hurt by the success of another author’s work. Conversely I have frequently benefitted from it.
If Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones books, Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic books and Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum books hadn’t been wildly successful I don’t think my book, Sex, Murder And A Double Latte would have even gotten published. You can even see how the publishers were trying to play off of one another’s covers.
Similarly, if E.L. James’ 50 Shades of Gray didn’t blow away all kinds of sales records I wouldn’t have gotten an email from an editor at Simon & Schuster asking me to consider writing an erotic romance. If that romance (Just One Night) was not advertised in the back of Christina Lauren’s runaway bestselling debut novel Beautiful Bastard, readers would never have discovered it and it wouldn’t have become a massive bestseller in its own right.
It doesn’t matter if I love those other books or if I don’t. Either way, I’m incredibly grateful for their success.
Ask Paula Hawkins, the author of the bestselling novel, Girl On The Train if she’s resentful of the earlier success of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. I’m guessing the answer to that is a resounding no.
Here’s how it works: if you have a novel coming out that is set in WWII and there are two other WWII novels already on the NYT Bestseller list, those two novels are not your competition. They’re your launching pad. It’s when those WWII books stop selling that you have a problem.
So while there may be emotional reasons, there are no logical reasons to be competitive with another individual author. Rooting for their success isn’t altruism, it’s pragmatism.
And as a bonus, I’m pretty no one has ever lost a book contract for posting positive reviews of other people’s books.
So there’s that.
I wrote about this in December as I scrape and struggle and sell my self-published rock & roll love story without an agent or proper deal yet SIGH
https://open.substack.com/pub/taradublin/p/thanks-for-screwing-it-up-for-the?r=a2ndq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web