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Part Six of the CONTROVERSIES thread which continues from Part One HERE and Part Two HERE and Part Three HERE and Part Four HERE and Part Five HERE.

Further discussion will hopefully be made in the comment stream below. Everyone is welcome to contribute on any aspect of book reviewing controversies and related matters in the hope that we may be able to cauterise them.

39 thoughts on “*”

  1. Someone’s FB for Friends (HERE) discussing Patreon (that I had not heard of before – similar to Kickstarter?) and a seemingLy controversial spin-off thread on the topic of a reviewer buying books to review or having them sent to a prospective reviewer free.

    • It could sometimes be really hard fitting reviews into 200-300 words when that was the BFS rule, as Dave Brzeski mentions, but it was a good discipline. No idea how Mojo writers manage to do it in 40 for their short reviews.

      Patreon is a bit different to Kickstarter. On Kickstarter your project gets funded in one big lump (like I’ve backed the Hemingwrite, and the new MST3K), but Patreon is more like ongoing sponsorship, where you pay a bit if you want to.

  2. Another FB for Friends thread HERE that continues the previous ones linked earlier on this Controversies thread about the big sad British Horror genre controversy from over the last six or seven years…

    • “this is the kind of person that either has multiple pages or has had to restart his page because so many have blocked him. Delete and block as — says. He’s Billy no mates anyway – it’s why he has to get his jollies from cyber bullying female authors.”

      “Ignore the trolls, you have some deeply shady ‘writers’ or idiots who consider themselves to be ‘writers’ who are so jealous of others that they deliberately try to harm their careers.”

      “send him this way … I’m in just the right mood to have a little chat…I’ll even supply the duct tape.”

        • It’s weird for an offhand comment from four years ago to suddenly become such a big deal. The writer in question had obviously been stewing about it for a long time, decided to confront me, and seemed as if they expected me to be embarrassed about it. Of course I wasn’t, and I was able to back up everything I had said back then, and I was also quite happy to discuss their use of a sockpuppet to recommend their own books. I’m being careful to not say who it is, bearing in mind the lessons I learned from Jon Ronson’s book on internet shaming, but the more they kick up a fuss the more they’ll attract attention to the stuff they’ve been up to, so I’m happy to leave them to it.

    • I think it’s quite an important book. Made me reflect on how things went with S_e D__t a while back. She was hassling me, which was irksome, so I talked about it on Twitter, posted screenshots, but then it went semi-viral, and she ended up being hate-rated by dozens of people on Goodreads protesting against authors harassing reviewers. She just wasn’t equipped to deal with that attention, and I rather regret bringing it on her.

      Right now, I could be posting screenshots on Twitter of this author’s sockpuppeting, of the things she and her friends are saying about me (the latest gems: “curse his flesh with a million paper cuts and a wedge of lemon”, “Someone with a problem with female genre writers”, “Kill him. Kill him with fire”, “I just hope someone posts a photo of his needle dick so we can all laugh at him”), but would it make me any happier?

  20. Not a controversy as such, but what I consider to be an interesting discussion about reviews with Rolnikov on his Friends only FB HERE. Although not fully public, it did start with a public Tweet, I believe.

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