What that Deranged Goodreads Review-Bomber and You Probably Have in Common
Publishing commercial books well requires great interdependence and intimacy, which means the process will trigger just about every maladaptive relational impulse you contain.
A bunch of you have asked me for my take on the Goodreads review-bomb drama this week. Here it is!
First, however, here’s a summary of said drama for those of you who still blessedly unaware.
(I’ve tried to keep my brain as free from this existential glop as I can, so I haven’t looked into it beyond a cursory read of this Mary Sue summary. True obsessives, please correct me if any of the below is wrong.)
Once upon a time, a white, nonbinary, femme-presenting author got a book deal with Del Rey, a Penguin Random House imprint dedicated to science fiction and fantasy. Their novel, which was slated to come out this May, seems to have been a space opera cum queer romance. The contract they received for this book seems to have been somewhere in the “medium-great” range, like: big five publisher, big achievement, excellent advance buzz, non-frontlist (five-figure?) advance.
This person has now spectacularly self-sabotaged. Their implosion picked up speed several months ago, when other authors with SFF titles coming out next year noticed some funny business happening on their Goodreads pages. Someone or someones were giving their books 1* reviews, despite the fact that many of these books hadn’t even come out in galleys yet. The reviews all came from the same handful of accounts, many of which bore stereotypically BIPOC names. All of them enthusiastically liked and amplified each other’s bad reviews.
Strangely enough, this handful of purportedly unacquainted Negatives Nelly all seemed to like the same single book of any they read this year. It was—you guessed it—the space opera cum queer romance. You know: the one that also doesn’t come out until May.
As authors are wont to do, the people who got those 1* reviews went deep, DEEP into the rabbit hole to figure out who was leaving them. Eventually, they began reaching out to each another with a shared suspicion: all of these accounts appeared to be sockpuppets created by the same single person, and it was pretty clear who that person was.
Yadda yadda yadda: after extensive denial punctuated by a flailing attempt to foist blame on yet another fictional persona via photoshopped Slack chat “evidence,” the space operettist fled social media altogether. In swift order, they lost their agent and (probably) also their book deal. Del Rey put out a statement saying the book was no longer on its Spring 2024 list.
So that’s what the drama was.
Here is my quick take on the drama.
My feelings about the drama have remained consistent since I first heard about it last week: a weak little speedball of irritation, boredom, and leeriness. Fellow recovering people-pleasers will recognize this as what generally comes on when we hear tell of a stranger in our wider community acting in a manner suggestive of an underlying cluster B personality disorder.
Were I actually on the space operettist’s radar, professionally or otherwise, I’d feel much more edgy, obsessive, and riveted by the situation, like a woman about to get in trouble personally for reasons as yet unknown. I’m not, though, so from my perspective, the situation just looks like gloop: vaguely gross, vaguely familiar. It’s happening within a certain Very Online community of genre authors and associated publishing professionals who strike me as stuck in a perpetual tornado, swirling around each other, hurling screenshot “receipts” about God knows what to exact vengeance on God knows who.
It all seems like one of the lesser circles of Dantean hell, honestly: traumatized people chasing each other around in a whirlwind, retraumatizing one another, unable to stop, their shame and anxiety and agitation crowding out any semblance of productivity in their careers.