I GUESS WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT GOODREADS

First off, as a much-needed addendum to my post from last week regarding the epic career self-destruction of former debut author Cait Corrain, please watch the video “What the Cait Corrain Situation Says About Publishing” from librarian and BookTuber Bookish Realm in which the even darker side of Corrain’s scorched earth program is given the cleansing light it deserves.

If my post from last week made it sound as if Ms. Corrain simply didn’t like the books in question and was simply offering her honest opinions, oh boy, that was not my intent. I’m not sure there’s any reason to believe she even read the books she tried to undermine, and there’s, again, the darker side as well.

Just… terrible.

What this has brought out—or, more accurately, brought up again—is the vehicle by which Cait Corrain easily if ineptly (since she was quickly identified as the culprit) did what she did.

That vehicle is GoodReads.

In a Guardian article posted yesterday (12/18/23), “ ‘It’s totally unhinged’: is the book world turning against Goodreads?” David Smith widened the discussion of the Cait Corrain debacle into an argument against GoodReads, and one I can’t entirely disagree with, even though I check in on GoodReads every day—at least once a day—and is a resource I use and value as a reader and collector of books.

“Its members had produced 26m book reviews and 300m ratings over the past year,” Smith reported… “But for some authors, it has become a toxic work environment that can sink a book before it is even published.” Much as I hate to see it happening, that does seem to be the case. But then back in what some of the publishing industry people Smith talked to would have us believe were “the good old days” didn’t the same thing happen? Case in point:

“[GoodReads] has a lot of influence because there are so many people now who are not in the New York ecosystem of publishing,” says Bethanne Patrick, a critic, author and podcaster. “Publishers and agents and authors and readers go to Goodreads to see what is everybody else looking at, what’s everyone else interested in? It has a tremendous amount of influence in the United States book world and reading world and probably more than some people wish it had.”

But then the New York Times, The New York Review of Books, etc., could just as accurately have been described as “a toxic work environment that can sink a book before it is even published” in the many decades before the Internet effectively destroyed criticism across the board, crowdsourcing it into oblivion.

A call for GoodReads to begin monitoring, or anyway to do a much more thorough job of monitoring its users might be something GoodReads is kinda sorta maybe talkin’ about, but can we be honest here? As Smith points out:

The founders of Goodreads did not come from a background of literary criticism. The site was launched in 2007 by Otis Chandler, a computer programmer, and Elizabeth Khuri, assistant style editor for the Los Angeles Times’s Sunday magazine (the couple married in 2008). Goodreads was bought by Amazon in 2013 and now claims to be the world’s biggest site for readers and book recommendations.

This is a tech company. When was the last time a tech company did anything—anything at all—to improve the level of discourse on any subject anywhere? At this point, we’re long past the point of expecting them to do the right thing on any level. Has GoodReads, like Facebook, Twitter/X, and literally every other social media platform across the full expanse of the Internet gone toxic? Well, like they used to say, what do you expect from a pig but a grunt? And though this:

But as in many other corners of the web, the removal of gatekeepers is both liberating and frightening, promising the wisdom of crowds but delivering the wild west. Concerns about the manipulation of Goodreads, and its ability to end careers before they begin, have been growing.

…is an absolutely valid concern, where does it leave us?

I actually like GoodReads. I use it to keep a list of books I own but have not yet read so I stop blindly buying the same book over and over again, which I’ve done. Kind of a lot of times. Is the interface hilariously old school and clunky? Yup. Are there reviews on there written by all manner of people bringing in all manner of baggage and whatnot? Sure are. And that’s exactly the same on all social media outlets, so then what is a reasonable person to do? More specifically, what is an author to do? Abandon GoodReads? If so, then be prepared to abandon X, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Discord, and all other social media outlets at the same time for the same reasons.

And once again referring you back to a previous post, “Authorship in the Post-privacy Age,” I don’t honestly think that’s a bad idea. But that’s kind of the “nuclear option” in terms of all the grimy bits of the publishing game that gather under the rock called “a platform.”

Take me for example.

I’m the author of one of the most hated books of the past twenty-five years, my too-fast attempt at a novelization of what (unfortunately for me) became a mega-best selling video game franchise. You don’t have to click too far into the Internet to find that hate. I get it. I understand it. I’ve moved on, and the rest of the world has, too. One of the ways I moved on was by not engaging in it. I didn’t fire back at critics or fans of the game. I took that one on the chin. And as an author and an editor there was no better learning experience. I actually keep a blow-up of the cover Wizards of the Coast made for a convention framed behind my desk to remind me of those lessons on a daily basis.

Since then I don’t feel as though I’ve been mistreated out there in cyberspace, especially on GoodReads. If I’ve been “review bombed,” I don’t know it. If anything I’ve written appears on what are, apparently, lists of terrible books everyone hates, which I’ve been told are part of the GoodReads environment, I’ve never seen that because I have no interest in that kind of negativity so never go to those lists or groups in any case.

And this is the advice part, finally.

Start with the fact that you have to take care of yourself. If you find any corner of the Internet upsetting, if it’s hurting you in any way to go there, stop going there. You are not—or in any case you shouldn’t be—required to spend time in toxic environments.

Otherwise, I can tell you it is possible to make your experience of social media much less toxic. You have more control over things like GoodReads and X than articles like David Smith’s might lead you to believe. All these platforms allow you to block and/or mute accounts that you find in any way negative. I block and mute like crazy, especially on X.

You do not have to accept every friend request. You do not have to engage in every discussion. You do not have to join every group. You do not have to read anyone else’s review of any book, either one you’ve written, one you’ve just read, or one you’re just about to read.

Can I just say this out loud? If I passed on everything I saw a bad review for I would go nowhere, buy nothing, read nothing, see no movie or TV series, and own no product of any kind ever.

I’m not exaggerating with that, and I think you know exactly what I mean.

Though I have no illusions that I might be, nor am I making any concerted effort to go completely “off grid.” There are ways to nudge yourself a bit more… let’s call it, “grid-adjacent.”

I’m on the Internet all day, basically. I run a one-person business from home, which means via the Internet. That means Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Google-whoever, and the NSA know a lot about me. But one little cheat can stave off 100% participation in the algorithm dystopia.

In February of 2019 I explained that one important step in “Why I Give Every Book I Read Five Stars on GoodReads.” Go read that, but here’s the gist of it: If GoodReads is using star ratings to decide what books and which authors it’ll put in front of me, if I keep reading across a wide range of categories and genres and tell it I absolutely love everything, it will have no choice but to show me… everything. Of course that means it’ll show me books I might not want to read, but I love books and everything and everyone around them, so I’m okay seeing an ad or post about a book I’m probably not going to read if it means GoodReads/Amazon’s inscrutable algorithm won’t hide from me a book I might not otherwise hear of but that I’ll love. I strongly encourage everyone to do this. Really sit and think about the degree to which your life is being curated by someone else’s top secret math problem. Is that really the dystopia you want to live in? Please say you don’t.

Doing that, and likewise never hitting thumbs up or thumbs down on anything on streaming services, Amazon—I wouldn’t spend a precious second on dumpster fires like Yelp—and so on, I remain at least something of a puzzle to our AI overlords.

And coupled with the power of block/mute I can and have crafted a social media space that’s mostly positive—can we but wish for entirely?—and focused on the stuff I love and people who share that love, along with their own opinions and preferences, which I’m happy to accept at face value as long as you’re not being a dick about it.

I’ve set up a Fantasy Author’s Handbook GoodReads group—the little GoodReads group that could. There aren’t a lot of members so far, but if you’re not there already, go there and join up. Anyone can, of course it’s entirely free, and it’s moderated—by me, who will keep it a positive environment for authors of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and fiction in general, even if the Rome of GoodReads burns around it.

Likewise the ever-burning Rome of Facebook, where you can now find Fantasy Author’s Handbook as well, even though my own personal account has been left happily fallow since 2018.

GoodReads doesn’t have to be a toxic swamp. And where it is, none of us has to actively participate in that part of it. Go out onto the Internet in a positive way, and with a sense of personal curation. Make of it what you will.

And now, all the social media links…

—Philip Athans

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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model.

In Writing Monsters, best-selling author Philip Athans uses classic examples from books, films, and the world around us to explore what makes monsters memorable—and terrifying.

You’ll learn what monsters can (and should) represent in your story and how to create monsters from the ground up.