On Goodreads, books can be canceled before they are even published

Have you heard of Goodreads? It’s a social media/review site where regular people can review books. The site was purchased by Amazon a decade ago. Of course you can rate older books but it has also become a big part of promoting new books, which have the potential to take off thanks to strong reviews. That ability to make or break careers has also made it a tool for the woke mob.

As with everything else, Goodreads is being ruined by cancel culture and wokeness. It’s now a regular occurrence for authors to become the target of review-bombing campaigns, often targeting books that haven’t even been published yet. Naturally, one of the authors who has been target on the site is JK Rowling:

…many of the hundreds of one-star reviews that greeted JK Rowling’s “Robert Galbraith” mystery novel Troubled Blood in 2020 have still not been removed, even though many of them offer comments such as “I haven’t read it, I just wanted to give J K Rowling and her transphobic clownery the lowest rating possible.” Why are these reviews still dragging down the book’s average?

Unlike Amazon, which demands some initial spend with a valid credit or debit card before you can post reviews, all you require to register with Goodreads, and many other review hosting sites, is an email address. Goodreads is always playing catch-up, therefore, when it comes to identifying bogus reviews – of which there are many.

But she’s far from along at this point. Anyone who offers an unpopular opinion on Twitter or whose plot summary for a forthcoming book is deemed too transgressive of leftist orthodoxy is likely to find him or herself the target of one-star reviews by people who haven’t read the book.

Earlier this month, Elizabeth Gilbert, the best-selling writer of “Eat, Pray, Love,” received hundreds of negative ratings on Goodreads for her forthcoming novel, “The Snow Forest,” which is set in Siberia in the mid-20th century. In her case, reviewers weren’t attacking the book itself, or even the premise — a Russian family seeking refuge from Soviet oppression in the wilderness. Critics objected to the fact that Gilbert had set the book in Russia while Russia is waging war on Ukraine, and lambasted Gilbert as insensitive to the plight of Ukrainians.

Gilbert announced she was postponing publication of the novel before a single review copy had been sent out.

The young adult authors Keira Drake and Amélie Wen Zhao postponed publication of their novels after facing criticism on Twitter and Goodreads that their depictions of fantasy worlds were racially insensitive. In 2019, the young adult novelist Kosoko Jackson canceled his debut novel, a love story between two teen boys set in the late 1990s during the Kosovo War, after drawing withering critiques on Goodreads.

All of these authors would probably describe themselves as progressives but that doesn’t seem to matter. Once the mob has been activated to shout someone down neither the contents of the book or the author’s politics matter. And so even trans authors get canceled.

When Gretchen Felker-Martin sold her debut novel, “Manhunt,” about trans women trying to survive in a world where a virus is spreading among people with higher levels of testosterone, she knew some would find the horror story distasteful. But she was blindsided by what felt like an organized campaign of review bombing on Goodreads, she said.

People who objected to the novel’s premise “went ballistic, and bombarded the thing with hundreds and hundreds of negative reviews before anyone had read it,” she said. Felker-Martin, who is transgender, said she had asked Goodreads to remove some of the more personal attacks, and asked friends to report hateful comments, but never got a response, although a couple of reviews were taken down.

How hard would it be to prevent people publishing reviews on books that haven’t been published yet? Maybe a bit more work but not much. Why not make this simply change to protect authors?

There are some interesting responses from commenters. This one from an author sounds a bit creepy.

I received a one star review for my novel ‘The Women and The Girls’ within minutes of its official publication. I felt hurt and devastated for a hour or so, until I realised she could not have had time to read it. Her review was amended to four stars a few days later for no apparent reason. I was then contacted by that person, who also contacted my publicist at my publisher. She ‘wanted to explain’ she said, and to meet me in person. It turned out she ran a volunteer group at my local library. I didn’t respond to her message, and that was the end of it. The whole thing made me feel oddly threatened, though, in a weird and almost imperceptible way. There are nasty people out there who do things like leave one star reviews for no good reason, and the internet is just giving them power.

One more:

We are in a culture that resembles a schoolyard brawl more than a culture. People bully for what they want without reading the book or listening to the opinion of those they oppose. So much power in being able to throw stones and see a whole group of stone throwers join you! Such a false sense of righteousness! And social media only reinforces that.

This is not much different than the book banning and textbook controlling that small strident groups are doing at libraries and school board meetings.

The stance of “I don’t like it so I won’t actually read it or listen to it and I want to totally destroy it” is about as far away as you can get from good civic behavior and thoughtful discourse. People are learning how easy it is to be a strong bully. How easy it is to “win” – when everyone else loses.

The difference is that when people remove a book from a school library on the grounds that the content isn’t age appropriate, the book still exists and can still be bought on Amazon or wherever else by anyone who wants to read it. When an author’s book gets canceled by a mob on Goodreads before it is even published no one ever gets to read or order a copy.