Authors Looking directly for Readers discussion

Hiya.

Stemming from one of my recent blog posts/rants, dealing with goons who slam you with 1-star ratings (without leaving a review to explain why -- one of our group members has found herself on the receiving end of a troll.

This person has doggedly attacked this user both here and on fb.

Assuming that direct sunlight won't simply turn this bugger to stone and end his tirade once and for all, I am putting the question to all of your writers who might have experienced one of these creeps in the past.

How have you all dealt with this tacky kind of business.

Tips, tricks and advice gladly appreciated.

BMB

Amazon has a process for dealing with this behavior. The _author_ must complain about the validity of the review. Point out abusive language and non-applicabiity of the review. This is especially good of the review talks about the author's politics/race/sex/etc. It can result in removal of the review and an "Amazon slap." Amazon slap means barring from the Amazon system.

It seems Goodreads take a very poor view of trolls as well. I sent them a message explaining that a troll known to me had set up multiple (new) accounts under which he kept leaving one-star reviews on my book. They sent me the following reply:

...

Thank you for your reply and for the additional information. We've looked into the accounts you mentioned and as some of them raised a number of our standard red flags for illegitimacy, they were removed from the site. To clarify, members are welcome to create more than one personal account if they wish (and for instance, authors may maintain a separate personal account in addition to the account linked to their author profile), but rating the same book from more than one account may skew the book's average and is not allowed. Additionally, multiple fake accounts designed solely to inflate or deflate an author's book are prohibited.

If you see any further accounts you believe are abusive, please let us know and we will be happy to look into it for you.

...

All his multiple accounts have now gone and so have the one stars. Although since then, he has set up a new one (but only one) and left another one-star review, as well as blocking me so I can't tell how old the account is. I am not sure whether I should bother reporting it. The guy will always be around and always try to undermine my reviews and he probably enjoys playing cat-and-mouse.

The only annoying thing is, he hasn't even read the book!

"The only annoying thing is, he hasn't even read the book!" If it's clear that he hasn't actually read the book, he will be ignored. If the reviews are on Amazon, let them know as well. They will "review, and remove" such reviews (so I'm told).