Was Goodreads Designed For Trolls?

They published this hogwash in the KDP newsletter today:

“Why Should KDP Authors Join Goodreads?
By Patrick Brown, Director of Author Marketing at Goodreads
Out of the hundreds of thousands of new titles published each year, how will you get your book noticed by readers? Look to our fellow Amazon family member, Goodreads. 

Goodreads is the world’s largest site for readers and book recommendations with 20 million members who have added more than 620 million books and written more than 25 million reviews. Most importantly, every second, Goodreads members add four books to their “want to read” shelves. How can you help make one of them yours? 

Marketing has become as much a part of the author’s work as writing the actual book. Savvy KDP authors are already taking advantage of the Goodreads platform to get reviews and reach readers. Upon becoming a Goodreads author there are many tools available to immediately boost awareness of your book. The first thing you have to do is join the site. To find out more about the Goodreads Author Program, click here.”

What Brown never says is that the Badreads site is not author friendly and is the home of a gang of stalker trolls they actually harbor, protect and defend. These are criminals who stalk, bully and harass indie writers relentlessly.

Badreads even threatens authors with the loss of their reputation if they respond to the personal attacks. 

http://www.goodreads.com/author/guidelines

“Goodreads authors have responded to readers who gave their books negative reviews or ratings, and the results have been disastrous for the authors’ reputations. Goodreads is not private; other readers will see a hostile reaction from the author, and a single negative interaction is often enough to turn a reader against an author permanently.’”

To me this is an implied threat to authors that if they defend them self against personal attacks by trolls, badreads won’t stop it, they will allow their trolls to destroy your reputation, livelihood and career.

Why would any writer want to be involved with a website who threatens them in the guidelines?

They treat all complaints of vicious personal attacks having nothing to do with a book or review as disgruntled authors whining about poor reviews. If an author complains about the trolls Badreads bans the author to solve the problem of the attacks.

But that does not solve the problem for the author. Even after being banned your book will remain and continue being attacked by the trolls. This same murder of trolls wallow in the Amazon forums.

He also fails to mention that many of the books on the Badreads website are stolen intellectual property. Many, many authors have left badreads in disgust and sent badreads DMCA take-down orders to get their books removed from that hostile site. They flatly refuse to remove content even against the direct wishes of the copyright holders.

With policy like that how can they possibly say the site is author friendly? This is clearly anti-author, pro-troll policy.  One can only draw the conclusion that goodreads is designed for trolls to terrorize indies back into the arms of parasitic, exploitive traditional publishing.

Both Badreads and Amazon protect and encourage these trolls. They’ve stalked me with them posting my home address online.

Amazon’s response was that stalking, bullying, harassment, criminal defamation, libel, terrorism and publishing confidential, personal information such as home addresses in their forums does not violate their guidelines.

Authors should avoid Badreads and Amazon forums like the plague.

The KDP select program that once worked so well to promote books has been rendered ineffective and a magnet for troll attacks. The trolls love to trash books by authors naive’ enough to give them free copies.