Let’s Talk Bookish: Author Controversies

Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly meme that was originally created and hosted by Rukky @ Eternity Books starting in August 2019, and was then cohosted with Dani @ Literary Lion from May 2020 to March 2022. Book Nook Bits has hosted since April 2022.

This is a really interesting topic, especially in light of recent events in the horror community, though you’d be better off working out how often that couldn’t be said, really. Anyway! Interesting topic, and definitely one worth lots of consideration.

Let’s Talk Bookish April 26th
Do Author Controversies Impact Your Reading Choices? 
(Jillian @ Jillian the Bookish Butterfly)

Prompts: For this topic, Jillain wrote that she thought of this topic because of the situation with Cait Corrain, the author who lost her book deal after posting fake negative Goodreads reviews of other books in attempt to sabotage those authors. Did you hear about the Cait Corrain situation? Do you often keep up with or read about author/bookish controversies? Do situations such as this one impact your reading choices?

I did hear about the Cait Corrain situation. It’s awful seeing anyone targeted in the way the debut authors were, but the addition of bigotry into the mix made it so much worse. It’s awful, too, to think of how much power there is on review sites like Goodreads, where there doesn’t seem to be a way to meaningfully tackle this trend of review bombing, which has especially been used against margenalised authors, most commonly BIPOC writers.

Not intentionally, but I do almost-accidentally keep up with “author/bookish controversies”. I think there’s a real issue in publishing, at all levels, of bullying, harassment, abuse, bigotry, and there’s a huge problem with ‘bad actors’ twisting ideas of social justice to hide their own behaviours, or to try and claim they couldn’t possibly be responsible for the actions they’ve committed. It happens over and over, and the Corrain situation was mainly unique for how it ‘broke out’ of the bookish community and became a full news story. However, we see frequent controversies at other levels. For me, it’s indie horror where I see this most – indie horror seems to particularly attract certain types of people who think the way to the top is to stamp and scream and leap from one ‘rung’ of the ladder to the next, damn anyone who ‘gets in their way’. There have been two such instances more recently where these people were ‘outed’, and the common behaviour in both is clear to anyone familiar with either situation.

So yes, I keep up with these sort of situations. And it absolutely does impact my reading choices. I almost rely on social media at this point to avoid promoting…’bad actors’, for lack of a better term. Sometimes a name will ring a bell and I have to do some digging, but I don’t want to support people who harm others. Sometimes, I might end up with an arc and find out later the author has done questionable things, but if that’s the case it goes to the bottom of the pile. It doesn’t mean I’ll never read it, but it’ll get a very low priority. And I absolutely won’t buy books by people who, again, have actively harmed others.

So yes, where I am aware of an author’s poor behaviour, I absolutely avoid their work. Sometimes it’s seeing something in passing on social media, sometimes it’s hearing about things that happened at cons, or even their own behaviour on social media raises red flags, but whatever the reason, it does impact what I read. But it’s not like there aren’t an unlimited number of books by authors who do treat others with respect and kindness and work on uplifting others as well as their own, so I am still completely spoiled for choice, even when removing authors who have caused issues.