It Happens to Many, and Now, I've Been Through It

As an independent/small press author, I've heard and read many the horror stories from my fellow storytellers about how people on Amazon or Goodreads routinely hop on their works and post one-star reviews devoid of details about the stories themselves because they didn't actually read the work. These trolls shamelessly attempt to lambaste and down-vote their competition to death in an effort to either promote their own works, or 'put indie authors in their place'.

This kind of petty, small-minded nonsense goes on so frequently that there's a petition being taken up to make Amazon require identification authentication for members who wish to post reviews on the site. Anne Rice and Stephen King are both on board with it, and that should say something.

Anyhow, I was, up until recently, a member of a Facebook writers group entitled 'The League of Distinguished Horror Writers'.  The man who established the group decided to start his own small indie press, and I was asked to join as one of the authors in the beginning stable. All was going fine, until I was asked for my feedback on a story he'd written and published on Amazon via its Kindle Direct Publishing program, a short work entitled 'Satan's Bitch'.

I proceeded to give it an honest, thorough review.  The review is here:

http://www.amazon.com/Satans-Bitch-r-archer-ebook/product-reviews/B00IVU28UQ/ref=cm_cr_dp_qt_hist_three?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addThreeStar&showViewpoints=0


A mere 30 minutes after I made Mr. Archer aware of the review, someone posted a 1-star ranking on my 'A Midwestern Yankee in King Ovin's Court'.  The review was all of 2 or 3 sentences long, had no details or sense of the 'reviewer' having actually read the material, and came from someone whose only other reviews were glowing 5-star reviews of works by Mr. Archer and other Madwriter associates.

When confronted with this, Mr. Archer became rather nasty with me, and was overly defensive of his work, trying to get me to agree not to be honest with my critiques of his or other Madwriter authors' works on Amazon by discussing negative points in their material.

I told him that that wasn't what it's supposed to be about as a storyteller.  It's supposed to be about working with each other, helping to improve one another's writing, and providing the best narrative possible for our audience.  He retorted that if I wanted to be a broke storyteller, that was fine.


I could go on, because Mr. Archer gave me plenty of material to do so here, but I needn't kick a dead horse.  The point is, I didn't think I'd run into this problem, but I did.  If you're a storyteller, be on the lookout for disreputable folks who are in it for nothing more than a quick buck; they are NOT professionals who you want to associate with.  Get yourself free of them early if you notice something amiss, and always, ALWAYS keep records of your chats and what happens as a result of your disagreements.  It can help you defend your actions later.