a TeMPLe of WoRDS

I am always honored when an author contacts me, especially when they are thanking me for reading and reviewing their books.  I know that not everyone feels this way, and I completely understand why they do, but I have been pretty lucky with the author interaction I have had, and have even became friends with quite a few.

What I dislike, however, is authors that feel the need to disrespect me as a person and a reviewer, threaten me, threaten others on my behalf, etc.

I wrote a very hard review for me yesterday.  Instead of giving both books the 1 stars I fully believed they deserved, based on the sole fact that she is giving a bunch of blarney and spouting it as fact, I chose to mark one with two stars (it is quite bad, filled with lots of anger, and I will be writing that review shortly) and the other, that I did review, with three stars.  I think three stars with constructive criticism help both the author and the readers/potential readers and don't mind taking a little bit of extra time to do this.

To say that the author was not happy would be an understatement.

In the amount of time it took me to post the review on here, Goodreads, Amazon, and B&N, as well as on my blog, she had contacted the person who was running the blog tour. I really don't know what she has said, but she apparently had already come at the blog tour coordinator for her review on the last book, expecting her to edit the negative things out.  I also know that she told this particular blog tour coordinator that she paid for positive reviews and wanted to cancel the rest of the blog tour if "all your bloggers are negative."

I thought this would be the end of it, especially since the blog tour coordinator stood up for me, and backed me up, then told her not to contact her for another blog tour because she would not be working with her again.

The nonsense began this morning with her leaving a comment on each of my reviews on Goodreads - both saying: "I love when I get reactions like this. It brings more attention to my work. Thx Meghan."  Knowing how easy it is for that kind of thing to backfire on the authors, and really NOT wanting to deal with this nonsense today, I deleted the comments.  Then, a little while later, found that she had tried to leave a comment on my blog (after the issue I had with ghost hunter boy, I made sure that you can only leave a comment if I like it enough to publish it), which really made me unhappy.  She then went back to Goodreads later, I deleted her comments again (stupid me), and then found she had tried for yet another comment on my blog.

This is getting out of control, authors thinking that it is okay to bully and disrespect reviewers.  She may not have liked my review, but I was honest and that's what matters to me.

So, for posterity sake, I am leaving a picture of her comments here.  I did not publish them to my blog - it's my blog and 'I do what I want.'  But, you know, watch out for this one.