Bullies and blackouts: Examining the participatory culture of online book reviewing

Abstract

This article examines online book reviewing practices through Henry Jenkins’s notion of ‘participatory culture’ and illustrates the power dynamics and market pressures that shape this participation. While the individuals featured in this article participate in shared affinity spaces around a passion for reading and writing books, they also participate in a publishing industry increasingly reliant on reviews and ratings. I argue that the sabotaging and bullying of authors and reviewers, and the power dynamics reinforced through these tactics, risk being occluded by scholarship that emphasizes the literacy practices fostered through participatory culture over the content and social actions reproduced through them. My analysis of book reviewing practices demonstrates the need to critique the positive imagery evoked by terms like ‘participatory’, ‘affinity’, ‘online community’, ‘shared goals’, and ‘collective knowledge’ and to examine these terms within their specific discursive and economic conditions.

Keywords

Affinity space Amazon book blogging book reviews Goodreads participatory culture

Introduction

In July 2012, an opinion piece appeared on Huffington Post titled ‘Why It’s Time to Stop the Goodreads Bullies’. In it, the anonymous post claimed that authors on Goodreads were being routinely harassed by ‘groups of bullies’ with ‘malicious reviews’ and the intent of ‘destroy[ing] the author’s reputation and career’. As one commenter quoted in the article explained:

It isn’t so much the individual bully reviews, which are bad enough. It’s that they form gangs and roam through GR like rabid animals, mocking, harassing, terrorizing, and humiliating authors. They do it for the amusement. They’re like Hell’s Angels without the Toys for Tots Christmas drive…for FUN, they psychologically torture and harass people.

The HuffPo article served as an introduction to the newly launched website, Stop the Goodreads Bullies (STGRB), and as a demand for the Goodreads site to enforce its terms of service and deactivate those members who engaged in bullying behaviors. Immediately following the piece were numerous responses accusing the STGRB site itself of participating in the very harassment tactics it decried, including disseminating the personal information of individuals they deemed bullies.

Since 2012, critical and contentious debates have flourished regarding the ways readers and authors interact online and the competing purposes book reviews serve. In this article, I examine online book reviewing practices through Henry Jenkins’s notion of ‘participatory culture’, I illustrate the power dynamics and economic pressures that shape this participation, and I demonstrate the need to temper the egalitarian claims promoted by participatory culture research. In many ways, the current book publishing market is a poster child for what Jenkins (2006a) describes as convergent, participatory culture: the ‘top-down corporate-driven’ and ‘bottom-up consumer-driven’ processes whereby content flows across old and new media platforms and where consumption is increasingly participatory and productive (p. 18). Because ‘[d]igital tools have lowered the costs of production and circulation…more people have the capacity to take media into their own hands, creating and sharing what they know and how they see the world beyond their immediate friends and families’ (Clinton et al., 2013: 8). Within the book publishing world specifically, digital technologies have decentralized and unbundled publishing services, and a market once controlled by corporate New York publishing houses has become increasingly destabilized by small, niche presses and self-published writers. Jenkins (2006b) suggests that the Internet has become the ‘digital refrigerator for the “Do-it-Yourself” movement’, allowing ‘amateurs’ to publish their writing, music, movies, and art for broad circulation (p. 555). Indeed, within the current book publishing market, the move from consumer to producer – from reader to writer – has never been easier.

At the same time, the ability to publish without the sponsorship of an established publishing house means that authors must find innovative ways to reach their target audiences and generate buzz for their books. Readers, faced with an increasingly flooded market, need ways of sorting through the hyper-abundant reading material now available. Large, traditional publishing houses need ways of maintaining a competitive edge within an industry whose profit margins have always been slim. Finally, digital channels and online shopping have replaced word-of-mouth and brick-and-mortar bookstores. Not surprisingly, the star ratings and book reviews featured on Goodreads, Amazon, and other book blogging sites have become a dominant system by which authors, publishers, and readers navigate the book market online. While the individuals featured in this article participate in shared affinity spaces around a passion for reading and writing books, they also participate in a publishing industry increasingly reliant on reviews and ratings.

I argue that the practices of buying and begging for reviews, sabotaging and bullying authors and reviewers, and the power dynamics reinforced through these tactics, risk being occluded by scholarship that emphasizes the literacy practices fostered through participatory culture over the content and social actions reproduced through them. Much of participatory culture research ‘beckon[s] us with infectious optimism into the new world of connected action’ (Couldry, 2011: 489). Less is known about the ways online communities, often mediated through anonymous avatars and screen names, navigate conflicting goals, foster antagonism and competition, or construct literacy practices and knowledges that reproduce hegemonic power relations and discourses. My analysis of book reviewing practices demonstrates the need to critique the positive imagery evoked by terms like ‘participatory’, ‘affinity’, ‘online community’, ‘shared goals’, and ‘collective knowledge’ and to examine these terms within their specific discursive and economic conditions.

The findings presented here are part of a larger qualitative study about the ways digital technologies are shaping the conditions in which popular romance fiction is written, published, and read. In 2014, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 50 individuals who read or write nonmainstream romance and/or work with nontraditional publishing venues. I recruited individuals by posting announcements for the study across a number of spaces both on and offline. I announced the study during my talk at the 2014 Popular Culture Association conference as audience members consisted of romance scholars, readers, authors, bloggers, and publishing employees. I contacted several nonnormative publishing houses including Bold Strokes Books (LGBTQ), Riptide Publishing (LGBTQ), and Ellora’s Cave (erotica). I also contacted several romance fiction blogging sites and I posted the study announcement across numerous Goodreads romance fiction groups that cater specifically to nonmainstream readers and writers. Interested individuals were asked to complete a brief online survey in which they verified that they were at least 18 years of age, self-identified in terms of gender and race, noted their highest level of education, indicated their position within the genre (reader, author, and/or employee of the publishing industry), and described their favorite kinds of romance novels and processes for finding them. In total, 170 individuals completed the survey and I selected 50 individuals who represented a range of the aforementioned categories. Of these study participants, 36 individuals considered themselves a romance author, publishing employee, or both. Fourteen individuals identified as romance readers only. I interviewed romance authors and publishing employees once. I interviewed romance readers twice, including one interview and one book discussion of a romance novel of their choice.

Interview transcripts were examined using a thematic analysis approach (Boyatzis 1991). After conducting the interviews, I read through all transcripts to develop preliminary ideas about meanings and recurring patterns. I then read these transcripts again multiple times, developing codes and documenting these codes using NVivo 10 software. Once all transcripts were coded, I began looking for salient patterns and themes within and across codes. Themes and their supporting codes were then used to develop larger claims about how individuals engage with nonmainstream romance novels and/or nontraditional publishing venues. One theme that emerged was the central importance of book reviews for romance readers, writers, and publishers. Historically, romance readers have not relied on published reviews of romance novels because, as I mention in a later section, such reviews were not available. That reviews had become a major talking point for most of my participants indicated a change in the romance genre. I therefore began scouring book blogs, Goodreads, Amazon, and news articles for conversations about online book reviewing practices and I analyzed these texts for recurring themes and debates. Drawing from these online conversations and interview transcripts from study participants, my argument examines the participatory practices of online book reviewing with specific attention to the genre of popular romance fiction and to the ways in which participatory culture falls short of its ideals.

Participatory culture: Definitions and considerations

In this section, I lay out Jenkins’s definition of ‘participatory culture’ and examine how it has been taken up in literacy scholarship. I then highlight, and try to account for, the positive connotations embedded in much of participatory culture research. I hope to show that literacy scholarship thus far may be overcompensating for the negative perceptions of digital literacies by under-examining their negative effects. A participatory culture can be defined as one:

with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement

with strong support for creating and sharing one’s creation

with some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices

where members believe that their contributions matter

where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at least they care what other people think about what they have created). (Jenkins, 2006c: 7)

Jenkins’s research has focused on the democratic potential of participatory culture and specifically on the opportunities for individuals to build ‘affinity spaces’ (Gee, 2004) and ‘online communities’ for the purposes of artistic expression and civic engagement, the pursuit of shared goals, and the production and dissemination of collective knowledge. Consistently, Jenkins’s work highlights the ways individuals’ online practices demonstrate collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity.

Like Jenkins, literacy scholars over the last 20 years have taken up ‘participatory culture’ to examine how individuals – especially youth – participate in online affinity spaces and support shared learning (Chandler-Olcott and Mahar, 2003; Gee, 2004). Rebecca Black’s (2005) research on fanfiction, for instance, demonstrates the capacity of online writing communities to support second-language acquisition and peer-to-peer learning. Gee (2004) has investigated the literacy practices fostered through video game play and examined how out-of-school learning environments might inform learning in school. Literacy scholarship has also considered how online writing encourages students to redefine intellectual property (Hunter, 2011) and develop civic identities (Ito et al., 2008). Other studies of social networking sites and affinity spaces have examined how individuals construct social identities (McGinnis et al., 2007; Williams, 2007), engage in new literacy practices (Lankshear and Knobel, 2008), create a sense of community (Albrechtslund, 2010), and build knowledge around shared interests (Lankshear and Knobel, 2007). Describing the literacy practices and relations foregrounded in literacy research on participatory culture, Lankshear and Knobel write:

Practices and relationships are widely marked by generosity, reciprocity, and a sense that the more who participate the richer the experience will be (cf. Ito, 2005). In terms of ‘ethos’, the ontology of practices like blogging, writing fanfiction, and collaborating in Wikipedia celebrate free support and advice, building the practice, collective benefit, cooperation before competition, everyone a winner rather than a zero-sum game, and transparent rules and procedures. (2007: 227–228).

The potential for participatory culture to foster egalitarian social relations and productive literate practices is well documented in literacy research. Several factors might account for why literacy scholarship has so often foregrounded these findings with less attention to those online engagements that result in less positive outcomes. First, since the late 1990s, literacy scholars have worked to complicate two prevailing assumptions about adolescents’ engagements online: (1) they are dangerous and (2) they are unproductive. Concerns regarding adolescents’ susceptibility to online predators, risky behaviors, and privacy violations have characterized online communication as a hazard rather than a resource. Likewise, the positioning of new media literacies and video gaming in opposition to traditional print-based literacies has worked to produce an enduring image of the struggling student tuned out to academic work in favor of online entertainment. Literacy scholars have consistently advocated for more nuanced definitions of literacy that include meaning-making activities across a range of symbol systems and that value learning across a range of spaces in addition to school. Literacy research that foregrounds the affordances of adolescents’ online activity has thus supported the development of school curricula that incorporate digital- and print-based literacy practices and bridge students’ out-of-school and in-school interests and knowledges (Alvermann and Hagood, 2000; Jacobs, 2008; Moje et al., 2008).

The demographics and affinity spaces frequently studied in such research, that is: youth’s engagements on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube, gaming sites like World of Warcraft, fanfiction writing sites, and other do-it-yourself and fan-based spaces, might also contribute to the positive findings highlighted by literacy research. Profit is not generally the primary motivation of adolescents’ online activities in these spaces. In contrast, while the online book reviewing sites I examine in the next section rely on a shared interest in reading and writing, the contributions of their members, and the free exchange of reviews and recommendations, they are also mediated by economic interests and an intensely competitive market. I do not want to suggest that youth do not participate in online spaces where profit is a motivating factor, nor do I want to draw a reductive binary between the practices of ‘innocent’ youth and ‘corrupt’ adults. Rather, examining how book reviewing sites function within these conditions and shape members’ practices will add to our understanding of the intersections between participation and profit, collectivity and consumerism.

In order to better understand the workings of participatory culture, it is important to highlight the affinity spaces and communal practices that may meet the criteria of participatory culture but may not live up to the democratic and productive possibilities that participatory culture research has foregrounded. Recently, scholars have critiqued the utopian discourses characterizing much of convergence and participatory culture research (Hindman, 2009; Turner, 2011), examined how fans’ participation on and offline provides free labor and marketing services (Bird, 2011), and complicated the use of terms like ‘community’ and ‘culture’ that too often signal positive, democratic, and shared goals (Couldry, 2011). My own analysis of online book reviewing sites as enactments of participatory culture contributes to research on the affordances and constraints of online collective activity. The current book industry serves a primary example of the egalitarian possibilities produced by participatory culture research. Yet an analysis of book reviewing practices as they travel across myriad spaces also demonstrates the ways in which these possibilities are not realized.

Examining online book reviewing as participatory culture

The online product review has been around for years, but specific attention to online book reviews has increased more recently as the gate-keeping function of book publishers have diminished and self-published books have surged. Rather than examine the book reviews featured on one site only, like Goodreads or Amazon, I consider how these sites, as well as other book blogging sites, illustrate a range of reviewing practices and raise similar questions about the purposes that book reviews serve and the social actions they make possible. As Nancy Baym (2007) writes:

We have countless studies of particular newsgroups, Web forums, social network sites, and blogs. We have few studies that explore the connections amongst these disparate online platforms, despite the fact that people’s online activities are almost always distributed across multiple sites. It is no longer clear that going to a site is an appropriate strategy for studying community on the Internet (n.p.).

Given the likelihood that many individuals use Amazon, Goodreads, and other blogging sites in tandem, my research demonstrates how book reviewing practices travel across affinity spaces and elicit myriad responses. As one example, and as I will demonstrate in this article, a YA author’s dissatisfaction with a single Goodreads review resulted in a book reviewing strike that spanned multiple websites and provoked lengthy conversations about the changing function of book reviews. Such a cultural moment could not be captured by examining the Goodreads site alone.

As ‘affinity spaces’ (Gee 2004), book review sites allow individuals to generate content and knowledge, interact across varied user roles and levels of expertise, and gather online in the pursuit of shared interests and goals. On Goodreads, for instance, users read book reviews, add their own reviews and recommendations, promote their own books, follow authors’ and readers’ activities, and join interest groups devoted to reading and writing. For many of the romance authors and readers I interviewed, both Goodreads and Amazon feel like egalitarian spaces where everyone’s voice is heard and where reviews have the power to respond to, and shape, the popular romance genre. As author Richard Natale noted,

On Goodreads, I’m there along with Donna Tartt and Joyce Carol Oates so it’s very democratic. Whereas I would never have been in their company because I wasn’t published by Random House or Simon and Schuster or somebody like that.

Likewise, fiction blogger RK, who contributes to the site, Smart Girls Love Sci-Fi and Paranormal Romance, described using the site as a way to foreground lesser known writers, specifically authors of color: ‘I do try to seek out as many people of color [to interview] as I can because I have a chance to do it and I feel like other people won’t, to be honest.’ For Natale, RK, and others, book reviews level the playing field and demonstrate the power of consumers and lesser-known writers to shape what historically has been a corporate-driven industry. To participate in online book review sites is to play a part in shaping the romance fiction market and, sometimes, even romance novels themselves. As author Tiffany Reisz commented, ‘If five reviewers say, “I hated this scene. It made me hate the hero,” the person – the writer – can pull it down, change the scene, and put it back up again.’ Uploading a book to Amazon, revising it based on reader response, and re-uploading the newest version of it highlight the possibilities of a convergent, participatory culture where writers and readers collaborate in varied ways around a shared interest in books.

Yet, individuals’ shared interest in books does not erase the conflicting interests mediated through online book review spaces or the multiple purposes book reviews serve. A few examples will help to illustrate this point. In 2012, the New York Times ran a piece titled ‘The Best Book Reviews Money Can Buy’. The article featured Todd Rutherford who, for US$99, would write a positive review of your book and post it on Amazon; for US$999, he would write 50 positive reviews. Rutherford claimed to have generated US$28,000 a month creating fake reviews before Google suspended his advertising account and Amazon began removing some of his posts (Streitfeld, 2012). Like Rutherford, former librarian Harriet Klausner has positively reviewed more than 31,000 books on Amazon, sometimes posting 20 reviews in a single day (Kaplan). Before her death in 2015, Klausner repeatedly stated she had never been paid for her reviews, although she did receive free books from editors and publishing houses. Moreover, Klausner left only four- or five-star ratings with reviews ‘as cookie-cutter as the novels she often wrote about: usually a two-paragraph plot summary followed by a few lavish run-on sentences about how great the book was’ (Kaplan). Yet Amazon listed Klausner as a ‘Hall of Fame Reviewer’, a badge to identify reviewers ‘who have been highly ranked in previous years’, purportedly for the helpfulness of their ratings and reviews for fellow readers. The book reviewing practices illustrated by Rutherford and Klausner demonstrate the book review’s function, not simply as a recommendation from readers, but as a marketing tool. As Rutherford himself put it, ‘I was creating reviews that pointed out the positive things, not the negative things. These were marketing reviews, not editorial reviews’ (qtd. in Streitfeld, 2012: n.p.).

The difference between a review for ‘marketing’ purposes and one for ‘editorial’ purposes is not as clear as Rutherford suggests, nor has it ever been. While traditional publishers may not have engaged in the explicit purchasing of positive reviews, historically they have decided which critics to send review copies to, and certainly these decisions were based on which reviewers they believed would read a given book favorably. It should also be noted that reviewers have the freedom to make decisions about the books they are willing to review. Prior to the early 1990s, for instance, reviews of romance novels were few and far between. The stigma of the popular romance genre as low-brow, hackneyed writing meant that it was reviewed mostly in genre-specific journals like Romantic Times. It was not until 1995 that Library Journal began reviewing romance novels. That year, chief editor Francine Fialkoff released an editorial titled ‘Are we Dumbing Down the Book Review?’ in which she defended the choice to begin reviewing romance novels: ‘You can’t just serve one clientele – or a clientele you’d like to create in your own version of the literati or that oft-mentioned ‘intelligent layperson’ – whatever that may be. Neither can we [as reviewers]’ (1995: 60). Still, publishers have traditionally sent review copies to professional critics at institutions like the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus, critics who are employed and receive compensation for their reviews (positive, negative, or anywhere in between). Moreover, such critics often have some training or expertise valued by the publishing industry. At Kirkus, for instance, reviewers include ‘librarians, business executives, journalists from national publications, PhDs in religion and literature, creative executives in entertainment and publishing industries, as well as other professional reviewers’. Likewise, since its founding in 1981, Romantic Times reports a vetting process for reviewers:

We look for long-time readers with favorite genres, who exhibited clarity and intelligence in their review writing. For the first few months, we ask other reviewers to read the books and check out the reviews and ratings of new hires. (Writers in the Storm)

The purchasing of positive reviews outright, the turning away from suspicious reviewing practices, and the use of free reviewers illustrate more recent trends made possible in part through the communications and practices fostered through participatory culture. Tapper (2014) argues that even while romance fiction has been lambasted as conservative and retrogressive, romance publishing tactics have been consistently innovative and profitable, including the industry’s book reviewing practices: ‘[O]ver the past decade, the rise of a vast network of Internet fan communities, blogs, and messageboards concentrating on romance…has enabled romance publishers to interact with their readership at once more easily and comprehensively than ever before’ (p. 256). Publishers, for instance, recognize the power of book bloggers to generate free buzz for books and thus send them advance copies of books, at times with the expectation that books be reviewed favorably. Jane, a participant in my study and a social media coordinator for a romance fiction publishing house, noted:

I’m right in the middle, so I get the author and the publisher side of, ‘We want them to do our book tours, and our book excerpts, and our cover reveals, and our reviews.’ And then bloggers say ‘We don’t work for you.’ But they get free books, and this expectation of free and early arcs, and how nasty do you be, and so it’s always very interesting for me as kind of the middle person to see this back and forth between bloggers and publishers and authors.

Jane’s comment demonstrates the conflicting interests book reviews serve for authors, publishers, and bloggers. While romance bloggers are generally unpaid, enthusiastic readers who maintain their websites because they love to talk about books, they nevertheless benefit from receiving free copies of romance novels. In turn, publishers and authors may position review sites and book bloggers themselves as simply an extension of their marketing team.

Within a networked ‘community’ of romance novel enthusiasts, the lines between marketing and editorial reviews, and the relationships reproduced through these distinctions, begin to blur. In my interviews, romance fiction authors described asking friends and family members to write reviews for their books, navigating a fine line between ‘professional’ and ‘personal’ relationships with bloggers, and distinguishing between buying reviews and begging for reviews. For instance, AJ Harmon, a self-published author of more than 10 romance novels, described to me how she solicited reviews:

Yeah, I won’t buy a review…I mean I beg for reviews all the time. But I try to word it so that it’s like ‘If you loved the book please go leave a review. If you didn’t love the book, please don’t leave a review. I don’t want your review if you didn’t like it.’ I also say things like ‘At the end of the week I’m going to give away a travel mug to one lucky reviewer.’…Some people consider that buying reviews. I completely disagree. I’m just encouraging them to go leave a review.

Harmon’s encouragement for readers to leave only positive reviews highlights the currency that book reviews represent and the changing power dynamics between authors and reviewers online. Harmon referred to romance fiction bloggers as friends, noting, ‘I mean, it’s not about writer/reader/blogger/author. I mean, that just kind of disappears after a certain amount of time and it’s just really, a really good friendship’. While Harmon attributes the professional and personal dynamics of her relationships with bloggers to the development of these relationships over time, certainly they are also due to the informal and frequent ways readers and writers interact across book review sites as well as social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

In fact, it is difficult to separate online book reviews from romance authors’ and romance readers’ uses of social media sites more generally as tools for interacting with one another. Many of the readers I interviewed described following authors on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, not just to learn about upcoming book releases but also to establish a relationship with the author as part of their reading experience. One participant, Tracy, commented:

Well, honestly, the only reason I joined Twitter originally was to follow Tiffany Reisz…so I actually went to a book signing that both [Tiffany and her boyfriend] were at. I met both of them and over the course of, you know, like hanging out with them for a year and we Tweeted against each other. She went to Oregon recently and they’ve invited me to come visit them.

Another participant, Elizabeth, described her evolving relationship with the author Radclyffe, stating

We are friends now, but in the beginning when it was completely a relationship by email, that was very exciting for me and she’s not the only author that I’ve had a relationship with that lives primarily over the Internet.

In my interview with Radclyffe (a pseudonym for Len Barot, the founder of the LGBTQ publishing press Bold Strokes Books), she echoed Elizabeth’s comments and described answering every email she receives from readers and the importance of those interactions: ‘I mean, lots of people who are in my company today started out as readers corresponding with me’. Most of the romance readers and authors I interviewed described how much they value talking with one another online and sharing an interest in romance novels. For varied reasons, some individuals described not having people in their daily lives with whom they can talk about their romance reading interests, and they see online communities as a way to meet like-minded people. The affinity spaces romance readers and authors share, and the online interactions made possible through social networking sites, thus allow individuals to construct a sense of community and safety from censure.

At the same time, such relationships between romance authors and readers are of course mediated through a participatory culture in which promotion is in part packaged as friendship and intimacy. Romance authors are routinely encouraged by their publishers to have a social media presence, to build a fan base, and to use online activity to promote books and interact with readers. To promote one’s books online without also providing access and friendship can be seen negatively by readers. For instance, describing some romance authors, romance reader Lady Orchid commented:

They don’t communicate with their fans at all, but they’re pushing for a review. I’m like ‘Well, why don’t you answer me when I’m asking something about a character in your book, and you don’t take the time to a least try to answer? Why should you be asking me for a review?’

In a market in which readers’ reviews on Goodreads and Amazon seem significantly more important than whether a book lands on the New York Times Bestseller List, authors must work at maintaining relationships with readers through access, regular updates, and correspondence. Jane, the social media coordinator for a publishing house, stated:

That’s one of the things [authors] often ask me, is ‘How much access should I give?’ And the answer is, ‘Well, how much access do you have in your life?’ You know what I mean? You have to balance that…and they say, ‘Well I need my book sales to go up, and I hear people that have 3,000 Twitter followers and a street team, and all this stuff have more book sales.’ And I say, ‘Well, if that’s the price you’re willing to pay, then give all the access you want.’

Jane’s comment here reveals the pressures authors face as marketing strategies move away from book tours, book signings, and advertisements, and move towards social connection, access, and maintaining relationships with fans. Acknowledging the extent to which readers have come to expect access to authors, Sarah, an editorial director for an LGBTQ publishing house, described the difficulty of marketing authors without a social media presence. Nevertheless, she also noted that authors’ negative interactions with readers can impact publishers’ decisions to work with them: ‘Does this author flame out on social media a lot? And if they do, then that severely affects our acquisition decisions’. When I asked Sarah to describe what constitutes ‘flaming out’, she replied, ‘getting into disagreements with readers about reviews. Getting into disagreements with reviewers in general’. Thus, even as romance readers and authors may construct online communities of genre enthusiasts, they also navigate complicated relationships that severely blur the distinctions among readers, writers, critics, and friends.

Taken together, the crucial importance of online book reviews, the varied purposes they serve, and the relationships participatory culture makes possible help to explain the behaviors and actions on book review sites that many have labeled ‘bullying’ and ‘harassment’. To better understand these accusations, we must examine the ways readers and authors can interact on book review sites. Like other Web 2.0 spaces, members on Goodreads can sign up with an email address, create a profile, and then choose an avatar and screen name to conceal their actual identity. With multiple email addresses, members can create multiple profiles and multiple identities. Members are then free to rate books within a five-star rating system, write a review, and add books to bookshelves. The STGRB site claims that readers use ‘sock puppets’ (multiple profiles controlled by a single user) to ‘carpet bomb’ authors (quickly drop large quantities of one-star reviews for their books) with the purpose of sabotaging their books. Some of my study participants believe that some romance authors use ‘street teams’ (groups of dedicated fans who organize to promote an author’s work) who not only leave five-star reviews for their favorite authors but also carpet bomb rival romance authors. Author AJ Harmon described the following incident:

Yes, I have several author friends that have had this happen to them. I know one author that did it to me…I just assumed that these four or five reviews I got on Goodreads that were 1- and 2-stars were just people that didn’t like the book. It wasn’t until later that I discovered that a particular author had done this to several other people. So I went back to Goodreads and I looked at the names of the people who I’d gotten these bad reviews from and they’re the same names that have gone to several different authors and done the same thing.

The STGRB site consistently provides screenshots of those they deem to be offenders; one image, for instance, captures the profile of ‘L’ who has written zero reviews and rated 4569 books as one-star. With screenshots alone, however, it is difficult to determine the frequency with which sock puppeting and carpet bombing occur, and whether they are done by readers acting alone, street teams, or authors themselves writing as reviewers. It is also difficult to say whether these reviews are generated by multiple people or just a few, or what effect they have on a book’s success.

Like sock puppeting and carpet bombing, the ability for Goodreads members to rate a book before it is available for purchase can serve to promote or tank an author. In an article published in Salon titled ‘Did an Author Get Bullied on Goodreads?’ Mary Elizabeth Williams (2013) describes the case of Lauren Howard, a first-time, self-published author who put her book Learning to Love on Goodreads before it was available for purchase. Once she uploaded the book, it immediately received low ratings. When Howard asked the Goodreads messageboard why it was being rated by people who had not yet read it, she received multiple disparaging comments, including this one by a Goodreads member:

Speshul snoflaks, otherwise supposedly known as authors, have the right to whine, whinge and generally complain about bad reviews. And reviewers have the right to rate a book however they feel like, with absolutely no justification what so ever. Get over it princess.

After receiving these comments and low ratings, Howard chose not to release the book. The use of the rating system as a way to gauge readers’ interests before a book is released demonstrates the shifting functions of book reviews and the social actions they make possible. Online book reviews and their accompanying star ratings reflect readers’ evaluations and endorsements of particular books and their ability to shape the circulation and reception of books; they may also reflect ‘however [readers] feel like’ at a given moment, and the ability to promote certain authors and intimidate others on a whim.

The STGRB site and its defenders have consistently stated that they are not against negative reviews but rather against attacks on authors. And there is no doubt that author harassment does occur through online book review sites. But the distinction between a negative review and an attack on an author, like the distinction between an editorial review and a marketing review, is not always easy to discern. Before their shelves were removed by Goodreads, for instance, several reviewers posted Lauren Howard’s book on shelves named ‘sodomy-by-lawn-sculpture’ and ‘abusive-attention-whore-authors’. In 2013, Charlaine Harris, author of the Sookie Stackhouse series – on which the television show True Blood is based – received numerous death threats across Amazon and Goodreads because readers were disappointed in the series’ ending (Flood, 2013: n.p.). Certainly, these examples extend beyond the negative review of a book and toward intimidation and harassment of authors themselves.

But what about the case of YA novelist Kathleen Hale? In 2014, Hale submitted a piece to The Guardian titled, ‘Am I Being Catfished?’ in which she chronicled her efforts to track down the identity of a Goodreads reviewer whose screen name was Blythe Harris and who gave Hale’s book a one-star review. Distraught by Harris’s negative review and the attention it was receiving by other Goodreads members, Hale turned to the STGRB site to interview its founders and to see if Blythe had been labeled as a badly behaved Goodreader (she had). The STGRB site claimed that Blythe had attacked a 14-year-old girl online over a disagreement about the book League of Strays and then ‘rallied the bullies’ to attack the girl as well. An examination of Blythe’s book review and subsequent comments suggests instead that while she indeed reviewed League of Strays negatively, her review addresses the book only and not the author. I could find no evidence that Blythe ‘rallied’ any reviewers or that she attacked the reviewer identifying as Michelle, a ‘fourteen-year-old eighth grader’, who criticized Blythe for using profanity in her review. Rather, given the timing of Michelle’s response as well as multiple other responses from Goodreads profiles that had recently been created, Blythe claimed that these were likely puppet accounts controlled by the author of League of Strays. In other words, the STGRB site blackballed Blythe Harris as a bully reviewer with almost no actual evidence that she had engaged in any kind of bullying behavior. Nevertheless, fueled in part by what she had learned from the STGRB site, Hale proceeded to track Blythe Harris down, paying for a background check to locate Blythe, and eventually showing up at her house and calling her at work. Responses to The Guardian article were mixed, but many book bloggers decried Hale’s actions as stalking and harassment, emblematic of a culture of authors attempting to ‘‘game the system by manipulating the reader community into artificial, even coerced, cooperation…It has [become] a space where reviews are almost seen as author property, or at least as something owed authors’ ( Dear Author 2014: n.p.).

Conclusion

Given the tensions among readers, writers, and publishers around online book reviewing practices and relationships, it is perhaps unsurprising that there have been various attempts to redefine and reorganize them. Author Anne Rice has recently signed a Change.org petition asking Amazon to remove anonymity from its review sites; the petition states that anonymity and the ability to create multiple anonymous accounts make bullying and attacking authors possible (Rothman, 2014). In response to the Kathleen Hale story, more than 30 book blogging sites participated in a Blogger Blackout in October 2014, emphasizing that book reviews are meant for readers rather than authors, and refusing to review new books for several days or weeks. Perhaps in an attempt to form some hybrid between the ‘professional critic’ and the ‘average reviewer’, Amazon has launched the Vine Voices program, which feature ‘the most trusted reviewers on Amazon to post opinions about new and pre-release items to help their fellow customers make informed purchase decisions’. The Amazon Vine is an invitation-only program, and members are selected based on how helpful other Amazon customers find their reviews. Vine members receive free products in exchange for ‘honest and unbiased’ reviews. Author Margo Howard is not impressed with Amazon’s elite reviewing club; when her memoir received poor reviews by the Vine voices, she published her dismay in The New Republic, lamenting the amateurization of book reviewing: ‘“Book Reviewer” is a profession, and reviews are done by other writers. Good sense would seem to militate against any group of people unschooled in creative and critical reviewing coming up with a worthwhile review’ (2014: n.p.)

As affinity spaces, book review sites epitomize key aspects of participatory culture: the lowered barriers to creative expression and engagement, the ‘amateurization’ of services previously deemed ‘professional’, the ability to collaborate with others beyond local contexts, and the construction of shared knowledges. In the case of popular romance fiction, book reviews draw attention to books that might otherwise go unnoticed in an ever-growing market. Blogging sites allow reviewers to foreground the authors and books that matter to them, to participate in re-shaping the romance genre, a genre historically controlled by corporate publishing houses. Through anonymous screen names and avatars, individuals can discuss books and reading interests they may not be able to talk about in their daily lives with those around them.

Nonetheless, recognition of the affordances of online book reviews as enactments of participatory culture should be tempered with an acknowledgement of their constraints. Book review sites demonstrate shared goals by their users but also reveal the multiple, competing interests book reviews serve. Participatory culture makes possible the amateurization of book reviews, the demand for constant interaction with and accessibility to authors, and the harassment of authors and reviewers behind an anonymous screen name. Individuals on Goodreads and Amazon construct shared knowledges about books and their authors, but informing those knowledges are purchased reviews, sock puppets, carpet bombs, and screen shots of ‘badly behaving’ readers. In order to better understand the affordances and constraints of participatory culture, we need further analyses of, and explanations for, instances of participatory culture that fall short of the egalitarian social relations and productive literacy practices highlighted by current literacy research.

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