The Weekly (Pat) Report #2: The Finale

As often happens with these kinds of things, they just sort of fade away. At least to all outward appearances. After a huge explosion after last Wednesday's post (and it was epic, let me tell you), Pat offered a truce, which covers fixing the things he did but not the things his sister did. As it turns out, his sister is willing to offer her brother up as a sacrifice for a vendetta that isn't hers just because it's fun to do mean things to people (that's a paraphrase of her actual words, not something I'm just saying). Pat, though, is doing his best to counteract what his sister has done, since she's unwilling to retract all of the fake ratings she threw at me.

And that's where it stands and where it will stand unless something else happens. I'm hoping that nothing else happens.

Because this is related, I recently (last week) started reading The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha; you probably know it better simply as Don Quixote, but I just love the full title. Now, just in case you don't know, this book is 400 years old and is one of the first examples of a novel in Western literature. Yet, in the prologue to the book, Cervantes felt compelled to write the following:

Idle reader, you need no oath of mine to convince you that I wish this book, the child of my brain, were the handsomest, the liveliest, and the wisest that could be conceived. ...if a father should happen to sire an ugly and ill-favored child, the love he bears it claps a bandage over his eyes and so blinds him to its faults that he reckons them as talents and graces and cites them to his friends as examples of wit and elegance. But I, who appear to be Don Quixote's father, am in reality his stepfather and do not intend to follow the usual custom, nor to beg you, almost with tears in my eyes, as others do, dearest reader, to pardon or dissemble the faults you may see in this child of mine. You are no kinsman or friend of his; ...all of which exempts and frees you from every respect and obligation. So you may say what you please about this story without fear of being backbitten for a bad opinion or rewarded for a good one.

So... There you go. 400 years ago, Cervantes was saying, "Review the thing however you want to. Be honest. You won't get a response from me one way or the other." Evidently, he was the exception in his time period, not the rule.

I suppose this is just an example of how people don't really change all that much. 400 years later, we're still struggling with the concept of allowing people to honestly receive our work.

The Weekly (Pat) Report #1

Well... Here we are! Another week in the saga of the Revenge of the Fake Reviews! You're probably all tired of hearing about it by now; I know I'm tired of talking about it. BUT, if you want things to be righted, you can't stop talking about it, because that's the same as saying, "What you did is okay, and I'm going to let you get away with it." Dilloway has already been implying that he wants me to stop talking about the things he's done and his patterns of behavior, and I will... just as soon as he has his sister take down all the fake reviews/ratings she has up for me. Which are also on goodreads, now, because Dilloway can't stop himself from escalating the situation even as he's talking about how I should stop talking about him.

So... Let's review the situation, shall we?

1. I wrote a review of a book not written by Pat Dilloway.
2. Pat Dilloway freaked out and had a hissy fit because the author of the book was a friend of his.
3. As a result of his hissy fit, he attacked my review in each place it was posted.
4. He also, in a attempt to "give me a taste of my own medicine," lowered the rating of a book of mine, "Tiberius," which he had previously reviewed and rated four stars, to one star.
5. Pat tried to extort me to change my review of the other book by offering to change his rating on "Tiberius" back to what he originally gave it. Not one to be extorted, I said no, but that whole exchange made me angry. This is not a "hey, I'll lie for you if you'll lie for me" kind of thing.
6. Then, he wrote a post on the IWM blog about what a horrible person I am and accused me of being someone who just goes around giving out 1-star ratings, basically, because I feel like it and because I like being mean to people.
7. At that point, I wrote a post explaining, again, my stance on honest reviews. This post had nothing in and of itself to do with Pat Dilloway, although he took exception to it just as he did the first time I stated my stance years ago. Also, Briane Pagel wrote a post about honesty in reviews which he posted on the IWM blog in no small part because Pat's view that reviews should be biased toward the author for indie books (although he does not practice his own stated stance and will freely give negative reviews to people he doesn't like or to whom he views as a threat or competition) is not a reflection of the views of IWM.
8. Pat expanded his attack on me to include Briane and 1-starred at least one of Briane's books in response to Briane's post about reviews.
9. I wrote a post about the childish behavior of Pat Dilloway with the idea that the way you deal with bullying behavior is to bring it to light. The bully wins if you keep it hidden, and it allows the bully to keep doing it and do it to other people.
10. Pat began harassing me and calling me names in the comments section on my blog (he had also been doing the same to me on goodreads).
11. I published a review of a book of his which I had previously withheld. I see, now, that withholding the review in the first place was a mistake but, at the time, I had not wanted to get into it with Dilloway, because I already knew how he reacted to bad reviews. The review was not revenge, as he seems to think, but was to make a point, again, about the types of reviews that I do, i.e. reviews with objective reasoning based on the product which have nothing to do with how I may feel about the author.
12. Dilloway, of course, attacked the review. Another reviewer pointed out some of the things that I was talking about in the review, things Dilloway said didn't exist, and Dilloway attacked him, too. The other reviewer posted his own review of Dilloway's book because his comments somehow mysteriously vanished from the comment thread on Amazon, and Dilloway attacked that review, too, though most of Dilloway's comments were removed by Amazon.
13. Dilloway began spamming my comment sections on my posts with hundreds of comments calling me names. Yes, I said hundreds. These comments I just ignored and stored, but Dilloway, then, went out of his way to also call various of my commenters names and, actually, called all of my commenters stupid.
14. Because of Dilloway's "I didn't do that, oh, I did do that but it's okay" attitude and his similarity to Vox Day along with his persistence in spamming my comments, I wrote the Sad Puppy post.
15. Dilloway asked for people to help teach me a lesson (on Facebook (I saw the post but don't remember the exact language he used)), and his sister went over to Amazon and began 1-starring all of my books. Later, his other sister also 1-starred the same books that Dilloway had 1-starred.
16. Dilloway wrote another post about what a horrible person I am and how I am just petty dictator for removing all of his comments which were full of nothing more than calling people names and insulting people. Sorry, it's my blog and, if insulting people is the best you have, I don't need that on my blog.
17. Amazon stepped in and removed all of the Dilloway siblings reviews/ratings on "Tiberius" and The House on the Corner. Dilloway re-posted his reviews, both with 3-star ratings, just to have Amazon remove them again. That happened several times (at least three), but Dilloway was persistent in re-posting the reviews every time Amazon removed them. They currently stand with 3-star ratings. Neither sister replaced their reviews on those books, but the first sister still has six 1-star ratings of my work on Amazon.
18. Dilloway began spreading around, in order to show how horrible I am, that I am currently in a feud with my church. That's a very interesting thing since, currently, I do not attend church nor have I in years. I'm assuming that Dilloway is referring to the series I've been doing about racism, and I am going to be generous and assume that his misunderstanding came from a lack of being able to read closely rather than that he is siding with the batch of racist assholes I was talking about in those posts.
Oh, wait, he could have just been purposefully lying about me so as to discredit me. Hmm... yeah, let's go with that option. Occam's Razor and all of that.
19. His sister expanded her rating attack to goodreads where she has currently given me more than 50 1-star ratings (because each piece of the Shadow Spinner serialization is still listed there).

This is the point at which I'm saying that I am not going to quit talking about Pat Dilloway and what he has done and is doing until he fixes it. Not just his reviews (he also went and downrated everything he'd rated of mine on goodreads), because he's changed those so that he can, I suppose, say, "Hey, look, I don't have any bad reviews of his works," but his sister's, too, since, ultimately, he is responsible for those being there. Also, if I see that he's doing this kind of thing to anyone else, I will do my best to let people know about that, too. Because, you know what? Bullies don't get to win.

And, now, for my favorite one!

20. Just this week, Dilloway has published a post saying how much he hates me and how, also, he's sure that everyone believes he's an asshole but, really, what he's doing is okay because he keeps it isolated to "out-of-the-way message boards and blogs." At least he's not putting it in a book that's for sale on, say, Amazon where thousands of people could see it.

The logic here is amazing to me. It's kind of like saying, "Hey, I know I hit you in the back of the head with this board, but at least I did it in this alley where no one could see instead of out on the street." Or, "I know I stole $100.00 from you, but at least I didn't steal $1000.00." It is not the magnitude of something that makes it wrong. The thing is wrong or it's not. Speeding is still against the law even if there are no cops around to catch you.

He also states in the that post that he has been involved in "many a flame war," which I also find interesting considering his stance that I am the problem. I suppose that this could be considered a flame war except that I have kept all of my talk (except for one stray comment) restricted to my blog and have also restricted my talk to only pointing out actual actions without resorting to calling names and insulting anyone's intelligence. At any rate, I think the person who has an issue with getting involved in flame wars should take a look at his behavior.

So that's the update. Next week's will be restricted to only new developments, but I wanted to get the sequence of events down here at the outset. I think I covered everything, at any rate.

If you would like to find out what you can do to help fight the bullies who attack and/or intimidate authors like this just because they can, please feel free to email me.

On Bad Behavior and Author Tantrums: Why It's Bad for the Indie Writer Community (or I Bet You Think This Post Is About You) (an IWSG post)

I live with a fairly harsh critic. Food critic, that is. She's hard to please when it comes to what she wants to eat. She's always been that way, my daughter. The boys were always pretty easy, but, when my daughter was a baby, we'd spend an hour, easy, just trying to find something that she was willing to eat when she was hungry. Talk about a nightmare! We were so glad when she learned to talk and could tell us what she wanted.

The problem, these days, is that the dinner selection most nights is pretty narrow. As my wife says, "A hunk of meat and some vegetables." If my daughter was rating dinners at our house, most nights would get one star from her. In response, I work with her as much as possible to make her school lunches interesting for her. [On the other hand, the boys take the same thing every day and are more than happy with it.] It's a small price to pay and works a lot better than me throwing a tantrum at her every night because she doesn't want to eat what I cooked.

I've known those parents, by the way. The ones that yell at their kids if they don't want to eat dinner. "This is perfectly good food, and you will eat it!" Or something like that. It makes the kids scared to voice their opinion... even when asked.

And that goes for readers.

But let's look at book bloggers, first. If you travel around to the blogs of book bloggers and take a look at the ones who will not review indie books (which is most of them), you will find two reasons repeated across most of the blogs:

1. The books aren't very good.

2. If you say the books aren't very good, you get attacked by the authors for saying it.

Basically, an author approaches a book blogger and says, "Hey, would you be willing to review my book."

The blogger says, "Yes, but it will be an honest review."

The author says, "Oh, yes, of course! That's what I want! An honest review!"

When the blogger gives the book a 1- or 2-star rating, the author explodes, "How could you do that to my book? My book is awesome! You're just stupid and didn't get it!"

Sometimes it's not actually the author but a friend of the author "sticking up" for his/her friend, but it amounts to the same thing.

From experience, I'm going to say that this happens a lot. I'm guessing I've done about 40 reviews of indie books at this point (no, I'm not going back to count), and I've had that response at least half a dozen times, now. That's significant. It's even more significant if you reduce the overall number from books I've reviewed to authors I've reviewed, which is a considerably smaller number.

And, then, maybe it makes sense as to why readers tend to stay away from indie books. When the author of the book attacks you for a negative review, it makes sense to stay away from that author. Unfortunately, it also makes sense to stay away from all of those indie authors (because traditionally published authors don't tend to attack reviews in the comment section on Amazon (maybe that's because the publishers keep a rein on the authors and prevent them from doing that, I don't know)); you can't tell which ones haven't grown up enough to not act like a 3rd grader over a negative review.

Of course, the whole thing can be even worse if you are another indie author, because many of these tantrum throwing authors will retaliate for perceived bad reviews by seeking revenge against you through the giving of fake, 1-star reviews, including getting their friends and/or family to join in "the cause" of giving that guy "a taste of his own medicine."

And, yes, this is a situation I'm going through, right now, as you know if you follow my blog. The author in question, along with his sister, have been fairly free about 1-starring everything I've published and bashing the cover art done by the talented Rusty Webb. What we'll call the drama around this situation prompted Tony Laplume to ask me "why?" Why review books at all if it leads to situations like this one? I think that's a very good question, because the whole thing seems... well, let's just say it's a minefield, and there's no way through it without setting some of them off.

I think there are three main reasons why indie authors need to step up and give honest reviews to their fellow indie authors:

1. It helps to legitimize the field of indie publishing. Right now, the general view from the outside is that indie writers are all busy shining each other's crap and saying how good it is. Basically, we all go around giving each other 5-stars on our books no matter how bad they are, so you can't trust indie writers. [This is, by the way, the point of contention between me and the other author. He believes that all indie authors (or, at least, the ones who are his friends) deserve the automatic 5-star rating because, in his words, "selling books is fucking hard."] However, when indie authors will step and give real, actual, honest reviews, it shows readers they can trust the field in general. Honest reviews are good for everyone.
2. Following that, it's good for the readers. Your readers deserve to be able to scan through reviews, if they so wish, and use them to reliably choose a book they think they will like. When the reviews are all gushing, fake, 5-star reviews, the reader gets gypped and chooses to not by more indie books. Also, giving the honest review can shine a light on tantrum-throwing authors. Invariably, tantrum-throwing authors attack the reviews in the comments. For readers who use reviews to help choose books, that can serve as a warning of which authors to stay away from. It a lot of ways, it's better for you, as an indie author, to be attacked than an unsuspecting reader.
3. Finally, it benefits you, as a fellow author. If you review one of your friend's books with a less than stellar review and s/he turns into a green rage machine and unfriends you and... well, it can be all kinds of things that happen after that, you will find out who your friends actually are and who of them are just using you because they think they can weasel some good reviews out of you. You don't need those people. Honestly, you don't.

I'm not going to say this is an easy thing to do. It can be especially difficult to just sit and take it. I mean, I want to go and refute every one of those fake reviews posted by Dilloway's sister. I want to do that. But I'm not going to. It looks bad. As I said, readers need to feel safe, and they need to feel safe to leave negative reviews if they so desire and, even though her reviews are fake, if I go and comment, it will look like I'm one of those authors who will go after people for leaving negative reviews. As indie authors, the best thing we can do is support each other in leaving actual, honest reviews and, more importantly, support each other in taking actual, honest reviews.

And, you know, stand up to the bullies who will use their power to retaliate against you with 1-star reviews. There are things you can do together to make what they're doing meaningless. But that's another post... or you can just email me to find out what you can do to help.

Who's a Sad Puppy?

An interesting thing happened this month: Salman Rushdie rated a bunch of books on goodreads. No, come back! They've all been taken down, now, so you don't need to rush over there to look. He was very honest with his ratings, because, well, he didn't realize they were public. He thought it was something like Netflix where you get suggestions based on your ratings. Needless to say, he got a lot of, shall we say, feedback based on his ratings, not all of it good. There was a lot of, "How could you not think [for instance] that To Kill a Mockingbird was the best book ever!" Because he didn't think that. However, there was also a lot of, "He's entitled to his own opinions," which he is.

And that brings us back to the topic of reviews. [And, trust me, I am more tired of talking about this than you are of hearing me talk about it.] One of the things Pat Dilloway said to me repeatedly over my review of Lyon's Legacy is, "...do what your mom always said: If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." [When I say "repeatedly," I mean repeatedly. He said it on my blog in the comments, emailed it to me more than once, and called me out on it in a post on IWM.] And, you know, I get that. It seems reasonable. Just hold back the critiques and let the market be flooded with... whatever. Because, you know, art is hard. Just like math. [That's a Barbie reference for those of you that remember that fiasco.]

BUT, as Claire Fallon said in her Huffington Post article on the Rushdie goodreads topic, "A sweeping policy of 'if you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all' means that every book is deemed an instant classic by some, and an artistic failure by none." Or, as I like to say it, "If every book is special, then none of them are." Basically, "public flattery and mutual back-scratching [of indie authors to other indie authors (my insert)] undermine the entire artistic community." That was, again, Claire Fallon.

Which brings us to the Sad Puppies...

But, first, really, who would name themselves that? [And they did name themselves.] It's pathetic, not cute.

Rather than try to explain the whole Sad Puppy thing in detail (that would take several posts, I'm sure), I'll just say it like this: The Sad Puppies are a group who have sabotaged the Hugo Award nominations for this year by rigging the process so that only the pieces that they have chosen (pieces by conservative writers) received nominations. Basically, it was a couple of guys (but mostly Vox Day, a racist, sexist asshole [Seriously, this guy believes that women shouldn't have the right to vote and has referred to African Americans as "half-savages."]) who were upset at not being nominated in previous years who, rather than just accept that their stuff wasn't up to nomination quality, started making excuses and coming up with conspiracy theories as to why they were being "blocked." [The major theory being that John Scalzi and his cabal of SJWs (social justice warriors) were behind the scenes keeping upright, conservative citizens such as themselves out of the ballots.] So they cheated...

Which is very like indie authors giving other indie authors 5-star reviews because, you know, "art is hard" and all of that crap.

Here's a thing that happened:
I posted my review of Pat Dilloway's Where You Belong to Amazon (because that's where reviews belong), and he immediately began challenging the review in the comments and saying the things I pointed out where just plain fabrications and I would need to point them out to him and prove their existence. He's not paying me to be his editor, though, so I declined. However, another reviewer came along and pointed some of them out. So Dilloway switched gears from "those things don't exist" to "oh, no, those things are legitimate" and proceeded to get into it with the other reviewer. I suppose he didn't like having concrete evidence of his tense lapses posted right there in the comments, though, because those comments by the other reviewer "mysteriously" disappeared thanks to Amazon (and, I'm sure, someone's liberally use of the "report abuse" button (because we all know that the truth is abuse, right?). [Fortunately, the other reviewer posted his own review, though that review is not as detailed in its examples as the comments were.]

So I was talking about all of this with a buddy of mine, Bryan Pedas, about both the Dilloway thing and the Hugo thing, and he read this post by John Scalzi about the mess with the Hugo awards, a post that I also read, and he sent me a quote about Vox Day that he said summed up Dilloway perfectly, which is actually exactly what I thought when I read the same piece of the post:

...he’s the sort of person for whom any scenario will be seen as a victory condition; if he were to be set on fire and pushed in front of a speeding train, he would cackle about how this was exactly what he had planned right up until the moment of impact turned him into flaming bits of kibble. In the grand pantheon of People Acting Like Children..., he’s the Grand Baby, and attention is what he wants.

...Fuck that dude. If everything is a victory condition for him — and it is — then worrying about what he’s going to do is sort of pointless. What is he going to do? Why, declare victory! Regardless! ...He wants you to see him as a mastermind, rather than as a general failure whose only successes lie in being terrible to other people, and encouraging others to be the same.

The fact that I'm making another post about all of this is, I am sure, a victory condition for Dilloway, but, then, not posting about it is also a victory condition, so I might as well do the thing I'm inclined to do, which is to out the person being terrible to other people, since Dilloway has been harassing me daily in emails and comments for the last month (since the Lyon's review went live) and has made it an ongoing practice to 1-star rate other authors' books as a way of expressing his dislike or anger. In light of all of this, the "Dilloway situation" and the Hugos thing, I am going to sort of redefine "sad puppy" to this:

A Sad Puppy is anyone who makes a habit out of whining or complaining about how they don't get the respect they deserve (in whatever capacity that takes: no award recognition, poor reviews, whatever) and, then, go on a rampage and do revenge-y things to get "even" with other people (or to, in Dilloway's words, "let [them] have a taste of [their] own medicine").

As Dilloway himself says, "I complain all the time about people [who give my books low ratings]."

What I really want is for people like this to just get over themselves. No one is out to get you. No one has a conspiracy against you. No one is going to any trouble to make things more difficult for you. Do you know why? Because you're not worth the effort. The only reason Dilloway is even still on my map is that two to three times a day, I get a notification that he's left another comment in which he calls me names (because Dilloway can't seem to tell the difference between actual literary criticism and name calling). [Actually, at this point, he has literally spammed my comment feed with hundreds of comments calling me names (just ask Lee or Jo, who both got caught up in his spam).] Oh, that and that he has down-rated another of my books. I supposed that is meant to provoke some kind of reaction out of me. And, maybe, this qualifies as that, since I've brought him up, but it's really more about the idea of these kinds of people rather than about Dilloway himself.

The most important thing to remember is to not let people like this push you into doing something you don't want to do. Remember, they're going to claim the win no matter what you do, so just go on as if they aren't even there and do what you would do. I'm going to leave you with another John Scalzi quote:

Just a thing to remember when a Sad Puppy puffs himself up in a blog post or comment thread near you: You're looking at a failure trying very hard to convince himself -- and you -- otherwise.