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What. The fuck. Is happening?

If you didn’t get a chance to read the last installment of DON’T DO THIS EVER, then you should hop on over there , because otherwise you will be muy confuso.

In the wake of Kathleen Hale’s stalking of blogger Blythe Harris, book bloggers developed a plan to stick up for their rights. They rallied support for a “blogger blackout.” The concept is simple: for a week, these bloggers don’t review. Some bloggers have taken it further, making it their new policy to not review any recent releases for the foreseeable future. This is to make a point not only to badly behaving authors like Kathleen Hale, but to publishers, who rely on book bloggers as a source of free publicity. The message they’re sending, loud and clear, is that without them, it’s pretty damn hard to grow a readership these days.

But one author, Deborah Smith, sees the blackout differently. She thinks it’s… sing it with me now, because you know this tune…

It appears to have started on October 20th, with this tweet:

So, now that we’re aware that we’re dealing with an author who thinks irony is “people doing something I don’t understand in a way that I feel personally affects me,” the rest of these tweets will make more sense in context.

Ole Debbie here does not care. In fact, she doesn’t care so much on October 22, that she continues to tweet about it:

for literally days:

Apparently, bloggers taking a single week off from reviewing and declaring that they won’t buy books or receive ARCs from authors who support Kathleen Hale in the wake of her admission of stalking, is an attempt to punish authors. Smith’s reasoning seems to be that because bloggers receive ARCs from publishers, authors should be allowed to stalk them.

Wait a minute. Hang on. Kathleen Hale didn’t “respond to reviews.” She spent months stalking a blogger online, plotting to get her address, and methodically planning a confrontation at the blogger’s home. This wasn’t some spur of the moment bad decision making. Hale rented a car months in advance, and drove to Harris’s house to call her out in person. That’s why bloggers are scared and protesting.

Furthermore, there’s no law that says an author can’t respond to a review. Respond all you want. But people are free to react to that response, and if everyone thinks you’re a dipshit, well. You don’t really have a say in that. Here, Smith has turned the car around. We’re not going to ProtectHalesville today. We’re heading right on back to bad reviews are bullying country.

So, here we are on that lonely, delusional road so many authors drive us down. Smith appears to truly believe that she and other authors are entitled to the free publicity that those ARCs, giveaways, and interviews provide for them, without having to maintain a standard of behavior up to and including “don’t stalk people.” For a blogger to deny an author a platform to market themselves is nothing short of, well… terrorism?

Here, Smith is referring to the doxxing of Kathleen Hale by twitter user @WhatTheEff. When bloggers on the #HaleNo tag saw this going down, they rejoiced and patted each other on the back for being hypocrites and bullies.

Oh. No, that’s not what happened at all:

In fact, a lot of people reported @WhatTheEff. I know I reported them. But Smith, seeking to cement her place as the Ann Coulter of the romance world, won’t let the Taliban thing go:

And if her hysterics over bloggers taking a week off from reviewing–remember, that’s what she’s pissed about, that bloggers won’t review books for one week and some are choosing to boycott authors who support an author who stalked someone over a GoodReads status update–weren’t offensive enough yet, well, hold on to your hat. Good ole fashioned white supremacy is just the pick-me-up you need to keep your overdramatic twitter rant fresh and exciting:

She’s also got some words for bloggers who aren’t sympathetic enough to ever-flowing white tears:

Smith apparently has made something of a name for herself on Twitter based on her Islamaphobic tweets and harassment of women of color. I’m sure you’re all shocked.

Apparently, bloggers are overreacting to a “minor incident” of stalking:

Saying, “I don’t want an angry author nursing an ego boo-boo to roll up to my door intending to do god-knows-what to me in retaliation” is no more bullying than giving a book a bad review in the first place.

There are many, many more tweets that I’ve screencapped from this nonsense, but they all say basically the same thing: Deborah Smith believes that she, as an author (and publisher; she is co-founder of BelleBooks), is entitled to free publicity, great reviews, and unending adulation from the blogging community. And if she doesn’t get all of that, she’s being victimized by terrorists.

I’m just saying, if I were Deborah Smith, I wouldn’t be demanding reviews from bloggers right this minute.

Look, if you want an example of “burning bridges,” this is the one, right here. Authors, when are you going to wise up? Book bloggers are out there, sharing their hobby in a way that benefits you. These are people who are so passionate about reading that they want to share their experiences with other readers and get them excited over your books. It’s done without pay (regardless of what Smith seems to believe, ARCs don’t pay the bills), it’s a ton of work, and it all encourages readers to buy books. Book bloggers are in it for love, not to destroy authors. In fact, most cases of damage done to careers has come from the authors themselves, when they point out a negative review and respond to it by childishly stamping their feet in public. That’s not the blogger’s fault. That’s the author’s fault. And even then, there don’t seem to be any consequences for the authors who actually do this crap. All we have to do is look at the response to Hale’s admission of stalking to see that no matter how badly an author behaves, there isn’t ever going to be a consequence.

Oh, hey, speaking of badly behaving authors who are still beloved despite the fact that they’re generally terrible:

 

Wow! Someone actually favorited that tweet? The tweet that sounds like a threat, coming from a woman who vocally supports Kathleen Hale, a reviewer stalker? Who the hell would favorite that?

 

Let’s compare and contrast that user photo, shall we?

Oh, okay, that explains it.

If you’re looking for more information on the blogger blackout (from someone who won’t compare bloggers to the Taliban and make Islamaphobic slurs), here are some posts you can visit:

• The Blogger Blackout: What it is and what it isn’t and Warring On Authors by Tez Miller
• Another post on the Blogger Blackout, at Howdy YAL
• A comprehensive post about #HaleNo and #BloggerBlackout by KT Grant (tons and tons of links here)

There’s also a Change.org petition asking Goodreads to increase privacy measures to protect the safety of its users.

Finally, as Deborah Smith is cofounder of BelleBooks, I would strongly urge any writers to avoid submitting their manuscripts there. I personally am writing them off my to-buy lists. It’s not fair to the authors who write for them, but I refuse to put money in the hands of a spoiled, entitled, racist brat like Deborah Smith. I strongly encourage you to consider doing the same.

I was out of town this weekend, and when I got home, I had all sorts of messages on twitter and Facebook. “Have you seen this?!” followed by a Do Not Link link. “I have to know what you think about this!” Well. I feel sick. And scared. Every time an author has a meltdown at a blogger, we all shout the same things into the social media vortex. “Every book gets bad reviews!” “Bad reviews can sometimes sell the book better than a positive one!” “It’s a matter of personal taste.” But then another author v. reviewer interaction comes along, more extreme than the last. Sites like Stop The GoodReads Bullies encourage abuse of and retaliation towards bloggers, stoking the flames so that each new “drama” is more radical and perplexing. I’ve long said that a site like Stop The GoodReads Bullies was going to get someone killed. And I am not exaggerating or being histrionic when I say that I fear that author Kathleen Hale’s actions have opened the door to that possibility. I don’t say that lightly. By Hale’s own admission, she stalked blogger Blythe Harris. In a long, unhinged essay for The Guardian, Hale tells the story about how a blogger caused her mental anguish significant enough to justify not only online stalking, but a premeditated visit to the blogger’s home, followed by the article exposing Blythe Harris as a blogger using an online pseudonym. The opening of the article draws on the time-worn cliche of “book babies” (with a tasteless comparison to Post-Partum Depression) in what is a transparent plea for a level of sympathy that excuses the actions that will be recounted in the rest of the tale:

“In the months before my first novel came out, I was a charmless lunatic – the type that other lunatics cross the street to avoid. I fidgeted and talked to myself, rewriting passages of a book that had already gone to print. I remember when my editor handed me the final copy: I held the book in my hands for a millisecond before grabbing a pen and scribbling edits in the margins.”

As an author, I find this to be worrying behavior. I’m not a mental health professional, so I can’t diagnose or declare someone mentally ill, so I won’t. But I will say that if one of my author friends were behaving this way, I would be gravely concerned for them, even if they were inexperienced or anxious over the release of the book. At first read, I assumed this description–and the following anecdote about her editor pulling the red pen from her hand–were humorous exaggeration. As the article continued, I began to doubt. According to Hale’s recounting of the story, she was approached by Blythe Harris on Twitter:

Her name was Blythe Harris. She had tweeted me saying she had some ideas for my next book. “Cool, Blythe, thanks!” I replied. In an attempt to connect with readers, I’d been asking Twitter for ideas – “The weirdest thing you can think of!” – promising to try to incorporate them in the sequel.

The order in which these events are listed is disingenuous; Hale makes it sound as though Harris contacted her to suggest ideas apropos of nothing, when in reality, Hale invited conversation, a fact that is dropped in as an afterthought. Hale’s curiosity led her to Harris’s GoodReads profile, where she found a one-star review of her work, with some harsh words expressing Harris’s dislike of the book. Hale writes about the warning that pops up when an author tries to leave a comment on a GoodReads review, but she doesn’t admit to leaving a comment. Whether or not she did, I have no idea; Harris has since made her GoodReads profile private.

“Blythe appeared on a page called Badly Behaving Goodreaders, an allusion to Badly Behaving Authors. BBAs, Athena Parker, a co-founder of STGRB, told me, are “usually authors who [have] unknowingly broken some ‘rule’”. Once an author is labelled a BBA, his or her book is unofficially blacklisted by the book-blogging community.”

Athena Parker is a pseudonymous identity that convincing evidence has linked to author Melissa Douthit. As STGRB has routinely stalked, threatened, and doxxed bloggers, using Douthit as a source in an article about stalking is either hilariously contradictory or tragically appropriate.

“In my case, I became a BBA by writing about issues such as PTSD, sex and deer hunting without moralising on these topics.”

I have to argue that the rest of the events in Hale’s anecdote are what make her a badly behaving author, not her choice of subject matter. She describes an “attack” Harris made against a fourteen-year-old GoodReads reviewer. Some authors and readers have pointed to Harris’s interaction with the teen reviewer as “bad behavior on both sides,” of this issue, but Hale’s obsession didn’t start with seeking justice for that incident, it was incited by a one-star review. As far as I can tell from Hale’s own account, the only action taken by Harris that justified Hale’s relentless stalking was that single review. The process of retaliation began the moment Hale engaged with STGRB. According to Hale, she was advised by a friend who was an editor to reach out to other authors who’d received negative reviews from Harris. I find this claim dubious in the extreme, but perhaps Hale found the one editor in publishing who feels engaging with a critic is a sound decision. She contacts several authors and finds only one who will speak, under condition of anonymity:

“She responded – “Omg” – and immediately took our conversation off the record. “DO NOT ENGAGE,” she implored me. “You’ll make yourself look bad, and she’ll ruin you.””

This is the advice Hale should have heeded. Instead, she continued to monitor reviews, following a “ripple effect” in which she implies that Harris’s review tainted the opinions of others. After searching her name on Twitter, Hale finds that Harris is “ridiculing” her:

“Confronting her would mean publicly acknowledging that I searched my name on Twitter, which is about as socially attractive as setting up a Google alert for your name (which I also did).”

Authors, if you are unable to handle dissenting opinions of your work and your public statements, never search your name. Never set up a Google alert for your name. But what truly troubles me about this paragraph is Hale’s concern that publicly announcing her vanity searches would not be “socially attractive,” yet she seems to find nothing unattractive about publicizing her methodical stalking of Harris. Does this mean that Hale finds her own actions acceptable? Hale describes what she did next as “light stalking.” This included tracking down all of Harris’s social media accounts, and consuming material that was unrelated to Harris’s book blogging. Months later, against the advice of the anonymous author she again contacted, Hale requested that Harris interview her for a book club. Hale doesn’t admit openly to requesting Harris with the goal of obtaining her address, but she is provided with the information. Hale used it to find Harris’s home on Google Maps, to ferret out her phone number and even check census records in order to learn more about her. What she learned was that Harris was using a pseudonym–not a crime, even if Harris did once make a claim to the contrary. Hale makes plans to confront Harris personally, at Harris’s home. Though the anonymous author once again pleads with Hale not to, Harris reserves a car for a date months away. She continues to stalk Harris via social media, collecting information to prove that Harris was not what she seemed, and that Hale was being “catfished.” She attempts to back up her paranoia with professional opinions; one must wonder how the sources cited feel about their words being used as vague justification for Hale’s actions. But Hale wasn’t being catfished–Harris had been reviewing books as Blythe Harris before she reviewed Hale’s book. Harris had not concocted an elaborate persona in order to trick people; many bloggers review under pseudonyms to avoid having their public hobby linked to their private lives, much in the same way that authors use pen names to separate themselves from their work. Hale concludes her self-pitying narrative by explaining how she went to Harris’s house and confronted the person who lived there, a woman named Judy who made excuses for her links to Harris. Or, when looked at from a different angle, a woman named Judy who, unnerved when a stranger from the internet showed up on her doorstep, tried to protect herself. Hale continues to contact Judy and Harris via social media, until both of them block her and make their accounts private, a step that Hale sees as an admission of guilt, rather than the actions of terrified victims withdrawing to avoid further contact. The details are presented in such a straight-forward, unflinching manner that it becomes painfully clear that Hale, despite calling the personal visit a “low-point,” has no remorse, and expects sympathy and understanding from the reader.  She received it in spades; Neil Gaiman leapt into the online fray to declare Hale’s article fascinating, though he states that he doesn’t condone her actions. Anne Rice (predictably) praised Hale, although one has to question one’s actions if Anne Rice approves of them. Comedian John Mulaney is also a fan, and Frank Rich, a fellow Guardian writer and her future father-in-law, threw his support behind the piece as well. Danielle Paige presumed to speak on behalf of all authors in an incendiary tweet that sparked dozens of replies:

‘Am I being catfished?’ An author confronts her no. 1 online critic @halekathleen did that thing we all want to do! http://t.co/HN1BRgK7Fo — danielle paige (@daniellempaige) October 18, 2014

Others blamed Harris, or insinuated that her behavior was equally as disturbing as Hale’s. I am forced to reiterated that the only thing Harris did to set this stalking behavior in motion was to write a one-star review for a book she didn’t care for. Hale was not catfished. Hale is not a victim. She is an author obsessed with public reception of her work, and comes across as a deeply troubled figure. The victim in this story is Blythe Harris, whose privacy, both online and off, was grotesquely violated by a woman who was repeatedly advised to disengage. All this, for the crime of disliking an unstable writer’s book. For her part, Hale seems to view this essay as a comedy piece, stating:  

@gabydunn thanks man. The piece is self-deprecating and the fact that I am bonkers isn’t news to me. Xx — Kathleen Hale (@HaleKathleen) October 18, 2014

I have to assume that were the roles reversed and a persistent blogger had visited Hale at her home, she wouldn’t have such a blasé attitude toward stalking. But as Twitter user @Bibliodaze eloquently explained:

@TracyClark_TLC @Jenny_Trout They see Blythe & reviewers in general not as people. Hale depicts Blythe as a character in her story. — Bibliodaze.com (@Bibliodaze) October 19, 2014

In the coming months, I suspect that fewer blogs will host book tour giveaways with physical prizes that require an author to receive an entrant’s address. I suspect also that fewer bloggers will accept physical ARCs, and for a while, author/blogger interaction will be more guarded than it has in the past. There is no way for them to discern which authors will cross the line and visit their homes with accusations. There is no way for them to discern which might go further. I expect a few pseudonymous bloggers to stop reviewing books altogether, even as Hale supporters backpedal from their threats to reviewers:

The takeaway? Do not cross @HaleKathleen — or writers in general. You will read every word. Promise: http://t.co/x4kD2k9WDb — Amy MacKinnon (@AmyMacKinnon) October 18, 2014

Hale’s actions have harmed not only the book blogging community, but authors who will now be viewed with suspicion and caution by bloggers. She’s limited opportunities to reach out to readers via book blogs, not just for herself, but for all of us. The most troubling aspect of this story is that Hale, after writing an in-depth admission of stalking, is receiving any support or accolades at all. What she has done is not brave. Perhaps it’s not serious enough for the law to become involved, but the behavior itself, the stalking and intimidating, is at the very least a prelude to a crime. Hale didn’t go as far as assaulting Harris, but her supporters have, through their pseudo-intellectual praising of her bravery and “fascinating” retelling, normalized and rationalized the abnormal, irrational behavior that will one day lead to a violent altercation between an author with a wounded ego and a faulty moral compass, and a blogger who reviews the wrong book. I hope that those closest to Hale will view this article for what it is: a confession of dangerous behavior perpetrated by a deeply troubled person. I would have thought this would go without saying, but the lesson here is: Don’t do this. Ever. For more information on Hale’s essay, visit Dear Author, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and this Storify of relevant tweets.  

CW: Suicide (but not an actual suicide)

I don’t really know where the fuck to begin this. I can tell you that there will be many, many swears. And by the end, you will probably be swearing, too. In fact, I think at this point, the sun itself should be shouting “FUUUUUUUUCK!” into the void of space.

Remember when I said it would take something really big to make me do another Authors Behaving Badly post?

Meet Susan Meachen. If you run in indie romance circles, you might recognize that name. Susan was an indie romance author who tragically completed suicide after being the victim of online bullying in the indie book community. The response to her death was an outpouring of grief that included people promoting Susan’s posthumous book release in conjunction with her family to raise funds for the funeral. Authors and readers alike banded together to create an online auction to benefit the To Write Love On Her Arms organization. Susan Meachen was mourned by stunned friends within the community, and donations for expenses poured in.

Susan Meachen NEVER FUCKING DIED.

Today, author Samatha A. Cole broke the news in a Facebook post.:

In September of 2020, Susan Meachen’s daughter (supposedly it was her daughter) signed into her mother’s profile and announced that Susan had taken her own life. Devastation from her friends, fellow authors, and readers followed. Allegedly she’d been bullied in the book world to the point of suicide. What followed was rants from said daughter about how horrid the book world had been to Susan and the family wanted nothing to do with the book world from that point on. However, they wanted to honor their mother’s memory by publishing the last book she wrote, which they did. Friends, authors, and readers shared the release.

We grieved for the loss of the woman we considered a friend. I personally was harassed by another author who loves to create drama, claiming I was one of the authors who bullied Susan and drove her to suicide. I was heartbroken when I realized it’d been a few months since I’d chatted with Susan in PMs and wished I’d reached out sooner and maybe it would’ve made a difference for her to know there were people who supported her.

Last night a post was made in Susan’s old reader group – The Ward – from Susan’s profile. And I quote –

“I debated on how to do this a million times and still not sure if it’s right or not. There’s going to be tons of questions and a lot of people leaving the group I’d guess. But my family did what they thought was best for me and I can’t fault them for it. I almost died again at my own hand and they had to go through all that hell again. Returning to The Ward doesn’t mean much but I am in a good place now and I am hoping to write again. Let the fun begin.”

Apparently, she’s not dead. TN Steele was a profile she made a month after her alleged suicide. What follows are screen shots from the group, her profile, and the chat I just had with a dead person.

For over two years, Susan Meachen pretended to be dead. She rebranded herself as TN Steele and watched as the rest of the community grappled with the aftermath of her “suicide.” She even reconnected with online friends who were mourning her.

From the screenshots Cole provided, which show her confrontation with Meachen, it’s clear that Meachen has absolutely no remorse for her actions. Scratch that: she has absolutely no remorse for actions she will not own or admit to. She blames her daughter for making the post announcing her death and implies that she’s somehow the victim of her family’s good and loving intentions. “I had no control over what my family did,” she told Cole. “I was in the hospital fighting for my life. But I understand what they did.”

Do you, bitch? DO YOU REALLY? Because what “they” did was make a post TWO MOTHERFUCKING YEARS AGO. You weren’t in the hospital the whole time, fucker! You were setting up a new pseudonym and reader group a month after your faked death. It never once occurred to you to correct the misinformation?

YOU ARE NOT THE FUCKING VICTIM.

I have compassion for people who struggle with suicidal thoughts and who make attempts, absolutely. We are in a shitty little club together. And if it is the truth that Meachen was going through that? I’m sorry that happened to her. But for what reason, what logical reason, would ANYONE ACTUALLY BELIEVE ANY PART OF THIS FUCKING STORY?! Forgive me and hundreds of other indie authors and readers who are doubting every facet of this bullshit, including the very existence of her god damn daughter.

Above and beyond the horrific toll that grief and suicide take on a community, Susan Meachen’s death by bullying attracted members of an online clique famous for their own bullying campaigns. You might remember that one of these “authors,” Dylan Cross (real name David Daniel Moore), ran a Facebook group called “As The Book World Turns,” dedicated to anonymous posts targeting mostly female indie romance authors. Under a thin veneer of “anti-bullying” concerns, Moore seized the opportunity provided by Meachen’s death and went after readers and authors (including Cole), shaming them for their culpability in the bullying that drove Meachen to suicide. One reader, who had been involved in previous clashes with Moore, has stated that she’d never even spoken to Meachen. Still, she was relentlessly harassed by Moore for allegedly causing the suicide Meachen faked.

And even with all of this going on, and Meachen watching and participating in the indie romance community from the sidelines, she never stepped up and said, “This was a misunderstanding.” She wasn’t dead. She knew she wasn’t dead. “TN Steele” and I have mutual friends on Facebook, friends who were mourning Susan’s passing on their timelines months after the fact. Friends who spoke about the harassment people were receiving. There is no reasonable way to deny that Meachen knew these things were happening. AND SHE NEVER SAID A WORD TO STOP IT.

Suicide is contagious. When one member of a community completes suicide, others follow. Imagine you were a reader or author who struggled with suicidal thoughts, and an internet stranger was relentlessly attacking you for allegedly “bullying” another author into suicide. What might you do under that pressure? What might you feel was your best option? What might your suicidal ideation tell you that you deserved?

There is no way that Meachen, a member of the indie romance community, didn’t know that there would be consequences for crying “bully!” in those circles. This was a malicious act. This was explicitly designed to produce these types of results, from the financial and publicity benefits to the persecution of those Meachen perceived as her bullies. And when Cole, someone who cared about Meachen genuinely, was under attack, Meachen did nothing.

This is not a case of a mentally ill person just not knowing how to handle a situation or do what’s right. This was a person who had an evil thought and followed through with evil deeds. And already, people are claiming that Meachen is the true victim in this. She lied about being bullied into suicide. She took money donated for funeral expenses. She didn’t say, hey, don’t send me money for my funeral. I’m not dead. She took the money. She took the increased promotional opportunity for her “posthumous” release. She accepted free services from editors and cover artists who thought they were helping a member of the community in the only way left for them to help her. She launched a new pen name and interacted with people who thought she was dead for two years. But somehow, somehow, people feel that anyone being angry about this or wanting to hold her accountable for her disgusting actions… ARE BULLYING HER. Placing her in a dangerous situation for her mental health

I am sick, from gums to rectum, of people being held accountable for their actions being described as victims of bullying. IT IS NOT BULLYING TO SAY IT’S NOT OKAY TO PRETEND TO HAVE COMPLETED SUICIDE. And so what about Susan’s fucking mental health? So god damn what? What about the mental health of all the people who mourned her, who tortured themselves with thoughts of what they could have done to help her before it was too late? What about the mental health of the people gleefully stalked and harassed by Moore and his goblin band? Fuck them? Protect Susan? No, go fuck YOURSELF if you care more about a liar, a fraud, an outright ghoul than you do the innocent actual victims in this.

I honestly have no idea where to go from here. How are we, as authors and readers, meant to support the indie book community when someone does something like this, and other indie authors and readers insist it’s victimizing the liar to point out her lies?

Meachen went so far as to respond to a PM from an online friend who, in their mourning, reached out to say that they missed Susan. Susan’s “daughter” responded to comfort this person, who then went on to dedicate their next book to their deceased friend.

Susan Meachen is a liar who disregarded the potentially fatal consequences of her selfish actions, then returns to say “let the fun begin.” Now, the book world is out for her blood. People are considering legal action over the money she stole. Here’s your fucking fun: you’re done. This is so big, it absolutely will follow her offline and into her real life. People will remember this forever and she is irredeemably ruined.

In the most extreme Clair Huxtable voice: Susan, are you having BIG FUN?

Have you ever noticed how a lot of erotic romance novels have similar titles? For example, Fifty Shades of Grey spawned titles like 12 Shades Of Desire, and after the publication of Beautiful Bastard and Manwhore a ton of books came out with increasingly profane titles? For the last couple of years, the word “cocky” has been popping up on romance novel covers. A lot of them.

Author Faleena Hopkins certainly likes to use the word in her book titles. See, Hopkins knows the importance of a brand, as she discusses in her blog post about being the first self-published author to ever photograph her own cover models (she is definitely not). Other authors were copying her on purpose. By…using stock photos that she had coincidentally also used:

My readers were starting to get upset when they saw the Cocker Family on other authors’ covers and/or advertising. I began getting messages. My readers posted on Facebook, on my Fan page, my personal page, and in my group.

“Isn’t this Gabriel? Why is he on this author’s ad? Is that legal?!”

“Look at this! They’ve got Jaxson on their book, same photo. Who do they think they are?” 

I told them about the licensing, because most readers don’t know about the biz.

But their instincts that some – not all, but some – of these authors were copying me on purpose, were founded in truth.

Anyone who reads erotic romance can look at a stock photo and tell you exactly which twelve books it’s on. There are some very popular stock guys out there. For example:

• Blond Guy With An Untied Tie Around His Neck Unbuttoning His Shirt
• Guy With Head Down, Face Obscured By Shadow, Wearing An Open Hoodie With Nothing But Abs Underneath
• Guy In A Suit Facing Windows, Definitely Not Inspired By The Fifty Shades Of Grey Movie Poster
• White Guy In White Tank Top Biting His Thumb And Pulling Up His Shirt To Reveal His Abs
• Headless Tuxedo Man And His Headless Pink Dress Girlfriend

and many, many more. But Hopkins knows everyone is copying her, despite the fact that very few authors or readers had ever actually heard of her and despite the fact that her allegedly original and striking covers are indistinguishable from hundreds of other erotic romance novels that predate hers.

But Hopkins decide that she needed to protect her brand. Since her Cocker Brothers series all have titles that start with “Cocky,” the next obvious step was to actually trademark the word “cocky.”

Because no one in their right mind would think, “I need to monitor all the notices and postings about potential trademarks in case someone tries to pull some shady bullshit and trademark a common adjective used on erotic romance novel titles,” no one had enough notice to challenge it. She now owns the word “cocky” and it’s no longer usable in any romance novel title.

The issue came to light when authors suddenly received copyright violation notices from Amazon and Audible informing them the word “cocky” was trademarked and therefore could not be used in their titles. Now that she owns “cocky,” she’s dead set on forcing everyone to remove the word from their book titles…even if they were published prior to her own series or prior to the application date of her trademark.

On social media, everyone weighed in on whether or not the trademark is enforceable or if she can retroactively enforce the trademark for books that predate her application. But I don’t believe it was ever Hopkins’s intent to actually enforce the trademark. She knows for a fact that threats work because authors have already changed their covers and titles out of fear of a lengthy and expensive legal battle. And she’s not shy about openly threatening the work, promotion, and royalties of other authors:

Except, retitling doesn’t take “one day”. And it impacts authors in countless ways. For an author to change the title of their book, they must:

• Change the text file of the book to reflect the new title

• Change the text files of any books that contain the title in an “also by” section
• Acquire new cover art
• Upload the retitled book as an entirely new work on platforms that don’t allow title changes
• Assign a new ISBN
• Change the text file of the paperback version
• Change the cover file of the paperback version
• Repeat the proofing process on the paperback version
• Dispose of any paperback copies on consignment through brick and mortar stores and re-stock with the new paperbacks
• Change keywords on all listings
• Published audiobooks will be subject to all of the above, but they’ll also have to be edited with the title re-recorded, and unless the book is selling really well, chances are the audiobook publisher will simply pull the book from their catalog and call it a loss
• If the author paid for the recording and production of their audiobook on their own, they will also have to pay for the re-recording and production or pull the book

If you’re an indie author trying to write and produce your next release, all of these changes can impact your schedule. They are time-consuming and potentially expensive. Those are just issues affecting the actual product. Consider it from a promotional angle:

• Any book- or series-specific printed promotional items from bookmarks to t-shirts are now garbage
• Ads purchased on websites or for print publication must be taken down or cancelled
• Banners and signage printed for book expos and events? Also garbage
• Author websites have to be updated with the new cover and title
• Any reviews received from blogs now have the wrong title and, depending on the platform, the wrong buy links

The timing of this move is especially cruel considering that it’s now conference season. Romantic Times, Reader And Author Get Together, Romance Writers Of America, and Literary Love Savannah, plus other local conventions, happen throughout the summer. Authors may have already purchased series and book specific advertising on banners, elevator wraps, videos, and programs, as well as printed promotional items for swag bags, baskets, and promo “alleys” at these events. Some will have already bought cases of print stock for signings, which they now cannot sell and must replace with the retitled versions of their books.

In the same blog post linked above, Hopkins describes her financial situation at the time of the publication of her first novel:

Originally I did begin writing it for money because when the idea for Cocker Brothers came to me, I was flat broke and $50K in debt. Not from shopping, just from living and trying to get a self-published, authoring, business off the ground.

As you can guess, self-publishing is expensive. A single book can cost me anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000 dollars to publish. That’s an impossible sum for a lot of authors. Hopkins clearly knows the financial hardship of the business and how expensive things can be, yet she’s seeking to obliterate other authors through financial ruin or the threat of it. There are going to be indie authors that can’t afford to publish after they deal with the mess, possibly never again, let alone fight a legal battle. Hopkins knows this and is banking on it.

She’s also threatening to pursue all royalties earned by any of these authors for the life of their books, as she did to Jamila Jasper:

Yet, in that same blog post linked above, Hopkins claims:

The reason I write this series isn’t for money anymore.

I believe her. I don’t think she’s out to get money from her series. I think she’s out to get everyone else’s money. But she picked a stupidly short-sighted way to do so, as she now faces a potential legal battle with Romance Writers Of America, who quickly involved an IP attorney. She’s also probably not going to make bank off her series now, either; many people have put her on their Never Buy list.

You can find more information about this case from Legal Inspiration! and Kayleigh Donaldson for Pajiba. Author Bianca Sommerland covered the story in video form:

Before I end this blog post, Faleena, I have some words for you that are original, not copied from anyone, and straight from the heart:

You are a nasty piece of fucking work, lady.

Nobody was ever copying you. Nobody knows who you are. The most common reaction seen on social media when your name started coming up was, “Who?” followed by “Who does she think she is?” We had to ask these things because we legitimately had no clue you existed. But boy howdy, do you exist now. See, you’re not famous, but you’re infamous. You probably thought all publicity was good publicity. That is not the case if the publicity you’re getting is just making people become more and more furious and fed up with you. I haven’t seen anyone say they planned to read your really interesting and unique books as a result of your Highlander mentality. I’ve seen a lot say the opposite.

You have burned a bridge the size of the Mighty Mac, Faleena. Not just burned. You blew a bridge up, but you didn’t quite get off it in time and you’ve blasted yourself into the ravine below. No one is going to invite you to their signings. No one is going to include you in their anthologies. If you have the courage to show your face at an industry event, you’re going to find yourself sitting alone at the bar. You might get a drink thrown in your face, soap opera style. I hope someone gets a photo.

Professional organizations will likely not allow you to join. Traditional publishers aren’t going to waste their time on your books now that you’ve shown your entire ass. You have poisoned yourself with your own bile.

I know you said in that blog post:

We indies work in the grit and grime of the biz, so we see more than an author who is protected by a big publishing house, one that does all that grit/grime work for them.

But I wouldn’t trade positions with a trade-pub author.

I have never submitted to a publisher, nor do I want to. Even when judgmental friends or people in the industry assume that if you self-pub, you must have been rejected.

Um…how about if you never sought approval in the first place, dinosaurs?

Readers are an Indies only judges. If they don’t like our books, they don’t buy them. And they happily leave one-star reviews telling you what a pile of horse manure it is.

Give me that over, “Please sir, will you publish my manuscript?” any day of the week.

but no, sweetie. You’re not indie because you’re above it all. You’re indie because you’re too insecure to try. You’re afraid that you’ll be rejected. You’re afraid you can’t hack it when compared to other authors. And that’s why you’re trying to sabotage them. Because you’re afraid that you’re not good enough to succeed on your own merit.

You’re not, by the way. I picked up one of your books. Congrats on being the third overall Kindle return I’ve ever made. Jesus, you’re not even good enough to be first at that. How embarrassing for you.

So, you think if other authors can’t afford to publish, if they can’t promote their books, if you hit them where it hurts, you’ll be the only one out there. You think you’ll get their readers. You won’t. And you won’t ever receive support from anyone in the community. Ever. You’re pretty much universally hated, so…there’s the door. Bye-bye. You can’t sit with us.

PS: your “cocky” series debuted a year after Vi Keeland and Penelope Ward’s Cocky Bastard became a huge hit. So, who’s copying who, you busted ass bitch?

On Monday, writer Camryn Garrett shared a piece she’d written for MTV News. Her essay, “Black Lives Matter Is The Bare Minimum” poignantly describes the frustration that she, a young black woman, feels when comparing her hopes for the future against the injustices of the present, and her anger at watching civil rights activism reduced to slogans while the oppressive machine of white supremacy grinds on.

So obviously, someone had to run in and take her to task for it.

[NOTE: I’ve omitted Camryn’s tweets here, simply because white supremacists have been out in force, and the last thing I would want is to be the person who led a whole bunch of them angrily into her mentions intent on proving her statements to Nielsen wrong.]

Though Garrett handled Nielsen’s tweets with poise and without coddling Nielsen’s racism, other writers and bloggers stepped in quickly to take Nielsen to task, not just for her racism but because Nielsen is a YA author.

Garrett’s writing speaks for itself; I don’t need to add to that to explain why Nielsen’s racist tirades were unacceptable. But there’s an added dynamic here that further appalls me, and which we’ve seen before. And we saw it play out with Camryn Garrett.

After she wrote a piece for The Huffington Post in 2015 titled “John Green, YA Authors, and Rape Culture”, in which she addressed the YA community’s troubling response to a Tumblr user who likened Green to a creepy dad at a pool party, Garrett became the target of YA authors who felt the need to defend Green. These authors and their lack of self-awareness as they tried to shame and silence Garrett only further proved her point; Nielsen has done likewise with her hateful screed.

Nielsen, for her part, is not a name. Before she deleted her Twitter account, she had less than three hundred followers. I’m sure she felt that Garrett was an easy target. After all, she’s just a teenager. But she’s a teenager with two-thousand followers and a passionate group of authors, readers, and activists who immediately stepped in to set Nielsen straight. They set her so straight that she tweeted a panicked defense:

Dozens of Twitter users were quick to point out that the hacker’s beliefs were bizarrely in line with Nielsen’s own white-tears-and-all-lives-matter POV, as evidenced from other tweets she’d made that day:

She’d also favorited tweets describing Black Lives Matter as a terrorist organization and made other anti-black statements in the days leading up to this incident, which Garrett’s defenders were quick to point out.

It’s easy to find some humor in watching Nielsen’s ham-fisted attempts at damage control. Her claim that she’d “just found out” about the alleged hacking of her account came only two minutes after the “hacker” had sent their last vitriolic tweet at Garrett. In a now-deleted tweet, Nielsen claimed that as a Mormon, she wouldn’t be allowed to use the foul language the “hacker” used, despite her exclamation of “Shit!” in her own tweet. She insisted she’d only started her account a few months before, until another user screencapped racist tweets dating back to 2014, at which point Nielsen desperately pleaded, “Please stop scrolling.” There’s something satisfying and even comical about seeing someone so nasty thoroughly self-destruct, but it made me wonder how many other teenagers Nielsen has gone after.

Nielsen clearly felt safe attacking Garrett. She knew to use Garrett’s age against her. And at no point did Nielsen, a YA author whose targeted readership is made up largely of teens, decide that this behavior was inappropriate. This troubles me deeply. Yes, people were there for Garrett, and the response to Nielsen’s comments came swiftly and decisively. But how many authors like Nielsen are out there? What kind of reader interactions are they having? What are they putting in their stories? And how do we find them and call them out before they come into contact with young readers who may not have the same support system Garrett had?

I wish I knew the answer. I suppose I could end this by saying that Nielsen’s racism, her claim about the hacking, her embarrassing back-pedaling and eventual deletion of her account were something to not do, ever (and they are), but I’m horrified that she even provided us with this example in the first place. I’m angry that she targeted Camryn Garrett, and I’m terrified that next time, this will happen to a teenager who doesn’t have anyone to speak up in support, or that other authors might join in. If black teenagers can’t be assured of safety in the real world or safety on the internet, the very least we in the book community can provide is safety from attacks by the very authors who write for them.

Edit: It’s rare that I have to edit a post before it even goes live, but it seems that Julia Nielsen just can’t stay away from Twitter. She reactivated her account to make amends:

Because of Twitter’s reverse order of postings, I’ll quote her apology in the corrected sequence for easier reading, though I’ll keep the inconsistent punctuation so you can tell where each tweet began and ended:

For anyone and everyone that I hurt or lied to yesterday, I am very sorry. I have done much reflection and have to check myself. I have no excuse, I just lashed out without really understanding. I’m sorry for the young lady that I vilified and hurt. I hope she can One day forgive me. I have done a lot of reading up on the police brutality and was very much in the dark before but now have seen what Has been happening. I got scared because so many people got angry with me and said that I was hacked, which I wasn’t. I raised three kids To be honest and have integrity in their lives. I’m full of shame and guilt for what I did. I feel bad that there’s so much hate and I don’t Want to contribute to it. Again, please forgive me. You can threaten and boycott me, I guess, but I hope that you can forgive me. I fucked up. I hope you realize that this is a sincere apology.

Nielsen’s apology quickly shifts the narrative from her racist attack on a teenage girl to her own values and her desire for forgiveness. She refers to herself twenty-five times. She fails to name Garrett. She also sidesteps the issue of her racism. She’s sorry for lying about being hacked, and wants everyone to know that she raised her children not to lie, but that wasn’t why people wanted an apology. Sure, she did “a lot of reading up on the police brutality” and feels “bad that there’s so much hate,” but she doesn’t actually apologize for her racist attack. Even her apology for the hacking claim is insincere and insufficient. “I got scared,” she says, passing the blame for her actions onto the mean, mean internet people who forced her to lie out of self-preservation.

When her “apology” received an unfavorable reception, she returned twice, hours later, to portray herself as the victim of the situation:

Now that she’s pseudo-apologized, Nielsen wants it all to go away. And of course, the best way to do that is to prove just how much you’ve learned:

Nielsen also reached out to Garrett directly, which Garrett confirmed to another Twitter user, describing the event as “creepy” and “uncomfortable.”

 

CW: Suicide

“And it’s hard to believe after all these years
That it still gives you pain and it still brings tears
And you feel like a fool, because in spite of your rules
You’ve got a memory

And you can’t talk about it
Because you’re following a code of silence
You’re never gonna lose the anger
You just deal with it a different way
And you can’t talk about it
And isn’t that a kind of madness
To be living by a code of silence
When you’ve really got a lot to say”– Billy Joel, “Code of Silence”

There is one particular blog post I’ve written more than once, and erased more than once. When I write it, I’m typing it up in anger and pain, and I’m usually at a point that’s so low, I can convince myself that by coming forward and saying something, I would be wrong. That I am a bad person for still being angry and hurt. So I always delete it.

It’s a post about my name.