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The Latest Goodreads Review Bombing Scandal
Targeting Authors of Color
Just when I thought I’d seen the most insane author behaving badly scandals of the year, a new one arose — involving “alleged” tampering of Goodreads reviews.
If you follow book news on social media, you may have seen a lot of posts discussing a new controversy — a debut author manipulating Goodreads to hurt fellow debut authors. Not to mention posts about Reylo fandom.
The author wasn’t named at first, and I was going to keep it that way. At first. But by now, enough people have named the author.
The author is Cait Corrain, whose debut book — a spicy queer space opera — is coming out through Del Rey, a part of Penguin Random House. Just the sort of book I might have picked up. So disappointing…
The True Champion
On Tuesday, author Xiran Jay Zhao posted a lengthy thread. In their post, they revealed that several fake “people” were one-starring upcoming debut books on Goodreads to influence their ratings. This sort of manipulation is known as review bombing.
Meanwhile, very suspiciously, another debut author’s book kept getting upvoted. That author is white. Most of the authors being review-bombed were people of color (POC).
Xiran Jay Zhao came with receipts — sharing pages upon pages of screencaps from Goodreads and social media.
Xiran Jay Zhao avoided naming the author behind this for the longest time. They wanted to avoid hurting a fellow author’s career.
How to Support the Affected Authors
Xiran Jay Zhao went out of their way to name the authors who were hurt and urge people to preorder their books:
The affected books include:
So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole
The Poisons We Drink by Bethany Baptiste
To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods by Molly X. Chang
Voyage of the Damned by Frances White
Mistress of Lies by K. M. Enright
You can learn more about them here.
