My brain is full of editing at the moment and I’m not very capable of forming reasonable sentences, so here are a few random thoughts in place of a proper blog post.
There’s a lot of unpleasantness flying about over Goodreads at the moment – it’s a site that I’ve only recently started to dip my social media toes into, and although I have yet to pay attention to even one of its recommends I do quite enjoy updating my book reading status; adding those extra few percent to my progress bar is so satisfying…
Most of the drama basically boils down to “authors are whiny babies who need to shut up” vs “reviewers are sadistic bullies with an agenda”. I think maybe we need to step back and consider the equality of the reader/writer relationship. Maybe, just maybe, we should try and reconcile the idea in our minds that they’re both equally important. Without writers, we’d have nothing to read. Without readers, there would little joy in writing (I know that we all say we write for ourselves, but in the end, you want to share that world, don’t you?)
I suspect we’d all avoid getting our knickers in a bunch if we could remember a couple of things:
Writers: Just ‘cause you’ve written a book, doesn’t mean it’s pleasant to lord it up over everyone.
Reviewers: Just ‘cause you’re reviewing a book, doesn’t mean it’s pleasant to personally attack the author.
The thing is, and I think we forget this on the internet quite often, you are totally free to say what you like. Of course you are. But please do not be all shocked if you say shitty things, and then people point out that you are saying shitty things.
We can all chuck our tuppence worth in. That’s what freedom of speech is.
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