By Hannah Story
A scandal hit the online book community this month: a debut author set up fake accounts on recommendation website Goodreads to publish one-star reviews of her fellow first-time novelists.
Over a period of months, the writer – later named as Cait Corrain – targeted writers, many of whom were people of colour and were also signed to her publisher, Del Rey Books, a sci-fi–fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House.
At the same time, she used the fake accounts to praise her book, Crown of Starlight, which was scheduled for release in 2024.
The allegations led to widespread outrage from the publishing community and Corrain being dropped by both her agent and her publisher.
While Corrain originally blamed a friend, she later admitted she was behind the swathe of negative reviews. In a statement, she wrote that she suffered from depression, alcoholism and substance abuse, and began posting the reviews while adjusting to a new medication, and in the grip of a “complete psychological breakdown”.
“It was just my fear about how my book would be received running out of control,” she wrote. “I betrayed the confidence of my agent, my [publishing] team, my readers, and my friends, and betrayed my own deeply held values … I accept responsibility for the pain and suffering I caused.”
The practice of posting a large number of negative reviews is described as review-bombing. The Corrain scandal is just one example in a long history of the behaviour, which often involves coordination between a number of people.
In September, American writer Nate Lemcke attempted to promote his self-published book by reviewing female writers on TikTok. He was accused of exploiting women and rewarded with a slew of one-star reviews on Goodreads.
Review-bombing is also affecting high-profile authors such as Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love. Three months ago, Gilbert decided to suspend the release of her next novel, The Snow Forest, due out in February 2024, following a backlash on Goodreads from Ukrainian users objecting to the novel’s Russian setting.
Robbie Egan, chief executive of BookPeople, Australia’s not-for-profit peak body for booksellers, is sceptical of Goodreads and how it can be manipulated. Still, he acknowledges the platform “does help sell books and promote writing”.
He criticises its move to tackle review-bombing by encouraging readers to report it rather than implementing better moderation. “That seems, for a trillion-dollar company, pretty lazy to me.”
Robbie Egan is the CEO of BookPeople, formerly the Australian Booksellers Association.Credit: Simon Schluter
While Goodreads has its place, Egan stresses the ongoing relevance of booksellers to getting an author’s work to an audience, citing the example of Pip Williams’ Dictionary of Lost Words.
“The proportion that sold in independent bookshops was huge,” he says. “It’s very hard in Australia to make a career for an author without independent bookshops being on board.”
A manager of Readings bookshops in Melbourne from 2010 to 2018, Egan says he would encourage his staff to be sceptical of Goodreads. “I would be telling my staff to take reviews with a grain of salt and to check out the content themselves,” he says.
Madeleine Gray, author of Green Dot, a critic and former bookseller, says that Goodreads is important for getting early buzz for a novel, especially for debut authors such as her. “If you can get a strong suite of pre-release reviews saying it’s good on Goodreads, that builds the hype, and it’s very helpful for people pre-ordering the book,” she says.
Madeleine Gray released her debut novel Green Dot earlier this year.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer
But Goodreads should not be confused with professional criticism.
“I say this with love: I would not think of Goodreads as an accurate critical gauge of whether a book is good or not,” Gray says. “One of my favourite pastimes is to go and read terrible reviews of undeniable classics. Like, you can go and look at The Great Gatsby and someone will be: ‘boring, dropped it after a page, one star’.”
Ultimately, Gray says, the way that books get into the hands of readers is through word of mouth.
“You can get as many reviews as you want that are good, but unless someone’s reading the book and recommending it to their friend or their mum, it’s not gonna go anywhere.”
Jessie Tu, author of A Lonely Girl Is a Dangerous Thing and book critic for this masthead, says she’s deliberately removed herself from the online book community.
“I just am so anti-social media,” she says. She points to its divisive nature, as driven by the algorithm (and described by essayist Jia Tolentino): “I just find all of that too insane and too much for my kind of very sensitive way of being,” Tu says.
“As writers, there are different ways to engage with readers and other people,” she adds, including author talks and writers’ festivals.
While review-bombing may not currently be widespread in Australia, Tu says the Corrain Goodreads scandal highlights a problem with local literary criticism: the way books by people of colour are reviewed.
Jessie Tu’s debut novel A Lonely Girl Is a Dangerous Thing was released in 2020.Credit: Steve Siewert
“Not enough of them are reviewed,” Tu says. “I wish more of their books were pressed into the hands of journalists and celebrities and critics and anyone who has cultural status and influence.”
“Also, I would love to see [that] the pool of critics reflects the spread and diversity of the Australian population.”
Michael Winkler self-published his first novel, Grimmish, in 2021 before it was picked up by an independent publisher and shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award last year. He didn’t find his audience through Goodreads reviews but on Twitter (now known as X), and later through the efforts of booksellers and the acknowledgment of the Miles Franklin.
Michael Winkler self-published his debut novel Grimmish in 2021.Credit: Justin McManus
“Twitter was actually a really important avenue for writers to connect with readers, especially people who were doing things that were experimental or a bit more challenging,” he says.
“For other authors, [Goodreads] is a place where people go for recommendations, and it can be powerful. And that’s why it feels like such a nasty betrayal, I think, to have a debut author not just pumping up their own tyres with their own five-star reviews, but actually actively going out there and trying to put down other debut writers.”
While Australia’s literary scene is small, and it’s possible some bad actors are trying to undermine each other through bad reviews, Winkler describes the local industry as overwhelmingly collegial.
“The local scene is characterised by kindness and supportiveness, and people wanting others to do well,” he says.
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