A first-time author has been dropped by her U.S. publisher and her agent after readers and fellow authors accused her of posting fake negative reviews to a popular book recommendation website.
The influential user review site has suffered a year of controversies, from cancelled book deals to review-bombing, and exposed a dark side to the industry
While the focus here is on book discovery to fuel future purchases, and not necessarily tracking and reviewing books, as on Goodreads, there's a lot of overlap with Amazon's other platform for book lovers it acquired back in 2013, and has done little to modernize since. Read more
Nominations for the 2023 Goodreads Choice Awards recently opened, and Goodreads is coming under fire for its decision to eliminate several categories. Children's & Middle Grade, Poetry, and Graphic Novels were removed from the awards. A new category, Romantasy, has been added.
It is, in fact, possible to have a decent time on Goodreads. You just have to ignore everything about the way the site is designed and how you're supposed to use it. When I first signed up in early 2012, I obeyed all the prompts. I populated my "to-read" shelf with the platform's recommendations. Read more
People in the book community have strong feelings about Goodreads. Some readers see it as a simple tool they use to track their own personal reading, while others spend hours writing and reading reviews, commenting on others' reviews, and participating in its many features. Read more
I can't remember the last time I enjoyed reading a book where my enjoyment wasn't tied to the euphoric sense of achievement I got from finishing it. This is not because I don't love reading, or would rather watch television. No, it's because of a little app on my phone called Goodreads.
On a typical day, a long-time user of Goodreads, the world's largest community for reviewing and recommending books, will feel like they're losing their mind. Read more
Michael Larsen is one of the deans of literary agents in the United States, who established Larsen-Pomada Literary Agents in 1972 and has represented hundreds of books since. Read more
‘I always quote Kurt Vonnegut. He said in the early part of his career he was dismissed as a science fiction writer and that critics tend to put genre books, including sci-fi, in the bottom drawer of their desk... It's true. I get the New York Times every Sunday. In 37 novels, I've never had a stand-alone review. I'm always in the crime round-up.
A survey of 787 members of the Society of Authors (SoA) has found that a third of translators and a quarter of illustrators have lost work to generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Translators are also more likely to use AI to support their work, with 37% of respondents saying they have done so, followed by 25% of non-fiction writers.
The author Lynne Reid Banks, known for her novel The L-Shaped Room and her children's book series The Indian in the Cupboard, has died at the age of 94.
I launched my podcast Making It Up nearly three years ago with the goal of interviewing writers not for any particular work of theirs, but to talk to them about their lives. I didn't want to ask them what famous author they want to have dinner with or what their top five favorite books are ... yech. Read more
Until we have a mechanism to test for artificial intelligence, writers need a tool to maintain trust in their work. So I decided to be completely open with my readers
‘People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.'