Attitudes in the book blogging community

There are some outliers that make the experience of sharing love and support for fellow writers very difficult.

I love reading. I love sharing my thoughts on what I read. I love recommending great novels. I also love sharing my experiences with writing and tidbits of information around writing, editing, publishing, and marketing. For the most part the online community is greatful and supportive. I have delightful conversations and garner knowledge from other bloggers on their own journey.

In dealing with a wide sample of the population we get a plethora of experience, knowledge, and attitudes.

Helping younger bloggers and writers elevate their content. Provide more critical reviews and recommendations, more insight into the craft of writing is what I consider what this community this community is all about.

One of my biggest dislikes has been the spam, the unsubstantiated emotional responses (*cough*trolling*cough*) and professionals coming back to members of the community with cold, threatening attitudes because they are trying to monetize and ‘own’ the content that a multitude of bloggers are posting for free. Granted it’s a small minority of the community at large, but it exists and can have an enormous impact on the person targeted with this type of behaviour.

I’ve personally had my content plagiarized. And it takes nothing to reach out to the instigator and politely ask them to either take the post down, or link it to your original material. There is no need for threats of lawyers, being rude, or charging them money for using your content. After all, you can contact the hosting service if they are in breach of copyright (WordPress has its own guidelines and governance regarding this) and the material can be taken down as a last resort. Or ultimately there is the registrar, the DMCA, or even google. (I have previously written a post with step-by-step actions about these topics here.) There are always steps to take other than a heated emails with no response.

On the other side of the coin, I have myself inadvertently breached copyright. In researching an article, I copy and pasted material into several documents for reference later offline, and to link to when I wrote and published my article. However after writing my post, I accidently deleted the finished article, and saved one of those source material documents under the title… and then it was subsequently scheduled to post. So what was published were notes cut and pasted without context of someone else’s material. Plagiarism out right. So embarrassing. A lesson learned in triple, quadruple checking the line-up of scheduled posts. I received an email the next day of a threatening nature. Granted it was my mistake, and I was able to find my original article and upload it in place of the mistakenly published article – the in-question material having only been live for 10 hours. However, this time I expanded on the topic, researched more and made it even better. The thing is, if I’d received a better toned email, I would have admitted my mistake, altered the article and the owner of some of the source material would have been credited and given a lot of hype in the article – benefitting us both. But instead I found alternate source material – who don’t require a paid subscription to access – and much more examples. My newly edited article was infinitely much better, and all reference to the nasty emailer removed. They missed out on engaging any audience funnelled from my publication just because of their attitude. I would have responded to a nice email… but I don’t reply to threats. You don’t get results for inciting negativity. You can escalate the issue for importance sure, but keep it neutral in tone. I hesitate to mention, that even after I had uploaded the correct and finished article, removing reference to the emailers original content, they continued to harass me to the point I had to block them on all of my social media accounts. This person clearly did not check the updated article, or check her tone. I wanted to issue a public apology, I wanted to contribute some of her material as inspiration for my article, but after the bullying nature and threatening nature of their correspondence (from a professional in the industry mind you,) I’m doing what my mother always said. Ignore the bullies and eventually they will find a new target to annoy.

I guess with a background in teaching – you learn a bit about reacting to attitudes; a little about conflict resolution. But with the rise of social media we are seeing a lot of this clapback mentality. Off the cuff posts, tweets, DM’s, emails designed to hurt, scare, or embarrass the target when you could take a night to sleep on the matter and craft your response more maturely. It’s hard to make this point in a world where sensational content trends regularly. Cancel culture, online bullying, clickbait, response videos, apology videos… they are big business in the news cycle. We are seeing more and more inexperienced (and some who rightfully know better) falling into this trap.

It’s a form of bullying, of hate culture, of negativity that stalls the growth of our community and the publishing industry as a whole. Sadly this is not going to go away. The only way we can start to change attitudes is to not react, or react appropriately. Know appropriate ways to respond to threats. Know the avenues you have available to protect yourself online.

Granted I don’t see this bad behaviour happen a lot within the book blogging community, but it does happen; and when it does it can really impact you.

Anyway I thought this was an interesting discussion to bring to the blog – have you experienced any of this type of behaviour? How did you deal with it? Have you made a faux-par with copyright or plagiarism, and what did you do to make amends? Do you think information around the craft of writing, editing, publishing, and marketing should be widely free and accessible to anyone online, or is it something that should be paid for?

© Casey Carlisle 2020. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Casey Carlisle with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Book Review – ‘Tell Me Three Things’ by Julie Buxbaum

A totally unexpected ride…

Genre: Y/A, Contemporary, GLBT

No. of pages: 328

From Goodreads:

Everything about Jessie is wrong. At least, that’s what it feels like during her first week of junior year at her new ultra-intimidating prep school in Los Angeles. Just when she’s thinking about hightailing it back to Chicago, she gets an email from a person calling themselves Somebody/Nobody (SN for short), offering to help her navigate the wilds of Wood Valley High School. Is it an elaborate hoax? Or can she rely on SN for some much-needed help?

It’s been barely two years since her mother’s death, and because her father eloped with a woman he met online, Jessie has been forced to move across the country to live with her stepmonster and her pretentious teenage son.

In a leap of faith—or an act of complete desperation—Jessie begins to rely on SN, and SN quickly becomes her lifeline and closest ally. Jessie can’t help wanting to meet SN in person. But are some mysteries better left unsolved?

I really got a kick out of ‘Tell Me Three Things,’ it weaves poetry, pop culture, and social media neatly into the narrative. Though I did feel like the pacing was somewhat slow. The truth is not a lot happens in this book, however I wasn’t bored by any means. It has that type of quirkiness that I’ve come to like from titles by David Levithan. Imperfect characters, big city sarcasm, and witty dialogue.

The whole SN (Somebody Nobody) thing was a little trite. I liked it having an anonymous person to chat to as a story telling device – a Cinderella story in reverse of sorts, but in a world of social media awareness and predators, something was screaming in the back of my head that our protagonist Jessie was being gullible.

I related to Jessie and got all the feels. I’ve lost a large number of family members in the last three years, and the grief is still raw, so there were times I had to put this book down because I couldn’t breathe. Many of her words rang so true. It’s not something anyone can understand unless it’s happened to them. I related to her quiet bookishness, her nerdiness, but I felt like she should’ve had more of a backbone. Especially when dealing with her Father. I know I would have totally lost it much earlier, and had a major meltdown at his feet and blame him for everything. That’s what grief can do to you. It also makes you numb. Maybe it’s my own experience colouring my views on Jessie and how she handled everything. I wanted her to be a little more prickly, fragile, volatile… maybe to validate how I handled my own grief and loss.

I felt the ‘all the boys fall for the new girl’ thing was a little over done. Whether intended or not. Whether stated or not. It just felt that way; and it annoyed me to no end. But the relationships, be they potential romances or not, were all very cute and adorable. I actually had a lot of fun reading ‘Tell Me Three Things.’

Caleb, Ethan, and Liam felt interchangeable. Like there wasn’t a lot of difference between them. SN had more depth than any of these men. And Jessie objectified them most of the time. Their floppy hair, their piercing eyes… I was waiting for her to discover more.

I also liked how I was kept guessing about the identity of SN. I kept trying to sleuth it out myself – like who would have access to her private contact details (this fact alone which threw me in the wrong direction – and to which I’m still wondering about how SN got them in the first place). Buxbaum does a very good job at swaying opinion from one person to another through Jessie’s narrative. I finished the whole book in a day, even with many rests to pull my emotions back together, it’s a touching contemporary about finding yourself through the loss of a loved one and re-defining what it is when you are You, who is You, who is You.

And I totally mis-guessed who SN was.

Doh!

The ending was cute.

I guess this book on a whole, although adorkable, had a tone of the uncomfortable. The grief and loss thing, the internet predator issue that was ignored, the feeling lost and out of place… it was hard for me to get engrossed in the romance when these issues were like the elephant in the room. It could have been so much more intense and angsty, but I appreciated the light nature of the narrative – it let me live in the fantasy.

Like I mentioned earlier, I found the pacing a little slow, but the writing style is easy to read and littered with pop culture acronyms (some of which I had to look up) and random references (which I Googled too): all of which I love. It sounds lame, but I always get a kick about learning something new from a book, no matter how obscure the reference. A big two thumbs up from me.

Overall feeling: cute and sad at the same time.

© Casey Carlisle 2017. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Casey Carlisle with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Book Review – ‘P.S. I Like You’ by Kasie West

Another great cutsie contemporary from Kasie…

Genre: Y/A, Contemporary, Romance

No. of pages: 330

From Goodreads:

Signed, sealed, delivered…

While spacing out in chemistry class, Lily scribbles some of her favorite song lyrics onto her desk. The next day, she finds that someone has continued the lyrics on the desk and added a message to her. Intrigue!

Soon, Lily and her anonymous pen pal are exchanging full-on letters—sharing secrets, recommending bands, and opening up to each other. Lily realizes she’s kind of falling for this letter writer. Only, who is he? As Lily attempts to unravel the mystery and juggle school, friends, crushes, and her crazy family, she discovers that matters of the heart can’t always be spelled out…

Another enjoyable read from Kasie West. She’s still totally killing it, and one of my automatic buy authors. Her stories are cute, cliché romances that leave you with a warm hug.

‘P.S. I Like You’ was no different. Our protagonist, Lily, is a quirky hipster musician and quickly found her way into my heart. Her insecurities and social ineptitude pulled her into the ranks of ‘sister’ from the get-go. I will say the madness of her large family household was written perfectly. It was like I was there with her, the noise, clutter, interruptions all in technicolour goodness. I don’t think I have read a book that knocked family life on the head like this so succinctly. I was impressed.

This story did give me a sharp current of agitation though. The way Lily’s situation unfolded with Cade was narcissistic in a way, and left a bad taste in the back of my throat for over half the novel. This was balanced out by other less aggravating male characters – which was both a positive and a negative for me. Love triangles, or any other shape, vying for the plain girl is so overdone. And I know ‘P.S. I Like You’ does not quite fall into this category, but comes close enough for me to grind my teeth.

I was also left wondering where mutual respect had gone for most of the cast… if you think someone had a boy/girlfriend, then there should be no reason to flirt. That is just distasteful. And to continue for weeks – well that’s all kinds of underhanded, no matter which way you spin it. These characters needed to grow some big hairy morals and take a good look at their actions.

Another thing present in Kasie’s writing is that there are always the typical YA tropes. I’d love to see her write something a little more gritty or dirty and add a new dynamic to her writing.

With the rant over, I liked the way some misunderstandings were revealed later in the story – you can’t have a good romance without some of them. Jumping to conclusions is a quaint storytelling device.

As with all of Kaise West’s story, they are very predictable – I mean hello – a light contemporary romance, it’s why we read them. So there was zero surprises, just me squeeing like some fangirl, eager to get to the good bits. I did like the way the story ended too, it has more of that contemporary touch than her previous novels have had.

I will say that this felt like the best written novel she’s published so far. The pacing is bang on all the way through. In fact, I read it entirely in one sitting in an afternoon. I could not put it down. The way she introduces complex characters is a joy to read. I know this falls into my guilty pleasure category, because you’ll never expect some contrived literary masterpiece, but West shines in her genre, and I always look forward to reading a book from her catalogue. Just like a good rom-com, West’s stories are fun and uplifting.

Overall feeling: another warm-fluffy.

 

© Casey Carlisle 2017. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Casey Carlisle with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.