publication
Cait Corrain, whose book Crown of Starlight is due out next year, admits to leaving messages “ranging from mean to downright insulting”.
Wed, Dec 13, 2023, 4:47 p.m. GMT
An author has been fired by her agent and publisher after posting a series of reviews from fake accounts on the book ranking website Goodreads.
Cait Corrain, whose book Crown of Starlight was due out in May next year, Posted on X to apologize for their behavior. “I increased the rating of my book, drove up the ratings of several other debut authors, and left reviews that ranged from mean to downright insulting,” she tweeted.
Corrain's US publisher Del Rey, an imprint of Penguin Random House, explained on Monday that one is aware of “the ongoing discussion” about the author. Crown of Starlight “is no longer on our 2024 release schedule,” it said. Although it was initially unclear whether this meant that the book's publication was postponed or canceled, both Del Rey and Corrain's British publisher Daphne Press later stated that neither Crown of Starlight nor the second book in Corrain's contract would be published with them.
Corrain's former agent Rebecca Podos announced Monday that she would no longer work with Corrain. “Cait and I will not continue our partnership in the future. “I deeply appreciate the patience of those directly affected by last week’s events as I navigated a difficult situation,” she wrote in one Post on X.
Goodreads is right to divide opinions, but wrong to distill them
Canadian author Xiran Jay Zhao first drew attention to Corrain's suspicious activity on Wednesday last week when he identified a number of accounts that had positively rated Crown of Starlight and left one-star reviews for other debut novels.
They published a 31-page Google Doc containing screenshots of the activity of several accounts with usernames such as “Chantal B” and “Oh Se-Young,” believed to have been created by Corrain. Many of the starred books were written by people of color, including “So Let Them Burn” by Kamilah Cole, scheduled for release in January 2024, and “To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods” by Del Rey author Molly X Chang , which is scheduled to be released next April.
Corrain tweeted that they had negatively reviewed Chang, Cole, Danielle Jensen and Bethany Baptiste, adding that “it's possible there are a few other authors affected.”
“I can't believe Del Rey spent half a million dollars on this when they could have spent half a million dollars on everything else. “Sorry, not sorry,” read one of the review screenshots of Chang’s book, posted by a user named Brett Spinner. The review was liked by Chantal B.
“There is something particularly despicable about using explicit POC [people of colour] Names in the fake accounts to upvote every negative review of POC books so that the top reviews all get 1 star and 2 stars. Like the one in the yellow face,” Zhao tweeted. Many of the accounts linked to the document shared by Zhao have since been deleted.
A review of Corrain's book, published under the username Oh Se-Young, called Corrain a “fucking genius.”
“I love this book so much that I regret reading it because now nothing on my TBR sounds interesting in comparison,” it says.
Corrain claimed that a friend was responsible for fake reviews and shared this several screenshots a conversation in which the author insults “Lilly” for publishing the reviews. Corrain later admitted that the screenshots were fake and that the “boyfriend” “didn't exist.”
In a X pEastCorrain said they were “fighting a losing battle with depression, alcoholism and drug abuse” and changed medications in late November. They explained that on December 2nd they “suffered a complete mental breakdown” and created “about six profiles on Goodreads.” Along with two profiles created “during a similar but shorter breakdown in 2022,” they used the accounts to post negative reviews of other books and improve their own.
Corrain said they felt “no ill will” toward the targeted authors. “It was just my fear that the reception of my book would get out of hand,” they added. “I’m more sorry than you’ll ever know.”
The intended purpose of Goodreads is for readers to keep track of the books they read and share their thoughts with an online community. The site's community guidelines state: “Artificially inflating or degrading a book's ratings or reputation is against our rules.” This includes activities such as creating fake accounts to manipulate book ratings, buying reviews, and incentivizing votes , likes, or other actions on Goodreads.” However, “review bombing,” a term that refers to users negatively reviewing books they haven’t read, often before the book is even published, is on the rise has become a problem – and one that can have consequences for practice.
In June 2023, “Eat, Pray, Love” author Elizabeth Gilbert decided not to move forward with publishing a novel scheduled for release in February 2024 after receiving hundreds of negative reviews on Goodreads criticizing the setting of the novel The book was criticized in Russia, which was seen as insensitive towards Ukrainian readers.
After Corrain's admission on “
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