This was my sixth book and the first I submitted to a site BookSprouts that connect writers and readers with the purpose of getting reviews in return for free ebook provided to the readers on this site. It turned out that these kind of places are where trolls prey on books they then trash. Trolls are not book lovers and they would never buy a book. So they subscribe to such sites to get books for free and that’s how they found my book.
Another reason was the content of my book. In it, I showed my vulnerable site and vulnerable people are what trolls love to go after more than anything. For them, that’s like smelling blood.
Numerous other authors complained about trolling on Goodreads (you can find more on that here) but I’m not sure what kind of books they write. Sometimes it’s a fellow writer that does this. One of the nastiest trolls that went after me had one book published.
You can also buy Goodreads and Amazon reviews for $20 and you can choose whether you want to buy negative or positive reviews. With Goodreads, you can choose to buy just negative ratings with no written reviews. So there, it’s very cheap and easy to destroy someone’s book’s chances just like that, while it’s not at all cheap and easy to write, self-publish and sell books.
Here is a post by another writer on Medium who dissected Goodreads and also talked about the trolling and fake reviews issue on the platform:
