Meet Bev, the force behind the wonderful book blog, My Reader’s Block.
She is an administrative secretary for the Indiana University English department’s MA/PhD program. Bev says, “I’ve been a reader as long as I can remember—but I credit my mom with getting me hooked. When I was seven, she gave me her five-book set of Nancy Drew books. I haven’t looked back since. I’m a non-stop reader and a wanna-be writer (first draft of a mystery novel done…currently it is sadly in need of revisions), so when I named my blog I was looking to do a play on ‘writer’s block’ while also indicating that I was reviewing the books (putting them on the chopping block, so to speak). I planned to call it just ‘Reader’s Block’ but some guy had already claimed it. What’s really irksome is that he claimed it, posted like 2 or 3 times several years ago and then abandoned it. So, I stuck a “My” on it. Ta-da!” Continue reading “Book Blogger Spotlight: My Reader’s Block”
This is only the latest in a growing trend I’ve seen in the indie publishing world that I find disconcerting. This trend is calling people out in public (it doesn’t get much more public than the internet) for perceived wrongs. You can find threads in the Amazon forums for outing authors alleged to have behaved badly and reviewers who are supposed to have done the same. There are numerous lists and shelves on Goodreads for those badly behaving authors. One of the latest is a site devoted to “Goodreads Bullys,” (which “fights back” against readers accused of writing vindictive reviews on the popular reader review site by posting personal information about them). The Huffington Post has had at least three separate articles about this site.