I hadn't been active on goodreads for at least a
month. My only use of the site recently was
to accept friend requests from other users.
As a small press author the site proved me a good way to connect with
readers. I was active on good reads for
roughly three years before my first professional publication was released and I
found it to be a great site to find new books, and keep track of what I had
read. Sometimes an author’s name would
escape me, and my read list made it easy to find their name, and then other
works by the author. It wasn't long
before I was offered and took on the status of librarian. This allowed me to upload other small press
authors I had discovered to the site’s listing of books, in the hopes that
these people would find an audience.
The other day I
tried to log into my goodreads account and couldn't. I assumed this was because I had changed my
password and forgotten what I had changed it to. This is a common occurrence in my life. I clicked the refresh password button, and
was told I had no account and never had.
This was confusing because I still had email updates from goodreads. When I contacted their help desk I was told
that my account was terminated because I was responsible for spaming other
users. No one could tell me when this
occurred and my recent lack of activity was shrugged off because apparently
these cycles don’t run very often. Nor
could anyone explain to me what I did to warrant being removed without any
notification. I requested to be
reinstated, and was told I could rejoin from scratch. All my reviews and posts lost forever, just
like snap chat pictures, in that they aren’t lost and are stored permanently. This affects not just me and my meager
status, but all those small authors I wrote reviews for in hopes of supporting
their work, because writing can be a lonely process and it’s nice to know
somebody is enjoying the product of your hard work.
I am not happy
with this state of affairs for what I hope to be obvious reasons. I enjoyed using goodreads before being
published, and once becoming published it was fun to use my ISBN number to
create an official page for my book on a website I used. Alas all this has come to an end. I write this so that when others are
inevitably kicked off because they were flagged by an algorithm it will not
come as such a surprise and not be quite as pissed off as I was in the moment
because it will be less of a surprise.
