Friday, March 21, 2014

I was thrown off goodreads and no one can tell me why...


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.  
Ironically my author profile, which I do not have access to any longer displays this message, "M.R. Gott isn't a Goodreads Author (yet),"