Author Threaten's Blogger

OMG! Have you heard of what Charidee over at Novel Reads is going through right now? While writing at a friend’s blog about Victoria Laurie’s book Crime Seen (which she praised by the way) and about the author herself, whom she didn’t care for (personality-wise) and then went on to quote from the author’s own blog where Laurie pretty much bullied a reader that had emailed her for not agreeing with her opinions (she even left these people's email addresses on her site).

After quoting this Charidee wrote “On one hand, I can kind of applaud Laurie for standing behind what she loves, on the other, I think she acted in an incredibly unprofessional manner with that.” but the Charidee concluded with, “In the end, I read WAGTD [What‘s a Ghoul to Do?], and I'll probably be at the store buying the next one the day it's released in March, because I LOVED that book, too. I'll continue to read Laurie's books, because she's one hell of an author and her books keep me turning the pages and even have me laughing at times too. I don't have to like how she views things. I'll continue to read her and be a fan of her BOOKS as long as she writes them as good as she has been.”

After being silent in the blog world for a little, Charidee opened up Novel Reads again and again talked about how unprofessional this particular author was because now Ms. Laurie was getting reviewers that had left unpleasant reviews of her books banned from Amazon.com (and then placing their screen names on her website). She also took the name of someone who had written to her about how she disliked her newest series and said she was going to place a person with a similar name (so as not to get sued) in a horrible situation in her next book. Humiliating someone because they didn’t care for your books (even though I don’t understand why they would write and be nasty to the author about it), is really low and extremely petty don’t you think?

Then, she learned that not only was the author seeming to enjoy bullying these people but that her editor was encouraging it. Charidee tried to find a way to contact said editor: “I'm trying to use my very limited powers of Google search to hunt down this editor of the authors so that I may contact them to ask a few questions about this. I'm very much interested in why the editor loves this idea enough to encourage it. Why the editor sees nothing wrong with it. I have no doubt my questions will go un-answered, but I still feel the need to try. Heck, I'm even thinking about contacting the agent of the author, asking if they know about the behavior. I think I'll wait tough, because I'd like to know about the legal angle here.”

Once she did track down these people, she left a voice mail asking for the editor in question to contact her about this because she was “deeply disturbed” by what she had read on said author’s blog (which by the way has been taken down). Charidee then talked to the owner of Dear Author about this, which prompted another posting about this author’s revenge.

Charidee eventually started getting some nasty emails about all of this but was a lady about it (and did not name names or post email addresses). Then on August 19 , 2008 (yes a few days ago and all of this started in January) someone claiming to be Victoria Laurie’s lawyer emailed Charidee pretty much bullying her but the lady of Novel Reads explained the situation to the Dear Author blogger and she (and several other people) came to her defense. Makes me want to stand up and cheer! Oh and I guess it was before Dear Author posted this but the crazy woman actually started bragging on her blog about what she had done which included something about suing Charidee and costing her, her kid’s college education. WTF?

The moral of this story? Not all publicity is good publicity after all and don’t write to psycho authors not matter how much you enjoyed their books. The moral for me? Never touch Victoria Laurie’s books… even with a ten-foot pole, you on the other hand can do as you please but I did warn you!

To learn more of this incredibly bizarre story you can visit Novel Reads and check out the latest post that gives links to all of the above quoted stuff. No, this is not a hoax either.