Professionals and nonprofessionals on Goodreads: Behavior standards for authors, reviewers, and readers

In 2013, Goodreads, a social media Website for book lovers, announced policy changes that included the deletion of reviews that discuss an author’s behavior. These changes occurred after a series of author/reviewer incidents in 2012 and 2013. This article presents a case study of one of those incidents in 2012, when a Goodreads reviewer wrote a negative review of a novel, the author and agent responded on Twitter, and a public discussion ensued around behavior standards for both literary professionals and nonprofessionals. The above incident, and how it does or does not foreshadow the later changes in Goodreads policy, offers a lens through which to examine evolving reading and writing practices and literary censorship, as well as how nonprofessional book reviewers and readers conceive of their and literary professionals’ roles in a complex social media literary landscape.