Slightly different post this morning. It's been a difficult weekend so far. Don't worry, all the animals are fine. But I got home on Friday and just as I pulled into the driveway the head gasket went in my truck so that's going to be an expensive exercise.
I was just sorting that out when I got an email from a small marketing firm who have been corraling readers to read the book and if they like, it hopefully post some reviews. I had been starting to think over the last couple of weeks that even though they were recommended by another author they started sounding a bit dodgy and I told them I wasn't going to continue with them, fortunately, we didn't have a contract.
Anyway, the email is basically blackmail. They stated that unless I paid them for more people to read the book which they said they've already done, despite me telling them not to continue, they were going to get all of their readers to upload 1-star reviews and tank the ratings.
As you can imagine, this has been hugely upsetting over the last 36 hours. Initially, my instincts were to go full-on-feral as I tend to come out swinging when this sort of thing happens, but I restrained myself and my last email to them before I blocked them was to say that I had retained copies of all of their emails and had passed these on to Amazon and if bad reviews start coming through, they would be removing the reviews and that person's account. Also, I would just flood the different writer's groups with bad reviews of my own. I have blocked them now through email so hopefully won't get any more and on the advice of a woman in one of the writer's groups I'm part of, have raised the price, temporarily of the ebook, (If they want to leave a shit review, they're still going to have to pay to do it)
I have been in touch with Kindle and they are going to look into it. So I just watch and wait and see if they try to carry out their threat. Amazon helpdesk is no help. Trying to get through to someone who can help is seemingly impossible but if the 1-star reviews start coming through, there is the option to report each one of them and I guess we go from there.
Not a chirpy story for this morning but when I started this, I promised I'd be upfront with everything that happens through here.
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