Writing Mistakes Writers Make: Sabotaging Other Writers
Everyone makes mistakes—even writers—but that’s OK because each mistake is a great learning opportunity. The Writer’s Digest team has witnessed many mistakes over the years, so we started this series to help identify them early in the process. Note: The mistakes in this series aren’t focused on grammar rules, though we offer help in that area as well.
Rather, we’re looking at bigger picture mistakes and mishaps, including the error of using too much exposition, hiding your pitch, or chasing trends. This week’s writing mistake writers make is sabotaging other writers.
Writing Mistakes Writers Make: Sabotaging Other Writers
This week’s mistake is one that comes up so often that I had to double-check our WMWM archives to make sure we had not covered it previously. Most writers don’t fall into this trap, but the ones who do tend to receive the full backlash of karma that comes with trying to sabotage other writers. In fact, it’s a recent development that inspired this post.
(How I Stopped Sabotaging My Writing Goals.)
It appears a debut author was caught creating several fake Goodreads accounts with the sole purpose of giving one-star reviews to books by other debut authors in their same category going back to 2023. The tell in this case was apparently that these fake accounts all gave five-star reviews to the debut author in question.
I’m not going to get into the weeds of this specific case, but it’s apparently led to the debut author losing their agent and being dropped from their publisher’s 2024 publication schedule. So a similar result to the author who inspired my recent post on overreacting to disappointment. There really does seem to be a lot of wisdom found in the common advice of doing your best to ignore and avoid reviews as much as possible.
But this type of thing happens in smaller ways all the time. I’ve witnessed authors refuse to recommend other books in their genre as if they’ll somehow steal all their book sales as a result. Writers have enough challenges without having to resort to sabotaging each other.
Mistake Fix: Focus on Your Own Writing
It’s OK if writers don’t go around recommending other books in their genre, though they’ll probably increase their expertise in the eyes of others if they do make great referrals. But authors are not doing any favors to themselves by sabotaging other writers with bad reviews or disparaging remarks; they’re merely hurting that author and writers in general.
(7 Mystery Novels With the Best Twists.)
In the example above, it was obvious the debut author wasn’t doling out actual opinions about their competition. (After all, it is possible to really not like a book by someone.) Instead, they had created a fake smear campaign of books that weren’t even released yet while giving themselves five-star reviews to somehow improve their stock.
Instead of investing all this time and energy in tearing others down, this author would’ve benefitted from reaching out to people about their own project and/or focusing on their next writing project. Imagine if this author spent the same amount of time and effort on sending emails to these other debut authors to see if they’d be interested in doing a joint speaking event to promote their books. Or creating a podcast.
Look: Book publishing is not a binary profession. If a reader buys a book by one author, that does not preclude them from buying a book by another. My daughter, for instance, has a small bookshelf with 11 books she’s read recently by seven authors (and her TBR list is filled with many other titles and names).
Instead of focusing on what others are doing, writers should focus on writing and sharing the best stories they can tell. That will lead to more publishing success than any fake one-star review on a fellow author’s book. And maybe Darby Kane is right: Writers should stay off Goodreads.