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No argument. I just don’t think using a venue like Amazon reviews is the way to do it. There are lots of authors whose writing is political. Real critique and discussion is valid and valuable. But slamming someone via their reviews as a political troll will spill over onto people on our own side. The potential is there to invalidate the entire public review process, which is important, especially for indie writers.

People already give one-star reviews to authors based solely on disagreement with a character’s politics. That is unfortunate and a misuse of freedom of speech. It seeks to penalize someone for creative thought and expression when the object is to evaluate presentation, skill and mastery of form and material. Still, done individually, it is a valid form of critique. Done en masse, it reeks of bullying.

I’m not against ridicule of the deserving. I’m not even against trolling, per se. I just wish this particular venue was not polluted by political action. I would hate to see this done to Bracken or Coonts or Trump or any future writer presenting our side of things. It feeds the stupid *haters gonna hate* memes as well as destroys the KDP platform, which is vital to very capitalistic and entrepreneurial creative expressions used by independent writers to break free of controlling traditional publishing restrictions. Which, BTW, is why a writer like Stephen Coonts had to publish his latest work, ‘Liberty’s Last Stand’, with Regnery because liberal trad publishers wouldn’t touch a book where the tyrant is named Barry Soetoro. Book highly recommended, BTW,

Wanna Alinsky Hillary? Go to Cafe Press or the other printing sites, make your meme, put your own money where your own mouth is, set up your own online store on your own domain and ridicule Hillary or the progs forever. Don’t sh!+ in some one else’s watershed and call it political activism.

When I saw this thread, I was expecting well-thought out, witty and valid negative reviews. God knows, she deserves them, the book deserves them and Kaine deserves them. What I found was a juvenile, endlessly self-indulgent and derivative pile-on which I dislike for the reasons stated above.

But, feel free to denigrate my reaction with repetitive ad hominems because it violates the group-think of the day. Online graffiti for its own sake is always cathartic for the tagger, no matter how destructive to the chosen venue. In this case, Amazon reviews are posted on private property made available free of charge to readers who bought (or downloaded on promotion) a book for their personal opinions regarding published work and, IMO, this is vandalism.

I have seen books/authors trolled before. I am not faint of heart, but the examples I have witnessed were directed at a teen author’s successful romance novel solely because the trollers’ novels failed. In that instance, Amazon acted.

YMMV