The spam book club reviewers that have been irritating authors with requests for paid services are now moving on to extortion. A number of writers have shared messages they’ve received stating that if they don’t respond, they’ll get negative reviews from “a community of readers” with the intent of damaging the author’s reputation.

What’s the next step? Making damaging claims elsewhere about those writers if they don’t pay up? Something even worse?

I would love for platforms like Amazon, Goodreads, Indigo, etc. to improve the way they deal with negative reviews, but I’m not optimistic. I suspect they either don’t have the resources or don’t care. And I’ll save the argument for whether books should even be rated at all for another day.

This disturbing situation highlights the need for the real community of readers to speak out about the books that matter to them. Recommendations by actual readers to their networks is the best form of publicity after all, especially as the traditional media has essentially abandoned books coverage. Leave positive reviews of the books that you love on your platform of choice, talk about them on social media, bring them into your book club, buy them as gifts, whatever.

If we don’t talk about the books we love, who will?