UPDATE: Author Cait Corrain Loses Book Deal After Sabotaging Goodreads Reviews of Her Peers

By Dustin Rowles | Books | December 12, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | Books | December 12, 2023 |

Update: The author has since taken full responsibility and apologized (see below).

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I’m a big user of Goodreads, and I often use their reviews to decide what to read next. I tend to read fairly mainstream novels with hundreds (or thousands) of reviews, which makes it more difficult to review-bomb them. My guess, however, is that it’s easier to manipulate the ratings of smaller books in the sci-fi and romance genres, where a few bad reviews can more easily drag down a book’s overall rating.

Enter Cait Corrain, the author of what was to be an upcoming sci-fi fantasy novel Crown of Starlight, who was accused by many in the community of review-bombing other authors. It was not, apparently, very difficult for those in the community to figure out that Corrain was posting negative reviews of books published by her peers. From NBC News:

Suspicion around Corrain’s alleged anonymous review-bombing first emerged when writers noticed several of the same accounts leaving scathing one-star reviews on unreleased books from other authors. Many of them were also debut titles to be released in the first half of next year. Internet users also noted that the vast majority of targeted books were written by people of color.

Those accounts, which appeared to “like” one another’s reviews, seemed to be further connected when people discovered they all rated Crown of Starlight five stars and upvoted it across dozens of Goodreads book lists.

Many of the reviews specifically questioned why her publisher, Del Rey Books, would invest in those other authors. Corrain was allegedly trying to shit on other authors to boost the prospects of her own book.

Corrain denied she was behind the review-bombing, claiming instead that it was a friend, “Lilly,” and provided screenshots of Discord conversations to prove it. She was not convincing.

Corrain’s book publisher, Del Rey Books (a subsidiary of Penguin Random Home), has pulled Corrain’s book from their publishing schedule. Corrain’s agent, Rebecca Podos, has also cut ties. This is all the more bizarre because early reviews for Corrain’s book were largely positive (the book pulled from the publishing schedule currently sports a 3.95 rating on Goodreads).

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Here is Corrain’s apology:

A sincere apology. I know this is long, but that's because I'm trying to own and openly address every aspect of what I did. pic.twitter.com/MEtyDLCkDw

— Cait (@CaitCorrain) December 12, 2023