REVIEW: The Birth of Vengeance by P.A. Ross

Source: Free copy from Author
Publish Date: May 28th 2012
Publisher: Scarlett-Thorn
ASIN/ISBN: B008732YPQ
Format: ebook
Genre: Urban Fantasy, Paranormal
Pages: 168
Date Read: December 17, 2013

Description
You've been beaten, bullied and betrayed but vengeance is at hand. One swift stab of a needle and the vampire formula will coarse through your blood. It will give you the immortal powers of the vampire for the night. Your fangs will bite and claws will rip at their flesh. No human will stand in your way. You will taste blood and feel the thrill of the hunt, but tomorrow you will be human again.

Can Jonathan Harper resist such temptation? He wants vengeance on a gang that have driven him to despair. The vampire formula can give him vengeance but at what cost.

This dark urban fantasy series embarks on an action packed adventure, as Jonathan must face the consequences of his decisions. “The Birth of Vengeance (Vampire Formula #1)” is the first novel in a series of new vampire books.

---

Review
This is probably one of my worst of 2013.

I give the author 2 stars for effort and for writing about vampires from a new/different angle and talking about a very important issue; bullying.

The story, the characters and the writing was all disappointing.
There was a lot of repitition, unnecessary details and inconsistencies (with the characters).

Jonathan was always going on and on and on about being bullied and wanting vengeance and feeling guilty for abandoning his friend.

Jonathan is a moody, uncertain character who is always whining. Even after all the training and everything. It got a bit tedious after a while.

The story in general just wasn't working for me and at the end, there was a failed attempt at throwing a curveball.
My reaction was: "oh please"

This story could have done a lot better.

---

Find The Book
Amazon || BN.com || Kobo || Smashwords

Find The Author
Goodreads: Paul Andrew Ross

Rating
2 Stars

Recommendation
This book wasn't my cuppa but you might enjoy it if you can get over the constant whining. It's supposed to be horror but it doesn't cut it for me.

Bullying On Goodreads: My Opinion

This is my third and final post on the topic. Read the first one here and the second one here

No one knows if Lauren Pippa/Howard started this whole thing to create attention for her book or if it was just a misunderstanding but that's not what I'm going to be talking about.

On a larger scale, it's impossible for trolls, bullies etc to not exist on a site as big as goodreads.

Authors should not get upset if people rate their books. You put out a product, you will get good and bad feedback. You should not respond to negative non-constructive feedback(on your product).
On the other hand, if someone abuses, bullies or threatens you, you should not just sit and do nothing. Report. That's why goodreads has a flag button bedside reviews.

IMO, people shouldn't rate or "review" books they haven't read. You can shelve whatever books you want to however you like but I think it's stupid to rate books you haven't read.

Authors harass people daily on goodreads. I have never personally been harassed but I know people who have. They harass you to read their books. They spam groups. I'm a member of a lot of groups on Goodreads and I see this a lot.

I know someone who was threatened by an author because she wrote a negative review of the author's book. She didn't bash the author or the book and she gave constructive criticism but the author took it personal and threatened to attack her if she didn't remove the review.

The worst I've experienced with author harassment on goodreads was when an author kept on messaging me that I got his characters' names wrong in my review. I went back and checked the book and I hadn't made any mistakes. I told him but he kept on disturbing me so I just removed the names in my review.

Bottom line is this. People shouldn't be able to rate or review books they haven't read. Authors need to stop spamming people's messages and group threads. And reviewers should stop bashing authors or books. Write helpful/useful reviews. When there's an argument, don't jump into conclusions. Find out the facts.

The saddest thing about all this is that the people usually involved in these things are adults. When adults are acting like they're in high school, what do they expect the ones who are actually in high school to do.

As for Lauren Pippa/Howard's book, the part of me that would read probably any book I can lay my hands on wants her to release the book. Another part of me doesn't want her to release the book because I feel sorry for her if this is how she wants to start a  career as an author

*image from The Savvy Senorita

Bullying On Goodreads: Badly Behaving Authors

Today, I'll be talking about the bullying on goodreads I started talking about here

In that post, I talked about how authors(specifically Lauren Howard/Pippa) were allegedly bullied and threatened with rape and other forms of violence.

I did a little more research on the topic and found a lot of people calling bullshit on the whole thing. Rosepetals, and DarkWriter give a lot of proof (screenshots from Twitter, Goodreads and Blogs) to support their claims. According to the other things I found, the whole things was a ploy for attention that blew beyond what Pippa could control.

On the issue of STGRB.com, FozMeadows calls them out. StopTheGoodreadsBullies.net, a website dedicated to proving that STGRB is made up of authors who bully readers and other authors who don't agree with them or have put up bad reviews of the books. They explain fully here.

Around the internet, I also saw that STGRB.com has allegedly called and threatened people that they "don't like".

On goodreads, I've seen a lot of threads discussing authors who harass reviewers and spam group threads and send messages threatening them.
It is said that these authors are mostly indie authors.
There are many groups on goodreads dedicated to discussing these authors. The most popular one is Badly Behaving Authors

My next and final post on this topic will be up soon. It's basically a conclusion and my opinions on the whole thing

*image from farmanor

Bullying On Goodreads: Stop The Bullies

So I found a post on goodreads about an article on Salon.com

According to the "supporters", Lauren Howard  asked -when the book hadn't come out yet - why people were giving 1 and 2 star reviews? Some people responded by giving more low reviews (just to prove that they can do whatever they please), and then started shelving her book as "authors who should be sodomized" and "should be raped in prison". She decided that that was too much and is no longer releasing the book.

I've noticed something like this once. I remember when I wanted to read reviews for the 4th & 5th books in the Secret Circle. It took a while to find an actual review. All I could find was people bashing the author.
Long story short, LJ Smith wrote the series as a trilogy but the publishers wanted more and she said no so they gave it to a ghost writer to write 3 more books.

According to STGRB(Stop The Goodreads Bullies), these people don't stop at online threats. They find out their home numbers and email addresses to call and send them threats. When the authors report, they are seen as childish and are told to grow thick skins.
Then the bullies will gather all their friends, rate the book 1 star and write negative reviews. They'll vote down all the positive reviews and tag the book or author as a BBA (Badly Behaving Author) and "blacklist" them.

I read that the goodreads moderators don't do anything. Some of the bullies are actually Goodreads moderators.

STGRB has compiled a list of the worst of the worst

My biggest problem with this is
¤ I really don't understand how you can rate and/or review a book you haven't read(or hasn't been released). It doesn't make sense. Besides book reviews are for BOOKS. Review the book not the author

There are petitions at Change.org for Amazon and Goodreads to stop letting abuse and bullying continue under the guise of freedom of speech and that Goodreads' should not allow comments that are abusive in nature for those who are interested.

Frankly, I don't care about the author or the book. All I'm saying is that you shouldn't be able to review books that you haven't read and you shouldn't threaten people.

I don't know how true the allegations of abuse are because there are no shelves on goodreads to prove that (some say the shelves have been deleted.)

This is part one of three posts that i will put up on the issue.

My next post will be about the supposed bullies and people that think STGRB is a bunch of crap