Saturday, January 12, 2013

Nadège Richards: Badly Behaving Author

Until author Nadège Richards decided to attack me, fauxpologize, and make purposely vague posts on Facebook, I had no plans to post anything else about author-reviewer fights after the epic post about 2012 in author drama.

Well, she did all that. I'm never going to take something like this lying down, so it's time to set the record straight with all the screencaps I can offer. One thing I learned in 2012 was to screencap EVERYTHING. Even the things I've linked to are screencapped in case they get deleted.

This didn't start with Richards, you know. It started with an author named Brittany Hiester, who I got into a very small tiff with back in March 2012 when she posted on my review of Heaven by Alexandra Adornetto. The only work she was then involved in was an anthology called If I Should Die Before I Wake and I put it on my "will-not-read-due-to-author" shelf, which is my normal protocol when I come across a badly behaving author. She sent me a message in November 2012 apologizing for what she said and how she acted and I accepted it. Now, I'm a busy college student with the attention span of a dead fruit fly, so I never got around to PMing her or removing her book from my shelf.

That brings us to January 10, 2013. Nadège Richards, one of the authors in the anthology, also posts on my Heaven review. I start there to give you the full context of who posted what afterwards and to make sure you get it all. My comment, which contains the full text of hers, isn't likely to be deleted anytime soon.

For any and all screencaps after this, click them to make them much larger.



Shortly after she made her comments, she deleted all of them and PMed me; "We need to talk" was the subject of the message. I don't know the legalities of taking screencaps of private messages and don't want to risk it, but here's a summary of what she said:

Her crack about whether or not I've written a book is her generic response to reviewers so she didn't mean anything by it (that doesn't make her look much better in my eyes), she's still in school and what she said to me wasn't immature, shelving her books as "will-not-read-due-to-author" is an onslaught/slaughter, and I probably wouldn't like it if she did that to me. (If I actually did something on her level, I'd let her have at it.) She oddly respects me for speaking my mind about bad books and she's sorry about her attitude, but she isn't sorry for her comments. She tries to appeal to my heart with the fact it's a charity anthology (spoiler: it fails because that is non sequitur) and she wants to put this all behind us.

Now, I have excellent fauxpology senses. If someone apologizes but doesn't mean it, I can tell nine times out of ten. Hers reeked of insincerity. At that time, I was still rather blase about all of it because she seemed just like any other clueless commenter. She just had author status. I tried to PM her back the next morning to talk it out with her like she wanted according to the subject line, but she blocked me. If I hadn't already known her apology was a fauxpology, this would have confirmed it.

January 11 passes without incident and I'd already forgotten her. Then came January 12 (also known as this morning), when I got up and found that she hasn't put it behind her at all. She doesn't want to.

The very first email in my inbox was for a comment from Brooke, someone who liked Richards' page on Facebook. According to her and her links, Richards has been posting very vague statuses about my on Facebook, meanwhile misrepresenting the situation to her fans completely.


Here are the posts, one and two and three and four:




Notice that on one of those screencaps, my comment can be plainly seen. I have since been blocked. I see she doesn't want any of her fans being like Brooke and doing some of their own research.

Funny thing: you can check all her books on Goodreads and all you will see that is remotely negative toward her books are shelves.

Number of negative ratings on her books from people who have shelved the book in such a manner--or even negative things said about her in the review? That would be zero, and I damn well hope it stays at zero because I don't want people doing that.

Moral of the story: don't mess with this kitten. I prefer to be sweet, but if you give me just cause, I'll fight back with everything I have.