Late last night, I received a long and heartfelt email from a reader who had left a comment months ago on a review of a book that I’d posted earlier this year. I hadn’t liked the book much for very specific reasons, and this reader had agreed in a comment.
But now the reader was asking me to remove that comment entirely because of a fear of being sued, thanks to the recent lawsuit by Ellora’s Cave against the Dear Author blog.
Never mind that the EC suit is ostensibly about DA reporting on possible financial issues at EC. Never mind that this wasn’t even an EC book. Thanks to the chilling environment EC is attempting to foster with their actions, some innocent reader of my tiny blog is worried enough to ask me to remove a comment just in case. And I did.
And now I’m going to go donate more money to the Dear Author defense fund. Because this nonsense has got to stop.
Interestingly, I’ve felt more “chilled” by the #notchilled campaign than by anything EC/JB has put out there. Heck, I was even threatened physically by someone on Twitter for not toe-ing the line and going along with the herd re the EC/DA suit. Courtney Milan throwing her weight around as a lawyer and joining the usual meangirl bully antics of the “romland” twitter crowd came off as much more threatening than some poorly formulated request in a half-arsed suit.
Merely pointing out that some of the things people were claiming about EC’s side of the suit were, in fact, false, got me threatened and “chilled”.
Now I just don’t care who wins, loses, goes broke, whatever. The meangirls won again. Not sure _what_ they won, but, they can crow about it on social media if it makes them feel good about themselves, I suppose.
Ms Nina, I would welcome screenshots of the harassment you suffered and the threats you received.
Since I’ve been following #notchilled since it started and I haven’t missed any tweets yet, I would really love to see some evidence of your claim.
Wow. I’ve been following #notchilled and haven’t read one questionably threatening post from anyone other than one or more published by Pubnt. Please provide specific quotes, etc. to back up your claim. Thanks.