A writer has been dropped by her agent and publisher after she posted a slew of reviews from fake accounts on book-ranking site Goodreads.
Cait Corrain, whose book Crown of Starlight was due to be published in May next year, posted on X to apologise for her behaviour. “I boosted the rating of my book, bombed the ratings of several fellow debut authors, and left reviews that ranged from kind of mean to downright abusive,” she tweeted.
Corrain’s US publisher Del Rey, an imprint of Penguin Random House, stated on Monday that it was “aware of the ongoing discussion” about the author. Crown of Starlight “is no longer on our 2024 publishing schedule”, it said. Though it was initially unclear whether this meant that the book’s publication was being postponed or cancelled, both Del Rey and Corrain’s UK publisher Daphne Press later said that neither Crown of Starlight nor the second book in Corrain’s contract will be published by them.
Corrain’s former agent, Rebecca Podos, announced on Monday that she will no longer be working with Corrain. “Cait and I will not be continuing our partnership moving forward. I deeply appreciate the patience of those directly impacted by last week’s events as I worked through a difficult situation,” she wrote in a post on X.
Canadian author Xiran Jay Zhao first brought attention to Corrain’s suspicious activity on Wednesday last week when they identified a number of accounts that had up-voted Crown of Starlight and left one-star reviews on other debut novels.
They posted a 31-page Google document containing screenshots of the activity of a number of accounts, with usernames including “Chantal B” and “Oh Se-Young”, suspected to have been created by Corrain. Many of the books given one-star ratings were written by people of colour, including So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole, scheduled for release in January 2024, and To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods, by fellow Del Rey author Molly X Chang, which will be released next April.
Corrain tweeted that they had negatively ranked Chang, Cole, Danielle Jensen and Bethany Baptiste, adding that “it’s possible there are a couple of other authors” affected.
“I can’t believe Del Rey spent half a million dollars on this when they could have spent half a million dollars on anything else. Sorry not sorry,” read one of the review screenshots of Chang’s book, posted by a user called Brett Spinner. The review was liked by Chantal B.
“There’s something extra despicable about using clearly POC [people of colour] names in the fake accounts to upvote every negative review on POC books so the top ones are all 1 star and 2 star. Like what in the yellow face,” Zhao tweeted. Many of the accounts linked on the document Zhao shared have now been deleted.
A review of Corrain’s book, posted under the username Oh Se-Young, called Corrain a “f*cking genius”.
“I love this book so much that I regret reading it because now nothing on my TBR sounds interesting by comparison,” it stated.
Corrain claimed a friend was responsible for fake reviews, and shared several screenshots of a conversation in which the author berates “Lilly” for posting the ratings. Corrain later admitted that the screenshots were fabricated, and that the “friend” was “nonexistent”.
In an X post, Corrain said that they had been “fighting a losing battle against depression, alcoholism and substance abuse” and changed medication in late November. They explained that on 2 December they “suffered a complete psychological breakdown” and created “roughly six profiles on Goodreads”. Along with two profiles created “during a similar but shorter breakdown in 2022”, they used the accounts to post the negative reviews of other books and to boost their own.
Corrain said that they felt “no ill will” towards the targeted authors. “It was just my fear about how my book would be received running out of control,” they added. “I’m sorrier than you’ll ever know.”
The intended purpose of Goodreads is for readers to track books they have read and share their thoughts with an online community. The website’s community guidelines state: “Artificially inflating or deflating a book’s ratings or reputation violates our rules. This includes activity like creating fake accounts to manipulate book ratings, purchasing reviews, and incentivising votes, likes, or other actions on Goodreads.” However, “review-bombing”, a term that refers to when users negatively review books they have not read, often before the book is even out, has increasingly become an issue – and one that can have real-world consequences.
In June 2023, Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert, decided not to go ahead with the publication of a novel that had been due to come out in February 2024 after she received hundreds of negative ratings on Goodreads, criticising her for setting the book in Russia, which was viewed as insensitive to Ukrainian readers.
Following Corrain’s admission on X, Goodreads confirmed that the reviews from the author’s various accounts had been removed, and said in a statement that it “takes the responsibility of maintaining the authenticity and integrity of ratings and protecting our community of readers and authors very seriously.”
