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Re: Bookhabit
Well, thank you for taking the time to respond to this. It’s always interesting to read the other side of the story, as it were, though I think you’ve misconstrued a few of the points I’ve made.
With regards to the book rankings, I’m not annoyed that you changed the system, I’m annoyed that it was changed after voting had closed. You were obviously watching things closely and I guess what I’m struggling to understand is why you didn’t fess up two, three, fourteen days ago with how things were going to work behind the scenes. We have this motto of sorts at work,
Technical problems require technical solutions
, and it seemed to me that you were trying to solve a technical problem (the system allowing gaming of the voting system) using a social engineering solution (we just won’t tell people what the formulae is until after the fact).No matter how you want to spin or or what your reasoning is, that bothers me. Because you’ve essentially changed the rules of the game after the last goal has been scored. If I did that at work – broadcast a policy change after it’d been implemented – I’d get raked across the coals all the way up to senior management. It’s not about what you did or why, it’s about when and how.
You’re also being a bit contrary; saying removing votes didn’t affect users when obviously it did, and we’re a case in point. From this end, we had no way of knowing what was going on; we thought we were doing well, because your system was set up to trick us into thinking that. What was the point of having a leaderboard if you knew you were going to completely restructure the voting? Look, I’m sure you didn’t have any malicious intent but from this angle it looks like either massive incompetence (to let the ‘bad’ votes in in the first place when you obviously knew you were going to get rid of them and had a way of filtering them out) or deliberate shifty behaviour (cue conspiracy theories).
The fact that you obviously don’t see why this bothers me (
If rankings were genuine it wouldn’t matter when they were pulled out.
)… well, bothers me. Because it does matter when they were pulled out; they should’ve been pulled out live to give authors a truthful indication of their positions. And I’m sorry you can’t see why that is.We are looking to give our writers help to make them successful. Strangely, this costs us money.
I have to say, that as someone who’s been involved in fandom a lot I don’t have a huge amount of sympathy here, I’m afraid. I know a lot of people who run fanfic archives – ones much bigger than Bookhabit – who do it all out of their own pocket. And sure, that’s not a business model (because fandom’s not about money), but even still; I know you can provide a comparative service on the sort of pocket change earned by a high school student. (And if you think you can’t; I’d suggest investigating a bit more…)
We are also more than happy for you to put up your book for free and sent you an email confirming this when you first uploaded your book, but it just couldn’t happen while you were in the competition to keep things fair between all the books. I guess you forgot this.
No I didn’t, but that’s also not really what I’m talking about.
I thought reading your blog on the long tail that you understood what we were trying to do.
I do understand. I just don’t think the way you’re doing it is beneficial to me personally as an author. And it’s my prerogative to make that call in an open market. /shrugs