New (to Me) Scam on Goodreads

I love connecting with people on Goodreads, especially people who have read or want to read my books. That said, I am extremely careful when people randomly want to friend me and have brand-new accounts.  Yes, someone could have read my book, seen that I connect with people through Goodreads, and created an account for that purpose, but if that were the case, s/he would most likely pass the test I give all new friend requests. (Plus, anyone can follow me and see my reviews and new books. Friends can no longer message people privately through Goodreads, so it's odd someone would want to do that when my profile is public.)

First, I check out the person's account. Does s/he have book reviews? How many? Are any of them written and not just star ratings? Do the written reviews sound AI-generated?  Few reviews that are mostly star-only or AI-generated, and a high percentage of 5-star ratings send off warning bells.

Goodreads also allows you to see the activity of members--which is good. Someone who has be randomly friending indie authors (exclusively) and sending them similar-sounding messages is another warning flag. 

Enter "Rose" who recently wanted to connect with me. As usual, it was a brand new account only trying to friend indie authors. Where Rose stood out was that she began messaging the people she friended (publically, so she must not realize everyone can see these) and giving the her e-mail request while asking for a copy of the author's book. The messages were almost identical, but contained what sounded like an AI-generated specific question about a book the authors had written. 

I wondered what Rose's game was. Obviously, she gives you her e-mail address and wants you to reply to her. Giving a scammer access to your direct e-mail is bad on its own, but this seemed like a lot of work just for an e-mail address. So, I dug a little more.

It seems the biggest problem is that you are giving them a copy of your book without any restrictions. Regardless of the protections you have on it, once they get a full copy, they can hack those away and distribute or sell it illegally. They could even use AI to translate it into another language without your knowledge and make money of it themselves. Apparently, this has been a long-running scam on Goodreads. I'm not sure how they missed me until now.

Anyway, Kindle+ (formerly KU) is a relatively easy way to get your books to the masses. If someone insists on a copy of your book, tell them when your next free promotion is, and let them download it from Amazon. Needless to say, this person 

Goodreads Review Groups for Indie Authors

In a post from March, I wrote an overview of how an Indie author could increase the number of reviews s/he has. Most methods of getting reviews cost money, but joining a Goodreads group is one free method. 

WARNING: There is at least one Goodreads Group that is solely marketing for a borderline scam outside site, Revvue. How Goodreads continues to allow this group to exist when every post by the moderators pretty much tells you to go to the Revvue website and use their service is beyond me. Avoid any Goodreads Group that solely exists to direct you to other websites. These violate Goodreads' terms of service. I suspect the moderators of this group are vigilant about making sure negative posts about Revvue are removed or are deflected. 

I have been a member of many "review" groups on Goodreads since 2014. Some are good. Others have absent moderators, which causes them to turn into a spam board. I don't think you can even message moderators to draw their attention to issues anymore. The Reviewers, The Reviews Initiative for Indie Books, Genre Specific Review Groups, Christian Fiction Fans, GOOD REVIEWS, and Read 4 Review are all groups I've joined that no longer have active moderators. You can still join them (or at least most of them), but the rules that prevented people from spamming everyone are not necessarily being enforced. That means that you need to be extra careful if you want to use these--and you also should be aware that although desperate authors will join and post in any group, most readers who are real readers and not scammers tend to flee when the rules stop being enforced.

The groups below have somewhat strict spamming rules and do not just allow you to post your book and hope you get reviews. You must follow the rules, for example, some groups prohibit AI-generated work, and you must post any self-promotion in the appropriate threads. 

The group I am most active in is Review Group. I joined this group in 2014 and, within this past year, joined the moderators of this group. Obviously, I am biased, but I feel we do a good job keeping the group focused and working together. Unlike many of the above-mentioned groups where you are posting and praying someone will see your book and review it, Review Group is primarily focused on review exchanges. There is a one-for-one list where members (who can be authors or readers) review a book on the list and, in exchange, can have a book they have written added to it. If they are just a reader, they can just state that when they post their review. There is also our standard rounds, where ten people join with one of their books. Each person reviews four people (who have never reviewed him/her) and gets four reviews for his/her book from people they have never reviewed. We are going to be experimenting with this format and reducing the number of reviews and the number of people in each group soon to see if it will be easier to fill groups. A lot of time and mental work go into creating these groups, and as they fill, it becomes more difficult to fit people into the group if they are not newer participants. 

Similar to Review Group, I am in the Review / Write / Read Club (Indie & Self-Published) group. I am only a member of this group, but this group shares members/moderators with Review Group, so it operates on a similar basis. There is a one-to-one reading list that works like the one above. There are also "rounds" which are small 3-5 person versions of the 10-person rounds mentioned above, but you only get one review and give one review regardless of round size. Although moderating is still time intensive, these rounds are easier to form and fill because you are only looking for a conflict with two people. (You have to keep eight people from conflicting with each member of the ten-person rounds.) Unique to this group is also the "Chain." This is a group where you only have to make sure you don't have a conflict with the person above you in the chain. All of these groups are basically give a review to one person and get a review from someone else format. 

The other group that I haven't participated in much, but it is actively moderated, is Readers Sharing Reviews. This group connects readers to free or low-cost books. It allows authors to self-promote their books as long as they follow the rules. There is usually a newsletter that gets delivered to your message box and highlights a few books. There are also occasional polls. This is a post-and-pray group, but it seems to actually have active readers instead of just authors trying to sell their books.

Do Not Upgrade to Audacity 4

 Audacity has been pushing its new upgrade on me for a couple of months. I usually put off upgrading in the middle of a project, but I grew tired of the prompts. When I asked Google if I was going to have to relearn a new system, I was informed that I could choose to use "classic" mode and everything would be the same. My life has been nothing but misery since.

You can, as Google says, choose "classic" mode in the beginning, which gives you a similar layout, but it does not give you the same features. I just need basic functionality to record my books for ACX, but that has been blown to the wayside. For example, the options to rerecord over parts of your project you are dissatisfied with are worded differently and offer different functionality.

Then, there is the fact that Audacity 4 will not open a file from Audacity 3. This means that when you try to open one, you have to "convert" it into 4. You will now have two files (labeled about the same) in your folder. You can no longer work on 3 in Audacity 4. This means that as I started editing in Audacity 4 and getting more and more frustrated with the awfulness of it, I could not go back until the 3 chapters of work I had converted and worked on were finished, and I was willing to never want to work on those again. That is where I am at now--trying to finish these so I can roll back.

The next major issue I had was that keyboard hotkeys for cut, copy, and paste do not work. Instead of getting more hotkeys for things I use all the time, like "Amplify" and "Measure RMS," I got keyboard shortcut non-functionality. I have tried shutting it down and restarting without any change. Now, perhaps if I take the time to go in and specifically program those as hotkeys, they might work--but why in the world would I waste that time when there is no guarantee they will work all the time every time if I do it?  

The transfer into Audacity 4 also made my soundtrack do weird things. It added pops and made this odd loud/soft/loud alteration that was all within my RMS goals, but sounded off to me. I don't want to go back and mess with this, which I estimate would take an additional 80 hours of work per chapter.

Recording and rerecording were also painful. When I record over something, the original does not have to be silenced, but it records in a separate clip directly over the top of where you want it. Instead of stopping as soon as you get to the end of the area where you can record, it then begins recording over things you do not want to lose. Getting rid of these recordings is something I haven't figured out how to do. Twice now, I have clicked ctrl-z to undo something and ended up with a black screen--my entire project is erased. This means I get to (1) start over or (2) close without saving and go back to my last save point. Then there was the fact that prior versions only let me record new at the end of a clip or after highlighting a center part of the clip. Now, I have found myself recording at the beginning of a clip when I did not want to and was originally working on the end. I have no clue why it jumped to the beginning before I hit record, but I lost data because it now records over everything, and I had to rerecord 20 minutes of audio to fix it because it got so messed up.

I can no longer copy and paste silence. Now, I have to click into  the Generate menu and click "Silence." Then I have to adjust how much silence- in other words, something that was once easy to execute through a couple of quick keyboard hotkey commands has now become a time-consuming process. 

I used to be able to highlight a section and listen only to that section--no more. The section keeps playing. This is extremely irritating because if I am listening for something specific and I want to see if it is in the highlighted section, I now have to make sure to stop the recording from continuing. I also can't tell if something is in that section when they are short because the playback continues outside the box, and I am too slow to stop it. I have to have my attention divided between listening to what I am looking for and stopping it where I want. 

There are a lot of positive reviews of Audacity 4 online, but I can't understand it. All the safety mechanisms to keep you from accidentally screwing up your work are gone. All the hotkey commands that made working quicker are nonfunctional. And, you have the chance of randomly losing all your work completely. I don't have time to screw around with learning this or waiting for an update to fix things. Don't make my mistake and upgrade.