Over at my day job, I wrote a piece about Anne Rice and others signing a petition urging Amazon to stop allowing anonymous reviews. The issue isn’t negative reviews, it’s trolls using the anonymity to personally attack writers.

I’m not the type to worry about bad reviews — in fact, I think the idea of reviews at all for fiction is sort of pointless in our modern age of book previews. I suppose nonfiction is a different story, but that’s a different post.

Attacks on writers — or other readers or reviewers, for that matter — is a real problem, as the article points out. There’s a little too much nastiness on Amazon and Goodreads, and it gets in the way of meaningful commentary/discourse/discussion, as when Rice was attacked in a writing advice forum.

As with anything else online, there are multiple sides to the story, and probably multiple sites telling each side of the story, but the article will give you a general idea of the battle lines. It would be nice if someone called a truce.