This week I’ve been cleaning house, on Goodreads that is. I’d been getting a lot of requests to befriend people and I think, why? they aren’t people who have read or are even “to-read”ing my book. They just seem to want to rack up friends. At first I said yes to everyone thinking that would somehow be a good thing for my book, but now every time I log on , I see these stranger’s updates. Things like “J. Johnson is now friends with Keir.” Or “Mandi liked Bookhead’s Review of “Mein Kampf.” And I think, oh nice for them, but I don’t know either one of them and I assume their friendship is as phony as ours and really I only care about what’s going on with a few people that I know or cyber-know (one has hair made of meat). So last night I decided to keep it rill. I cut all the fat –the only people I’m friending are people I know or people whose work I admire–or pretend I admire. And I’m thinking of leaving the Author Program, too, because I want to write nasty things to people who give my book low ratings and I don’t want them to know it’s me. (Like “Sorry, I didn’t write the book for half-wits.”)
You know?

There’s a website called Goodreads.com thats just like Facebook or Myspace (I guess, I’m not on those) except it’s all about books. You can befriend people and join groups, etc… but the feature that I like best is that you can catalog every book you’ve ever read and rate it. The bad part is that I’m in their author program so my ratings come up with my name, so I won’t list any book that I am not willing to cough up 5 stars to in the event that someone I rate low will meet me at a party and collar me and say, “what the hell were those 3 stars about?”

I think you should all join and be my friends and then give my book five stars, okay?