Goodreads will now enforce stricter posting guidelines, promising to “delete content focused on author behavior” when posted on the social network for books.
You can learn more at the site’s review guidelines for readers. The site also revised its author guidelines to help writers negotiate this new information. Customer care director Kara Erickson wrote more about the new enforcement. Check it out:
We have had a policy of removing reviews that were created primarily to talk about author behavior from the community book page. Once removed, these reviews would remain on the member’s profile. Starting today, we will now delete these entirely from the site. We will also delete shelves and lists of books on Goodreads that are focused on author behavior. If you have questions about why a review was removed, send an email to support [at] goodreads [dot] com. (And to answer the obvious question: of course, it’s appropriate to talk about an author within the context of a review as it relates to the book. If it’s an autobiography, then clearly you might end up talking about their lives. And often it’s relevant to understand an author’s background and how it influenced the story or the setting.)
(Via Dear Author)