Although we try to give our authors good/favorable reviews, it must be noted that we make no claim to and there is no guarentees of a positive review given by our reviewers.

Furthermore, we do not proofread.

What they have is a policy of demanding money in order to get a review, and that review is guaranteed to be a good review.

Which means that they aren’t publishing reviews, they’re selling advertising space. 

Perhaps someone should point out to them that under FTC rules, they are required to post a statement on all such posts to indicate that the post is a paid placement.

This blog is a collaborative blog written by a group of individuals. This blog accepts forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation.The compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog. That content, advertising space or post may not always be identified as paid or sponsored content.The owner(s) of this blog is compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. Even though the owner(s) of this blog receives compensation for our posts or advertisements, we always give our honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experiences on those topics or products. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the bloggers’ own. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider or party in question.This blog does contain content which might present a conflict of interest. This content may not always be identified.About Chick Lit Girls ReviewsChick Lit Girls reviews books in a honest and forthcoming manner.  Although we try to give our authors good/favorable reviews, it must be noted that we make no claim to and there is no guarentees of a positive review given by our reviewers.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/goodreads.com

How insulting can a self-description be??

I’ve been on Goodreads since 2009 and have never encountered a dearth of intelligent and articulate women posters there.

For example, the AP, NYT and WSJ are ok with iTunes, but omit the exclamation mark in Yahoo!’s name

Just typing that made me feel absolutely filthy and this is just a blog comment.

These folks need to work on that aspect of their operation.

Based on the actual response of this particular operation I’m inclined to suspect them of being worthless scammers and recommend nuking from orbit.

However, (while I personally love and cherish a well-written scathing review) there seems nothing intrinsically problematic with publishing only good reviews. It makes your publication a ‘recommendation site’ rather than a ‘review site’; but there isn’t any obvious problem with providing recommendations-only for people who want to find something to read, rather than survey the present state of a genre or wallow in their favorite german emotion in front of a bad review.

Similarly, if you attract a high volume of aspirants, charging for the reviewer’s time and effort hardly seems intrinsically problematic.

That said(and as appears may have happened in this case), it isn’t rocket surgery to imagine how ‘only writing about stuff worth reading’ and ‘charging a fee for the service of consideration’ could pretty easily morph into ‘pay for a puff piece on our site!’. That wouldn’t be obviously illegal or anything; but it’d nuke the site’s credibility among people looking for books pretty quickly, hence the desire to shut up the critic, and preserve a public appearance of impartiality(that makes their shill-jobs worth buying), while still selling shill-jobs…