Got a very nice letter indeed from the author. It was extremely long - too long to reproduce here - but made me really think he's not an anonymous and annoying author, but a tremendously nice man.

I get a lot of author spam and fake friend requests and if I got up feeling rested and had a nice cup of coffee I will probably just delete them. BUT once in a while, I didn't sleep well, the cat clawed me awake, the coffee has grinds floating in it and the truck has leaked oil over the place again got a new vehicle last Friday as truck finally died. This may improve the mornings. and I tend to let that annoyance spill over onto the first thing that pisses me off. In this case the friend request from an author with no books or reviews who didn't read my profile which is about this sort of thing.

I only wrote "See comments. Not a spammer" and then what I wanted in the comments, it was a way of trying to get around the ban on writing about the author but not the book. I don't think it is a fair policy at all. Not considering that my only other banned review - on my profile - was about spam and the author had been spamming people for 2 years but I wasn't allowed to say any of that.. The author reported it to GR and it got banned. There you go. What I wrote was against the ToS whether or not I agree with them.

But I didn't really stay pissed-off for very long.

I have a bookshop, I have quite a few local authors and they make all kind of mistakes in publishing their books and trying to promote them. They don't see the books as products, no different from a can of beans, they see them as their babies. But to a retailer, they are just products we have to sell in order to pay the rent and although we've rather had the carpet pulled out from under our feet with Amazon etc, we do love our 'beans' and the 'cooks' who make them and want to put their cans in the window and shout out, hey look what we've got, they're made locally and the best thing since sliced bread, come and try! All indie booksellers feel like this about locally-written books. And all books are locally-written somewhere. Online everyone is our neighbour, there is no distance. And all of this has got tortuous enough. Not a good writing day today.

So, I've withdrawn the stars, he's off the nasty shelf and I plan on reading this book some time. Will I give an honest review? If it's good, yes. If I don't like it, no I'll just keep quiet. For a change.

To sum up, I hope the author finds people who read his genre to review his books and I wish him all the very best. What a nice man!

So since this review has no stars and is banned, it won't show up at all on the book. That's probably best.