The Cait Corrain Goodreads Drama Is Heating Up

The Gist:

• Debut author Cait Corrain encounters Goodreads controversy with fake 1-star reviews and review bombs on other authors’ books.

• Cait’s attempts to address the issue on Slack led to tensions and doubts about screenshot authenticity, and a feud involving Bethany Baptiste.

• The situation got worse and caused authors to leave the Slack channel amid allegations of ableism and racism. The true perpetrator is uncertain.

Some people think books are boring, but they’re anything but! And now, the authors behind them are proving to be even more dramatic than the books themselves. After many mysterious review bombs and Goodreads lists, the drama has come to the forefront of a debut authors’ Slack channel, which has made its way onto Twitter.

As the new authors quibble among themselves, readers watch the drama unfold from afar and try to understand what’s happening. So we’re breaking down the tea on the Goodreads drama between Cait Corrain, Bethany Baptiste, and others.

Basically, in early to mid-November, someone made several fake Goodreads accounts to “review bomb” a few 2024 debut books, according to Twitter user Natalie Lief. The accounts gave a bunch of 1-star reviews to books by new authors Danielle Jensen and Molly Chang, among others.

In addition, an account called Tasty Spam put other debut novels under lists with titles like, “Fake Reviews Bad Writing.” One of those authors was Bethany Baptiste, who later had something to say about all this.

Once the authors figured out what was going on, they took the drama to Slack to try to figure out who was causing all the chaos. The one book that got several 5-star reviews was Cait Corrain’s book, so it seems like it all must have been connected.

But on Dec. 6, 2023, debut author Xiran Jay Zhao tweeted: “If you as a debut author are going to make a bunch of fake Goodreads accounts one-star-bombing fellow debuts you’re threatened by can you at least not make it so obvious by upvoting your own book on a bajillion different lists with those same accounts.”

This tweet got people talking again.

Cait eventually came forward with screenshots to prove that her “friend,” Lilly, was the one who review-bombed, not her personally. In the screenshots, Cait gets incredibly mad at Lilly, who apologizes for trying to help. Cait shares the screenshots, along with Lilly’s Discord name while throwing her under the bus.

Even still, many people didn’t believe the screenshots were real. For one, some timestamps say “today,” while others say “yesterday,” which is a strange inconsistency. Also, the heightened drama and Lilly’s now-deleted Discord only add to the mystery of it all. Author Bethany Baptiste took to Twitter to call out the sketchy behavior.

Bethany said, “Debuts have to deal with an albino snake in the hen house,” which one of Cait’s friends in the debut Slack channel then took offense to, calling Bethany ableist and racist. This caused the Slack moderators to lock the #BIPOC and #disability channels as members worried about their private information being shared.

After this, Bethany and several other authors left the Slack channel, and Xiran continued to post support for Bethany. It isn’t clear if Cait did the review bombing herself or if it was a friend, but either way, there’s something shady going on with the debut authors.