Goodbye

Dear Everyone,

Hello.  It’s been a long time since I’ve posted on this blog and I’ve spent days trying to figure out how to word this post.  Sometimes I write up a long post giving lots of details, then I scrap it and write an alternative quick post that seems rushed and not detailed enough.  No words seem right in putting across how I feel without hurting somebody’s feelings out there.  So here goes…

Blogging on Happymeerkatreviews has been fun and not so fun at the same time.  I’ve met so many wonderful people and had such amazing support from the blogging community I didn’t know existed when I started my blog.  But along the way some bad things happened.  If I’m honest I was super naïve entering the realm of reviewing and blogging and more importantly reviewing on request.

When I entered the wordpress blogging world, I’ll be honest, I’d never really read an indie book, so I never knew such a community and plethora of books existed.  And although I found and read many new books by authors I’d never heard of, I also encountered the dark side of the indie world, the authors who’s books were written terribly and who had bad attitudes towards people like me, reviewers.

I won’t go into more detail, it’s easy enough to find the stories on my blog of what happened, but after going through one of the most stressful experiences of my life I finally decided to put an end to the thing that was causing all the stress…this blog.

I’ve loved blogging here and while it’s sad to say goodbye to my happymeerkat avatar (I’ve grown fond of how cute it looks), I’m also filled with a sense of relief.  The last weeks and months of this blog had been my hardest.  I’d experienced what can only be termed as online bullying.  On top of that I’ve felt a distinct divide between ‘bloggers’ and ‘authors’ with me firmly on the ‘bloggers’ side despite the fact I’ve been a writer (unpublished) since I was a child.

I’ve felt like my blog became a service to authors and not in the good way of working together I review your book and you’ll promote my site kind of way.  Instead I’ve had more and more authors taking advantage of my reviewing and seeing me as a way of getting reviews for their book without care and respect for the human being they are contacting.  In recent times authors have contacted me for reviews and never linked back to my blog or thank me later, DM me on twitter about reviews for books which are innapporiate for my site (child friendly + I don’t do twitter review requests) and had authors contacting me for reviews even when I slap a massive ‘NOT ACCEPTING BOOK REVIEW REQUESTS’ on my contact page (- not cool by the way, to still contact me, big lack of respect in that behaviour and an author I’m unlikely to ever read or recommend to others for doing that 😡 .)  I’ve even had some people lifting my website’s banner and using it online for profit without asking me if it’s ok to do – I would probably have said yes but a banner’s still my own design and it would have been nice to be asked 😦 .

The whole thing got too much for me and although there are many wonderful and nice and courteous authors out there…I’ve met a growing number who are not.  Even in the last few weeks in lieu of posting here I’ve been reading blog posts online that have even mentioned a new trend/school of thought where authors shouldn’t thank reviewers – yes, odd!

So I’ve come to the difficult decision that I’m saying Goodbye to Happymeerkatreviews.  It’s been a wonderful growing experience and the good times have certainly outweighed the bad but sometimes you have to make a difficult decision but the right one.

Will the website be deleted?  No, I’ve put too much time and effort into this blog to delete it all, so you can still look back at old blog posts and read my reviews and poetry and other stuff.

Will I be leaving the blogosphere entirely?  I don’t think so.  I’m sure you’ll find me around in one form or another.  And I’m certainly not going to give up on reading the blogs I follow.  But I’ll no longer be posting on Happymeerkatreviews.  Whether this extends to my Products site too I haven’t decided yet but I haven’t posted there in a while so I’m not sure.

Thank you for all being such wonderful supporters of my blog.  Thank you to everyone who has followed Happymeerkatreviews from the very start to it’s very end.  I’m sad to be leaving this blog but I have so many new things going on in my life that it’s the right thing to do fro me, and ultimately we must all do what is right for ourselves and our wellbeing.  Anyone who wants to contact me about my blog or me can do so at the following email address: thehkat@yahoo.co.uk 

Thank you for all your support and I wish you all the best ❤ 🙂

-C thehappymeerkat