This installation of the newsletter features something different. This is a story I started reporting a year ago. It took a substantial amount of work to get sources to speak to me on the record and more to confirm information. There were twists and turns and it even got killed at one point for various reasons. I held on to it and tweaked it and worked it knowing it would fit here. This is a long story. It’s not an interview. And I had a lot of help with it along the way — especially from friends making sure I didn’t leave 1 million typos after reworking it multiple times.
One of the main things I wanted to get correct in this story was how it treated the community I write about. The other stories that appeared about this community felt patronizing.
I hope to do more of this in the future and offer a place for other reporters to do something similar or different. I want to make this a newsletter that shares smart work, especially stories and essays that couldn’t find another home. If you have any ideas, don’t hesitate to reach out.
A tweet from @Draggerofliars went out on January 3, 2023 at 11:19 P.M.
“Author Susan Meachen died from suicide 2 years ago. Except it turns out she didn’t.”
A pair of screenshots from Facebook were attached. They tried to explain the mystery of Susan Meachen, a self-published author of romance novels who lived in Polk County, Tennessee, and supposedly committed suicide in 2020 due to her involvement in the online romance novel world but mysteriously resurfaced nearly three years later with an online announcement.
What was supposed to be a tweet criticizing someone for lying soon became an internet sensation. Since it went up, the tweet has been shared by more than 5.6 thousand people alone, not including the countless number of people who reshared other posts about it, and stories about Meachen and the tweet ran in papers across the globe and in publications like Slate. Along with it, a world of independent authors working in the shadows of the mainstream publishing and media worlds came out from the darkness and into the focus of more people.
But first, Meachen.
Meachen rose from the dead. Or rather, she rose from an Internet death to become a villain, a pariah, a hero, and a star. Two years prior to her resurrection, Meachen committed suicide. At least that’s what her family told the world on September 10, 2020.
“Author Susan Meachen left this world behind Tuesday night for bigger and better things. If she owed you something and it’s in my realm of getting it to you let me know tis [sic] account will close in 24 hours. She had a case of books and a few in her office if they belong to you please let us know so we can resolve this issue. She had 3 in editing and I will be collecting those also. Please leave us alone we have no desire in this messed-u industry [sic].”
In the wake of the news, the online community of authors who live in the independent romance publishing world, affectionately called Romancelandia, came together to donate to her funeral. They wanted to support a fallen friend—someone who inhabited their coterie, who they knew through the usual channels of Facebook groups and chats.
A group of writers altered a project they were working on and dedicated it to Meachen. Their collection of stories celebrated the bully subgenre within romance. The dedication of that collection of “Paranormal Bully Romance,” called The Bully King Anthology, reads:
For Susan Meachen. An author of what she called Perfectly Flawed Romances. The world is a little less bright without her. Words can hurt, but they don’t have to. Words can also heal. Let’s keep bullying where it belongs—in fiction.
After her death, Meachen vanished into the Tennessee earth. Her closest confidants didn’t get to say goodbye. Then she rose from the dead.
Autumn 2020
Connie Ortiz’s phone kept pinging as she sat in the doctor’s office. What the hell, she thought as her phone begged for her attention. She glanced at the screen. The messages said something similar: “Is it true? Is it true about Susan?”
Ortiz didn’t know what the messages were about. Confused, she finished her appointment. She left the doctor’s office, checked her phone again and found the Facebook post. Susan died. Suicide.
Ortiz had known Susan Meachen for three years. She’d become her personal assistant. They’d never met in person, but they talked on the phone daily. They exchanged birthday and Christmas gifts. They shared secrets.
“I'm supposed to know everything that's going on,” Ortiz told me about that day in 2020. “But I didn’t. I was just shocked. And I found out like everybody else.”
Ortiz reached out to Meachen’s family. She wanted to know what happened. She hoped to go to the funeral. She asked if she could drive from her home in Philadelphia to Benton, Tennessee, where Meachen lived with her family. She wanted to say goodbye to her friend.
Ortiz met Meachen through the online book world dedicated to independent authors who specialize in e-books categorized as smut or romance. This particular world of authors is a place of deep connections, hyper-specific sub-genres, and writers who aspire to publish bestsellers while understanding that their stories don’t sit with the gatekeepers of Big Five publishing.
But e-book sales are not miniscule. According to the research and analytics data nonprofit WordsRated, e-books accounted for 191 million sales in 2020—a drop from the e-reader boom of the mid-2010s, when sales peaked in 2013 at 242 million. Today, the e-book world is a thriving marketplace. But it’s also difficult, as with any artistic endeavor, to make a living. Most e-books sell for less than $3, and the authors don’t get all the royalties for those sales, with only a percentage going to the author after costs like delivery and taxes. Amazon, for instance, says writers can earn up to 70 percent of royalties if a self-published author releases an e-book and sells it between $2.99 and $9.99 and it’s sold to someone in one of the markets covered, such as the United States and England. With all of that, though, Amazon still takes off for the digital delivery of the e-book and taxes, so there isn’t much left for an author unless they sell thousands of copies of their books. Barnes and Noble says it gives writers 70 percent royalties on its platform as well. But then it’s about beating the algorithm of the millions of other authors publishing and promoting books online to get anyone to shell out a few dollars once, let alone a few times, for an unknown writer. Most writers have other jobs to pay the bills to add on top of the workload of being an independent writer, which includes writing thousands of words a month and monitoring online communities, both of which are full-time jobs of their own. It’s not much of a livelihood, but there is a thriving community.
An avid reader, Ortiz first discovered Meachen while working as a police officer and hunting for more books on her Kindle. She began devouring one e-book after another, then she’d look up the authors and follow them on social media. She’d reach out to tell them how much she enjoyed their work. In turn, the authors invited her into their inner circle of close readers, who test-read new stories and help authors set up reading groups, chats, and other promotional events (which were almost always online). A major part of being in that coterie meant that authors asked Ortiz to review their books, because Amazon’s algorithm requires good reviews from trusted reviewers to push works into more prominent positions. Ortiz enjoyed it.
“That would keep me sane from my police work and my everyday life,” Ortiz told me.
Ortiz came into the independent author world brimming with excitement for the community she’d found. One connection led to another. Each author and book transported her to some new realm of the Internet. While reviewing a book for a prominent indie author, she joined a private chat and Ortiz says she started talking with Meachen’s personal assistant at the time. Ortiz mentioned that her son had recently passed away and that she was “really hurting.” Meachen’s then-assistant had recently lost a brother, and the two connected. During their discussions, Ortiz claims it came up that Meachen had apparently tried to commit suicide. According to Ortiz, Meachen became depressed after writing one of her novels and allegedly attempted to put a bullet in her head.
Romancelandia warned Ortiz to stay away from Meachen, but she wanted to help. When Meachen resurfaced on Facebook TK MONTHS after the suicide attempt in 2017, Ortiz reached out and asked her if she wanted her to “pimp” her book, which means drumming up interest by sending it out to other authors and sharing it on various Facebook groups and message boards. Meachen said yes. After that, Ortiz became her new personal assistant. She organized Meachen’s Facebook Group and worked on selling her books.
At the same time, Ortiz says Meachen became attached to her. They talked daily. Ortiz became not only a close friend to Meachen, but also, as Ortiz recalls, a lifeline.
What Ortiz gathered was that Meachen needed a way to snap out of her writing fits, because Meachen would become consumed by her stories. She told Ortiz that she became the people she was writing about. She couldn’t come out of the trance, and she needed Ortiz to pull her out of the hypnotic state.
From 2017 until her death in 2020 , Meachen wrote and self-published 14 novels. She was productive and prolific, but none of these novels made her famous.
And then, the text messages appeared on Ortiz’s phone. Out of nowhere, Susan Meachen exited Romancelandia and life. Ortiz knew nothing about it.
Ortiz thought she was different. She wasn’t part of the industry— she was a friend. No—she was family. She asked Meachen’s daughter to attend the funeral, but she was told no, and that “nobody from the book world is allowed because she was cremated.”
It may have seemed like the end, but that was only the beginning of Meachen’s story. Ortiz had gathered parts of her life from their discussions, but the whole story could and would never have come out if it weren’t for the tweets posted three years later. Romancelandia would find itself in the spotlight alongside Meachen.
Meachen dropped out of high school in the ninth grade. She married and arrived in Romancelandia while spending endless days alone at home while her husband was away working as a long-haul trucker. She devoured romance novels. She started a family and began writing her own books. She became a fixture in the community, which grounded her and gave her a sense of place. Speaking to The New York Times in January 2023 after the controversy surrounding her resurrection, she described the romance community as “an escape, a timeout, a break from everyday reality.”
But with every great escape comes consequences.
Meachen suffers from mental illness. She told the Times—and her therapist confirmed with the paper—that she has bipolar disorder and had tried to commit suicide in the past. (Meachen did not comment for this story. “Not interested in any more interviews,” she wrote in an email.) Her Facebook fan page references stays in psychiatric facilities with its title: The Ward.
Meachen grew addicted to the community. She felt the pull and the power of feeding into the online discourse, and the high of self-promotion. Soon, it took over her life. Her husband, Troy Meachen, told the Times that his wife had periods of mania and psychosis; sometimes when he’d come home, he’d find his wife embodying the characters she was writing about. Meachen once told Ortiz that her book Chance Encounters, which deals with child sex trafficking and drugs, was about her. “She was one of those kids,” Ortiz said. “She met a man that fell in love with her and he took her away from that world and the man died from cancer and she couldn't deal with it. While she was writing the book, she got so depressed that she put a bullet in her head."
But, like anything with Meachen, nothing seems to add up. I couldn’t confirm the bullet in the head story or the sex trafficking and drugs. One source said Meachen was “suicidal” but then, like most sources on this story, dropped off when I asked for specification.
Writing romance novels created a spiral that fed into itself. Each new story brought new comments, new reviews, and more contact with the outside world. It also brought more critiques and more edits of Meachen’s work, which diminished her soul. And then, she hit rock bottom.
On September 10, 2020, Troy Meachen was away from home hauling chemicals when their 22-year-old daughter found her mother lifeless. Meachen had taken enough Xanax to knock her out. It had come to this. Meachen, who told the Times she had a difficult time separating the real world from the book world and writing would trigger her mania and issues on fan pages would send her spiraling in anger. This was the final act, though. Change needed to happen. She needed the addiction to end. According to the Times, Troy told their daughter to kill off Susan Meachen, the author, and close this chapter of their lives.
“I told them that she is dead to the indie world, the internet because we had to stop her, period,” Meachen told The Times. “She could not stop it on her own. And, even to this day, I’ll take 100 percent of the blame, the accolades, whatever you want to call it.
On Oct. 23, 2020, a Facebook post appeared announcing Meachen’s death. In reality, she left the community for her own sanity.
November 2022
Ortiz kept The Ward running after Meachen’s death. She was in charge of the Facebook group and did her best to keep it up to date and manage her dead friend’s literary presence. But she finally had had enough and needed to move on. On November 5, 2022, Ortiz announced that she could no longer be the administrator of The Ward. Her life had become too hectic. Personal tragedies had taken a toll on her. She announced she was looking for someone to take control:
“I have been considering closing it down but that would not be fair to you. If anyone wants to take over this group please let me know. Susan Meachen worked hard to keep this group going and it would be a disservice to her if I close it…. Just let me know if you want to take over this group.”
Someone named TN Steele replied: “I’ll take it Connie Ortiz. I will overhaul it in hopes that is pleases [sic] you and Susan.”
What no one in the group knew was that TN Steele knew Meachen well. In fact, she knew everything about her, because TN Steele was Meachen. She’d been staying updated on the world. Her family may have killed off Susan Meachen the author, but they couldn’t curb her addiction forever.
Meachen reappeared in Romancelandia on January 2, 2023.
“I debated on how to do this a million times and still not sure if it’s right or not. There’s going to be tons of questions and a lot of people leaving the group I’d guess. But my family did what they thought was best for me and I can’t fault them for it,” Meachen wrote announcing her return to Romancelandia.
“I almost died again at my own hand and they had to go through all that hell again. Returning to The Ward doesn’t mean much but I am in a good place now and I am hoping to write again. Let the fun begin.”
When Meachen announced her return, saying that she was back and “in a good place,” some in Romancelandia assumed this was the plan all along.
“A lot of us think that she faked her death to try to get her books to go viral, to try to get to be a famous author, author Candace Adams told the British tabloid The Sun in January. "But that didn't work, because, frankly, her books are very bad.”
Rumors swirled that Meachen used the money raised for her funeral costs to pay for her daughter’s fall 2020 wedding (a wedding website still exists on The Knot). The assumption was that Meachen faked her suicide because she needed the money, and that maybe her resurrection was intended to become a news story, leading to notoriety and book sales. Being an independent online romance novelist isn’t lucrative.
If gaining short-term fame was the plan, that part of it worked. Meachen became a sensation: news outlets like Slate, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times reported on the small-town writer who rose from the dead and caused a stir on the Internet. The tweets of screenshots from Facebook went viral. Meachen has denied that she planned any of this.
But that's where the story gets murky. People who reached out to Meachen to express their dismay and inquire after the money raised were met with two versions of the truth. And even those versions of the truth were impossible to nail down because there were multiple Meachens on the Internet.
“Honey be mad all you want, look on the internet my name is plastered everywhere,” a Meachen impersonator wrote to someone from Romancelandia in a Facebook message, which was shared with me. “This was all planned out from day one. And now my books will be sold everywhere. I can say my daughter got the money because you have no proof it was me. So go to your community and cry about it all you want.”
Someone impersonating Meachen claimed that Netflix reached out to do a movie, which Netflix told me was not the case. The story grew into multiple conspiracies and the more I reached out to people, the more confused I got. Sources opened up and disappeared. Screenshots of conversations appeared on my phone via text messages. Then there were emails and interviews. What started out as a curiosity about a person and a place on the Internet grew into a sweeping conspiracy plot with characters impersonating characters, people claiming to have called the police. There were fake Facebook and Twitter accounts, but what is reality on the Internet, especially when the main character in the story claimed to die three years before?
As with anything Meachen, the details are difficult to confirm. The more I read about her and the more I tried to understand her, the harder it became to parse fact from fiction. It seems her online persona swallowed her. She entered the belly of the whale like Pinocchio on her own path to finding herself. But instead of learning her lesson, she went deeper into her own mythology, creating her own story, which was something she was adept at doing online. She’d practiced in the past. The one thing the Internet has allowed all of us to do is to create our own person on it. We can curate who we are and make our own origin story or build a whole new life without anyone knowing any better.
As Ortiz says, Meachen showed no fear online. She would never have been bullied. “Susan was never bullied,” Ortiz said. “Susan had a mouth on her that she can get out of anything. She used to protect people who were bullied, but nobody bullied Susan because she wouldn't put up with it.”
But that didn’t fit the plot. Meachen claimed she was bullied by other authors. She posted about it on Facebook before disappearing, “Every day it got to the point I’d rather be dead than to deal with the industry and the people who swear they are friends,” she wrote.
The strong Meachen who took nothing from nobody didn’t fit the story that Meachen wanted to spin. She tried to create a story out of her life and she couldn’t handle all the threads. As Adams told The Sun, Meachen’s novels “don't tend to make very much sense. People say that they kind of confuse them."
When the news of Meachen’s resurrection broke, Romancelandia began to suspect Ortiz had a part to play. They assumed she knew all along. Ortiz says she didn't. And now, she doesn’t know what is and isn't true. Meachen told her all sorts of things, like that she was a kidney patient and on dialysis.
“There were so many things she told me she had that I know now are not true,” Ortiz told me.
When Meachen returned from the dead, people believed Ortiz knew about the fake death, and about the plan to return to Romancelandia. Rumors swirled that she would reap some of the benefits of the big reveal—that she’d be paid as part of the resurrection and the ensuing media storm. Ortiz was practically part of Meachen’s extended family—it would have made sense for her to be involved. But according to Ortiz, none of that is or was true.
“I never got a cent from her,” Ortiz said. “What I was doing was out of the kindness of my heart.”
January 2023
Samantha Gray (which is a pen name) isn’t on Twitter, but screenshots of her Facebook posts are in the tweets by @Draggerofliars.
“We grieved the loss of the woman we considered a friend,” Gray wrote.
And when they hit, they set the social media website alight. The author woke up the next morning to a flood of emails and private messages on Instagram and Facebook with reporters wanting her to comment on the things she said about Susan Meachen.
“I was just in shock that A: the suicide was fake; and B: that she thought she could just jump back into the community without us blinking an eye,” Gray told me. “I had no idea it was going to go viral. Ninety-five percent of our drama stays in our community.”
Gray’s posts brought the world into the Romancelandia bubble. Gray, who spoke on the condition that I not use her real name, is a mainstay in the community. Before she became an indie author in 2015, she didn’t know that the indie author community existed. She didn't know that authors and readers hung out with each other on the Internet, or that authors talked to readers via social media. All she knew was that she loved these books since her grandmother gave her a collection of Silhouette and Harlequin romances, and that she had characters in her head talking to her, talking to each other, and stories to tell. Those stories needed to get out.
A former police officer and paramedic, Gray was out of work and on disability after a bad accident in 2000 led to a series of knee surgeries and a neck surgery. She was searching for something. In 2011, she had another surgery; with her knee propped up and bored “out of my mind,” she couldn’t find anything to read on her Kindle. During that time, Gray wrote two and a half novels “out of sheer boredom.” She sent the books out to friends and family, who were “too supportive.” Gray continued, “In fact, they didn’t want to tell me that I couldn’t write to save my life.” She gave up on writing until 2015, when another story popped into her head and wouldn't leave her.
A Navy Seal had a story to tell about hook-ups he was having. It wouldn’t leave her alone, so she sat down and wrote 85,000 words in a week. At the same time, she was getting into the BDSM genre of romance and couldn’t let her family read what she wrote, so she found beta readers, who read an early draft to help the author untangle any mess they’ve created in their story. One of them told her the story still needed work and introduced Gray to another author to help. After a year and a half of working with the other author on the writing, the story, and the ins and outs of the independent publishing world, the book went out. The other author left the indie publishing world after her husband returned from overseas, but Gray went further down the rabbit hole.
With each subsequent book, Gray gained a stronger following. She’s always been willing to pay forward what she learned, because that’s the kind of community this is: one where everyone is looking out for each other.
The authors work together, read for each other, host events and workshops for one another, and create crossover books and collections. According to people interviewed for this story, members of the community chat regularly. As one person who writes under the pen-name Candace Adams (and who contributed a story to the collection dedicated to Meachen) told me, the authors in Romancelandia “try to help.” Adams said the community often hosts fundraisers to cover the costs of house fires, surgeries, and other unexpected life events.
Another author, Kitty Berry came into the community through a desire to read more. Before becoming a romance author, she was an avid reader of what she calls “chick lit,” which she classifies as Jodi Picoult, Anita Shreve, and Kristin Hannah-esque novels. But she needed something more. Then e-readers came into vogue, giving her a new, ever-expanding library of books she could read. Soon enough, a seismic boom occurred when Amazon launched Kindle in November 2007, allowing almost anyone to publish a book. Then the explosion happened when E. L. James began publishing her Fifty Shades trilogy in 2011. James’ novels started as Twilight fanfiction, then grew into one of the publishing world’s biggest success stories and the best-selling book of its decade. They were also some of the most important works in introducing the mainstream world not only to fanfiction, but to the bubbling community of romance literature growing online.
“[Fifty Shades of Grey] just opened the door for everyone to be able to really do that,” Berry said. “Or people just decided at that point, oh, if she can do this… I think everyone had it in their heads that they were all going to be the next E.L. James.”
Berry had to find the time to write her own novels. When she started, she worked as a special education teacher and had a family to manage. Now her children are grown and out of the house, giving her more time to write and more time to navigate the social media world, which she says has become a vital tool for romance authors to sell their books. She can write a novel every four months; then she formats her own books and does a lot of the graphic work too, saving her money when it comes to production. In Romancelandia, there are cover models, photographers, graphic designers, editors, and other people trying to make money through the side hustle of book publishing. No one wants to be seen as the writer who uses the same stock cover image as someone else or the same cover layout.
“People have this perception that we’re all making the same money as people that have had their books made into movies,” Berry said. “Trust me, we are not.”
Gray receives 70 percent of the sale price of a book sold on Amazon, which she feels justifies going this nontraditional route. But the trade-off is that there are additional hours of work that would be done by a book publisher, like press relations and marketing. Instead, Gray works roughly 14 hours a day between writing, managing her communities, research, networking, and advertising. Plus, there are the book signings and in-person events.
In 2019, Berry launched RomantiConn, a romance author signing convention in Connecticut. Other authors have set up their own events, and Berry, like many of the authors in the community, travels to as many as she can get to and afford, to sell hardcover versions of her e-books and to meet her fans in person.
All of this has made the community feel like family. And as with any family, there are rifts and gripes. There are fights. There are scams and grifts.
“The book world always has drama,” Berry said. “There’s always something going on. There’s been events in the past where people have collected money from authors and then disappeared.”
But, for the most part, the issues live online and take place between clashing personalities.
“There can be quite a few issues with some people,” Gray said. “A lot of it comes out of jealousy or two alpha personalities butting heads, but for the most part, we just block those people and move on. It’s not worth my time and effort to deal with this person because I have all this other stuff to do.”
But when something does happen, the drama rarely spills out of the community. Instead, it’s handled internally, and it’s normally something that can be resolved or moved past. It doesn’t often force someone like Gray to answer the calls of Rolling Stone or the New York Times to set the record straight.
A writer who goes by the name Vanessa Muse, because she doesn’t want to “advertise” that she writes what she has labeled “smut” on her author Facebook page, describes the community as one that is “intelligent and compassionate,” which is why the Meachen situation felt so jarring.
“That’s why people like Meachen can set off such a disruption when they go against the core principles of the community,” Muse wrote in an email. “It’s basically seen as a huge betrayal.”
What Meachen did was take advantage of a group of writers—or so they felt. These are real people who are trying to make their dreams come true. They’re trying to live the life of an author, but also trying to connect with other people who think and feel the same way they do.
“I want to be very clear here: indie authors pour their hearts and souls into writing,” Muse said. “It is a passion for them, as it is to me. However, society tends to be dismissive of the work and creativity that goes into the romance genre industry. I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea that bickering and faking suicide is something that is normal or in any way acceptable in the indie writing community.”
The Internet has no one single creator. The Internet may (falsely) claim that Al Gore said he did, but he didn’t CREATE it. The creators are the people who populate the vast networks that once lived on dial-up modems connecting our computers to the NET via some popping and pinging noises. “You’ve got mail!” would ring out and then there would be chatrooms, a few websites, and then, well, then it all took off once we figured out that our television cables held some magical power and that anyone could create, sell or build anything on the Internet. We downloaded music, started making GIFs before we knew what those were and started uploading endless hours of videos. Along the way, we found cliques and communities. We talked on Instant Messenger and let the world (i.e. our classmates) know all of our feelings with our away messages and profiles. We had Livejournals and Tumblrs. And then, of course the social networks arrived and we connected with old and new friends. We created new communities. And, along the way, we created drama. All of us. Somehow. Some way.
But, what we built was a place, for good and for ill, for anyone to find like-minded people. It has led us astray in some ways (hello QAnon, etc.) and it gave us some real community. Romancelandia was just that. A community. A place where people who once had to hide their “smut” from their parents, friends, co-workers and strangers on the subway could be themselves and revel in their love of stories in genres the mainstream had banished off to a corner in the darkness. Of course there were fights before Susan Meachen killed herself and rose from the dead. And, there will be more. Petty infighting and cliques and jealousy will live on.
What Susan Meachen did was toss a grenade into the community, bringing it unwarranted and unwanted attention. What was once a place for the margins came to the forefront and people began to judge. The stories in Romancelandia are the ones mothers and grandmothers confiscate. But that’s all changing. Sales of Romance novels grew 52 percent in 2022, according to Publisher’s Weekly. You could argue that if sales hadn’t been growing and the community hadn’t continued to surge into the mainstream that Meachen wouldn’t have become another phenomenon. But with the combination of social media and the growing reputation and acceptance of the Romance genre, it was the perfect moment for Romancelandia to explode.
“Sad and challenging books have their place in the world, but there is plenty of room on your bookshelves,” Jamie Greene wrote in Vulture in 2019. “Romance is written to be enjoyed. Romance is a genre overwhelmingly written by and for women, where women’s desires, experiences, and rich inner lives are given value, center stage. It is fun, smart, savvy, increasingly inclusive, and a guaranteed good time.”
Still, somehow, the community continues to fight for mainstream acceptance. Its authors still hide behind pseudonyms, afraid what the people in their personal lives will think about their work or hobby. But maybe that will change. Someday.
“I have read a few other articles about the situation and it’s disheartening to see how some news outlets are very dismissive of the $3 books available on Amazon kindle,” Malevolent Muse wrote in an email. “These are the books in the romance genre that sell. People make a living off of these books. It’s nothing to thumb your nose at. Additionally, the Slate article basically called the community nasty, toxic, claustrophobic, and unprofessional. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
As with anything today, there will always be people trying to exploit the system. Communities on the Internet come and go. There will be conspiracies and theories. There will be the next moment and its star. Then, it will fade. A fad. Disappearing into our consciousness as the news of the next crisis comes to the forefront on the Internet.
When I reached out to Gray in September about Meachen, she was quick to respond that she had too much to do with new book promotions and more going on in the Romance world. Plus, “the Susan story is old news,” Gray wrote back, “and I haven't heard anything about her in months.”
For now, though, the attention Meachen brought wasn’t all her fault and the reaction definitely wasn’t her fault either. The story got out of hand, quickly, and everyone paid the price.