How Cait Corrain Ruined Her Life
How to Lose a Publishing Deal in Just a Few Easy Steps!
These days it is not considered rare in the least for authors to find their way to traditional publishing through the practice and networking of fandom and fan fiction. In fact, the romance and fantasy genres are having a very nice little surge of Reylo fan fictions adapted into original works that do quite well among readers of traditionally published books as there is something about that formula that simply makes money, and publishers have noticed. One Reylo who wrote a particularly popular fan fiction hosted on Archive of Our Own (Ao3) found herself living out the dream of so many less lucky fan fiction authors: her book was getting published! She had a deal with Illumicrate (a book subscription service), her advance reader’s copy (ARC) was getting fabulous reviews, and she had obtained blurbs from plenty of other authors and debuts with similar hype around their works. With her advance in hand and her release date just around the corner in 2024, nothing could stop Cait Corrain from wild success. That is…except…
Herself.
Originally writing as “Enterprisingly” on Ao3, Cait’s break-out fan fiction was called Play to Win and featured Rey and Kylo Ren, characters sourced from the ever-popular Star Wars fandom. With an engaging plot and a dedicated fanbase, her success in fan fiction emboldened her to reach further. Unable to successfully query with Play to Win as a manuscript, she went back to the drawing board and wrote what would become Crown of Starlight, a completely new reimagining of the Ariadne and Dionysus myth in a fantasy setting. Combining the skills she honed in fan fiction spheres and the somehow-not-yet-overplayed Greek Myth retelling of the bulk of contemporary fantasy romances these days, Cait was able to mostly successfully rebrand herself as a traditionally published author rather than a filed-the-serial-numbers-off-my-fanfic author (nothing wrong with those btw, we love The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood!).
In a bizarre twist to this “Rags-to-Riches: Fandom Edition” episode, everything Cait had ever wanted, strived for, and finally had in her grasp was sabotaged by the most shocking of people: Cait herself. With a chilling level of dedication, Cait managed to craft at least eight and perhaps over ten separate sockpuppet accounts on the popular book review website GoodReads and use them over the course of nearly eight months to wage a “review-bombing” campaign against other debut authors of 2024 whose books would have been debuting alongside hers. As all of this was going on, rumblings were happening in the whisper networks of debut authors as they desperately sought to determine the source of these “bombings.” Author Akure Phénix wrote on Twitter about their experiences with Corrain’s meddling back in August of 2023, addressing her directly, “You harassed my book on Goodreads until I deleted it. I had no idea who it was and a new one was made. I am still recovering.” Eventually, on the 5th of December of 2023, author Xiran Jay Zhao tweeted out of frustration, clearly aware then who the offending party was and begging them to take action quietly, urging Cait (then unknown to the wider Twittersphere as the culprit) to cease pretending to be a victim in order to not force the victims’ hands to release the receipts.
It was for naught. A 31-page Google Document of screenshots was eventually released by Zhao after Cait failed to come clean, connecting quite a few of the sockpuppet accounts and their suspicious activities along with the smoking gun of Cait’s known account having interacted with the same obscure GoodReads lists and all of Cait’s books receiving five star reviews from the bombers. Of course, this was not simply released to be petty: Cait was still crowing her innocence, claiming that an “unhinged” Reylo was to blame for it all, citing poorly-crafted fake screenshots of Discord conversations with a “Lilly” whose existence could not be confirmed by any current Reylo fandom member who knew Cait in years past. Attempts at distraction were made by Cait’s closest allies, including a strange diversion into accusations against one of the targeted authors for “ableism” while Cait was hidden behind a lock on her Twitter.
With or without Cait, the drama was swirling and questions were pressing. Why did she do this? Why were the majority of her targets people of color? Why did she target debuts from the same publisher as hers? The same agent? Debuts who had written her blurbs!? Who had been ostensibly friends with her!? Was Cait so incredibly threatened by BIPOC debuts that she felt the need to make a sloppy attempt to drag down their book ratings on GoodReads? Was she really convinced that the success of those debuts would mean a lack of success for her own work? These questions were answered…sort of but also not really. In Cait’s apology, accessible from two screenshots of a typed response on her Twitter page, she claims that “Since June 2022” she has been “fighting a losing battle against depression, alcoholism and substance abuse[…]” She claims that in November of 2023, she started a new medication and the result of said change was a complete “psychological breakdown” in December of 2023 which led to the events at current. In no place does she acknowledge that review-bombings were occurring as far back as April of this year, including those that affected Akure Phénix in August. As if to completely avoid any conversation about these incidents, Cait claims that her memories are “fuzzy” (believable if her claims of prolific substance abuse are true) and she provides a blanket statement toward authors she neglected to personally name, claiming that she takes “full ownership of what I did to you as well. I’m sorrier than you’ll ever know.”
She claims that her disappearance from social media in the last few days was not a fragile white woman’s “flounce” (something I have personal experience with) but an attempt to go through “withdrawal” in order to sober up “enough to be brutally honest with you and myself.” In another bid to be as inaccessible as possible for the foreseeable future, Cait claims to be checking into a psychiatric and rehab facility, committing all of her time to the program so that it will “stick.” In other words: she’s not going to be addressing why the majority of her sockpuppet bombing campaigns were leveled against authors of color, nor why she chose to use ethnic-sounding names for at least one of those sock-puppets, as though it would lend a kind of credibility for those who read the reviews and fell for the bait. She will not be addressing why she hid behind paper-thin excuses in her “apology” letter or how in the world a medicine switch in November would have affected her actions in August. She will not be telling anyone how she somehow made it through eight months of a depression spiral without any single shred of clarity that would have prevented a long-term campaign of malicious sabotage against her teammates in publishing.
She will also not be getting published. On December 11th, her book’s release date was pushed out to 2027, removing her from direct “competition” (it’s not a competition) with the other 2024 debuts. A single day later, it was announced that Crown of Starlight was no longer to be published at all. As of December 12th, Cait Corrain has lost her agent, her cushy bonus-filled publishing deal, and the respect of any and all of her former fans. Cait Corrain ruined her own life through insecurity and what appears to be the zealotry of white supremacy—the notion that should BIPOC authors receive anything more, they must not deserve it as much as the white person does. Need we all be reminded of the lessons of our youth? One does not look into the bowl of one’s neighbor to make certain that the amounts are even. One looks into the bowl of one’s neighbor to be certain they have enough to be full.
As though in divine irony, Twitter user freydis_moon quote retweeted Cait’s apology with a particularly apt screenshot of tweets she had made previously, a nice little note with which to end this lovely bit of drama.
