The Implosion of KBoards

If you're an indie writer and haven't heard the news about KBoards, well, go back to your writing. Trust me, you're in a better place.

For the rest of us, I can't even call the KBoards fiasco a train wreck. No, it's more akin to watching a sun swallowed itself to become a black hole.

It comes down to a typical solution by Mom&Pop shops when the original founder leaves the business for whatever reason. The gentleman who originally founded Kboards passed away. His spouse and children had no interest in continuing his work.

And let's be frank, running ANY forum is a huge, thankless job.

So the family decided to sell KBoards to a company called VerticalScope (VS), which is a division of Torstar. You might remember Torstar as the former parent of Harlequin Publishing. You know, the same Harlequin that ended up in a huge lawsuit for screwing writers out of money.

Now, if I were a suspicious person, or someone who wrote thrillers, I would think that Torstar was behind the buyout because indies seriously screwed up Harlequin's profits in the romance genre. You got to remember Harlequin was Torstar's main bread-and-butter for years until they sold the Harlequin division to HarperCollins in 2014.

Alas, the real answer is far more sleazy and less personal. VS specializes in buying forums for their SEO, drives away the users, and slaps a shit-ton of ads on the website to generate revenue. They inserted a TOS that alarmed many of the writers who use KBoards to share publishing information with some terms that allegedly claimed rights to the content they posted, including covers and excerpts.

Matters weren't helped when someone from VS named Helena jumped on and did absolutely nothing to calm the situation or answer questions. The flame war quickly became a five-alarm dumpster fire with the unpaid moderators caught in the middle when Helena accused anyone questioning VS procedures of being trolls.

Writers tried to remove content only to find out they couldn't. However, they could modify their posts. The Writers Café on KBoards now looks like a ghost town.

I'm not linking to KBoards because I honestly don't want to give VS the clicks. But y'all can find it if you wish. Writers are already making alternate arrangements for online gathering places.

I'm a little sad that so much research and knowledge is disappearing, but it's more from a historical perspective. As someone on KBoards said, things are changing so fast in publishing that many past insights are no longer relevant.

So, goodbye KBoards! You did not go quietly into that good night.