[books] I still find the Audra Winter/Age of Scorpius thing fascinating not because of anything new with her herself but just how people have generally gone from "She is an incredibly flawed writer with poor priorities but she's young enough to bounce back" to "She is actively scamming people" with no inciting incident in between

like i do think her not releasing a sample chapter while allowing people to preorder was bad, I don't think it was actively a scam because she seemed up until that point really proud of her writing

And raising the price of the second edition is probably something she justified in her mind because she's "employing" all these artists and adding more art, kinda dumb but likely not intentionally a scam. Do think she shouldn't have them for preorder yet though

I don't think she's intentionally trying to mislead people, I think she's just way too far down the booktok rabbit hole and probably thought that counted as market research. Never assume malice when incompetence suffices as an answer.