Brittany Broski warned us about Oliver Mills😭| BookTok's romance war + Bailey Taylor vs Dave Portnoy

So there is some drama in the Australian bookish community around romance book events.

Okay, so there's two events you need to know, Rare and Crave.

Okay? So on October 3rd...

It's October 3rd.

[laughs] I'm so millennial that as soon as I said October 3rd, I was like, "Ugh, I have to say it." A new event called Crave Chapter One announced that it would be holding an LGBTQIA+ romance book signing in Melbourne on April 1st- 2028.

So Crave had previously described itself as Melbourne's first dedicated LGBTQIA+ romance book signing and said on its website that there had never been a queer romance event in Australia.

The following day on October 4th, established romance event Rare posted its upcoming events and seemingly took issue with Crave choosing April 1st, 2028.

Rare stands for Romance Author and Reader Events, and it's a global book signing festival, so they have them all over the world.

So Rare's caption basically said that they'd heard about another event, quote, "Aligning with our dates," and questioned why another Melbourne event would choose the same date.

So their caption read, "Announcements.

We've heard about other events aligning with our dates, so for planning purposes, brackets, we announced late March, early April for Melbourne, so not sure why another event in Melbourne would choose our date.

Mark your calendars," and they put a bunch of dates.

And they put April 1st.

[laughs] And of course, given the fact that Rare had not actually announced a specific date for their event in 2028 and then announced April 1st as their date after Crave announced their date, people think they chose that date intentionally.

Okay, so people started commenting that the post felt passive-aggressive and anti-queer, with readers and authors telling Rare that they should support another event rather than treating it like competition.

Now, it could have ended here.

If Rare had just said, "You know what? Fair enough.

Maybe this was not the best way to go about it," and just dropped it, I actually think none of this would have become a story.

However, Rare became increasingly defensive in the comments, including telling people to fuck off, calling Crave unprofessional, and threatening legal action against people criticizing the post.

So somebody wrote, "Instead of writing passive-aggressive homophobic comments all over social media, you also could have chosen to collaborate, but instead you decided to attack the first queens book event in Australia." And then Rare responded, "F off homophobic.

Check your facts now or you will be sued." Oh my God.

I don't wanna get sued.

Okay.

So Rare eventually turned off comments on Instagram and Facebook, but the arguments continued on Threads, where Rare disputed Crave's claims about being the first queer romance event.

So Rare kept commenting about GLOW, basically saying they're missing from this conversation, like they are an event in Australia for queer authors and queer literature.