I’d argue that, not least because I know you need to sell a shockingly small amount of books to get on the NYT bestseller list.
Yeah, publishing is super-white; I’ve been advised to change my Eastern European last name to a more WASPy pen name, even though I have an Anglicised first name.
Readers want more diversity; publishers… say they do, but really don’t. People forget now that it’s been mega-successful, but even something not-that-radical as Harry Potter got picked up by a smaller publishing house, because the majors wouldn’t touch it.
How do we know readers want more diversity? Because authors who have been dead for decades, but who represent more diverse voices, are still being read.
But from a publishing point of view, that just means easy readies.
Yup. Raincoast was laughed at for picking up that boy wizard book. They were gonna lose so big on that.
And Rowling has the advantage of being white.
I know as a reader I should try harder. There’s a fairly even split on the men versus women on my shelves (leaning slightly towards women because the mystery, fantasy, sci-fi and horror genres have some amazing women working in them), but most of those authors are white. It’s not that non-white authors aren’t writing, but that publishers and agents aren’t working as hard to get them in front of our eyeballs. They aren’t doing the ad buys and paying for the displays. They aren’t booking these authors on tours, and aren’t working to shop the book around Hollywood. Wanting to read a wider range of authors means having to do a lot of legwork.
So, because most readers don’t have the time, energy and/or awareness to do that legwork, the publishers throw up their hands and say “well, diverse authors don’t sell. Here’s another white guy novel with full page ads, and a table display in every major bookstore across America and let’s get him on a few talk shows…”
Imagine if the Inheritance trilogy had been given the GOT treatment, from day one. Imagine if a multiple award-winning series were pushed and hyped for a black woman the way that’s been done for a white man. People who have never gone near the fantasy section of the bookstore know who GRRM¹ is, but N.K. Jemison will just get you blank stares. Where’s the Octavia Butler prestige TV series? I wonder what the difference between them is?
¹Don’t get me wrong. From all reports, GRRM is a hell of a nice guy who supports other writers. But he has benefitted well from publishing’s white male bias.
This is the kind of thing that made me give up sending short stories to sf magazines, after a few minor sales. I realized the “gatekeepers”—agents and editors—were, for the most part, self-satisfied, narcissistic fucks with their heads up their asses. I turned to thinking self-publishing was the way to go, back in the mid-nineties. But only because it’s a hobby for me, not a means to buy groceries.
ETA: I’m a white male, but my name is gender ambiguous.
Have any of you had any success or experience submitting your work to Medium? A client of mine, an older retired gentleman, is trying to get somewhere on it, and has submitted a few stories with varying degrees of success. I’m not even sure if it’s at all lucrative. I know that he’s not doing it for the money if there is any.
It is a blogging platform, but unlike maintaining your own blog, there’s traffic automatically built in. And while you can publish anything you want, in order to get it featured by the site, and promoted, and emailed out to other members, you can set it up so it’s reviewed by editors, and if they deem it to be worthy, then they’ll push it out to everyone, and I think you get some kind of remuneration, but I don’t know what.
They’re pretty much exactly like the concentration camps of the 1930s, the ones the SS used to hold trade union members, Communists, and resistance members. Right down to the constant detail of the concrete floors.
That this is even a debate only shows how poorly history is understood.
Just going through the most recent construction, the new checkpoint makeover in San Ysidro traded in the old colonial architecture for something much more blank, imposing, and psychologically repressive. All poured concrete and chain-link fence, it literally uses the same architectural features as contemporary USA prisons.
Can we also stop referring to it as ‘detained’ or ‘detention’ instead of falsely-imprisoned? Detained is having to wait a few minutes while someone checks to see if you have any arrest warrants or your paperwork checks out. Once you need prison camps for it, that’s not really just ‘being detained’ any more.