#publishing discourse

as a reader who likes books with long sentences and interesting POVs and bold narrative choices it drives me nuts cos it makes everything more boring to read but seemingly it's too risky on a market level to write anything actually creative or well-crafted since grown adults have both the reading level of an eight-year-old and a general refusal to change that by challenging themselves apparently

but the short version is that the idea that you have to be an influencer to get a (fiction) book deal is absolute 100% bullshit (nonfic is a different kettle of fish and one I'm less qualified to talk about). also a vast amount of it all is luck, but sometimes that luck is about being in the right place at the right time, which means yes, the whole system is biased towards people who can, for example, go to book launches and events and get chatting to editors who will later be interested in their work, which means there are major geographical biases as well as people needing to know enough to know those events are happening at all

and THAT accounts for way more selection bias than how many twitter followers someone has. given that a very large proportion of the published authors that i know didn't even have a twitter account when they got their book deal, or if they did, had <500 followers (the majority of them still don't have TikTok, either)

"People from X group need to see Y". Sure. But have you considered that the author is from Z group? Have you considered that the author has no obligation to write for X at the expense of erasing themselves?

"I wanted this character to be X queer identity and instead they were Z queer identity" does not make a book "problematic". It makes it a book that you, personally, didn't relate to as much as you hoped. When Z queer identity IS the author's identity too, or close to it, calling them problematic for writing about people like themselves has a darker undertone. Suggesting they need a "reason" to have that identity and that otherwise it's a "cop out" is frankly inappropriate.

People have some really strange ideas about what they're owed by authors and what makes a work "problematic". Reblogging my post about the dangers of morality policing in online YA communities to complain about a marginalised author (one who has written themselves about how harmful social media has been to them) choosing to write their own identity instead of yours... is a spectacular failure to critically engage with what I actually said.