How to Write Your Novel Part 4: Meeting Goals

In my last video in this series, I’m talking about writing goals: how to make them and how to meet them. Setting goals is especially important in the period of your career where you’re not working with an agent or publisher and need to give yourself structure. Even after you are working with professionals—unless you are on a very tight book-a-year schedule—there will be long stretches where you need to hold yourself accountable and keep yourself motivated when no one else is around.

Now, a word about writing goals in 2020. Somewhere around April or May when it became clear that this disruption was with us for the long haul, my therapist told me to just double the time it was going to take to doing anything this year. I’ve spent many months internally rebelling against this idea, and it has nonetheless turned out to be completely true! So, I’m giving you that same advice now. Seriously, this year has been a garbage fire, take it easy on yourself.

On that note, whatever your life circumstances, I think it’s always good advice to make your writing goals as practical and concrete as possible. Nebulous goals aren’t motivating and don’t create any built-in accountability. For an ambitious goal like writing a book, you need a workable and efficient road map.

As much as I think we should all temper expectations this year, I want to also acknowledge how inspiring it can be to chase the big dream. Writing may be one of the few things you have a modicum of control over in your life right now, and if leaning into it feels good, by all means, go for it.  

I originally did this particular video series for NaNoWriMo and though I’m aware it is no longer November: I think there are some great takeaways from NaNoWriMo about goal setting:

1.              Sometimes a lofty goal can be motivating in itself. 50,000 words in a month is a lot for most of us, and I think what makes NaNoWriMo fun is the audacity of it. Even if you get halfway there, you have 25,000 words! That’s a third of a novel!

2.              Momentum matters. Having a big, concrete goal encourages forward-momentum which is everything when you’re writing a first draft. The big word count of NaNoWriMo forces you to keep moving and getting those words on the page with no space to second guess every paragraph.

3.              Create accountability, even if you don’t have a ‘deadline’. Members of the NaNoWriMo community are constantly posting their word counts and talking about their progress, breaking big writing goals into smaller ones and reporting your progress (even if it’s just to yourself in a notebook) will help make it manageable.

4.              Cultivate community. Whether it’s by connecting online or in-person (sometime in the future obviously when in-person is a thing we can do again!) finding fellow writers to form a support system is essential. I advocate for finding people who are in roughly the same stage career-wise to keep these relationships feeling even-keel. (For more on that, see this video I did with MY writer-friend Courtney Maum).   

The biggest piece of advice I have about goals right now is to not beat yourself if you don’t meet them. If you’re constantly finding that you’re unable to meet your targets, take a step back and reevaluate, but the most important thing is to bounce back and keep going. Writing is a career of ups and downs: beyond talent and work ethic, resilience is the single most important quality for success, however it is that you measure it.

This week’s exercise: Reflect on your month of writing. What went well? What didn’t? Figure out your goals for next month and those to come.

How to Write Your Novel Part 3: Getting Stuck

This third installment of my series is focused on an inevitable part of writing: getting stuck. Some days, we feel like the muses are with us and we’re channeling from the beyond and some days we show up at the keyboard cross-eyed and confused. This rollercoaster is a lifelong part of writing, the only thing that makes it better is knowing that each of these states is temporary as long as you push on.

 Now, a word about the term “writer’s block”. I don’t believe in it. Rather, I don’t believe there is a specific kind of stuck-ness that only magically plagues writers. I think mythologizing that feeling I described above can make it scarier and more permanent; much better in my opinion to just recognize that you’re having an off day.

So what to do when you’re experiencing a slump? First, check your vitals. Are you sleep-deprived? Overwhelmed? Sick? Experiencing family/friend/work trouble? Are you drained? Is the pressure of homeschooling your three children whilst also working a full-time job and trying to figure how to explain Zoom to your grandmother leaving you feeling a bit spent?

Oftentimes, I think what we’re prone to calling ‘Writer’s Block’ is just plain-old Burnout. Writing can be your oasis from the chaos or it can be that ‘extra thing’ that makes everything else feel like too much. Which one it is for you also may change by the day.  

2020 is a year of unprecedented burnout so if you’re feeling it with your writing, ask yourself if there is some way you can scale back your goals to meet you where you are. Or maybe writing your novel is an ambition that needs to be delayed a bit. That’s truly okay.

I am here to remind you that while writing is important, it’s never the most important thing in life– people, including yourself— are! Those who put writing on a pedestal above everything, even human beings, are assholes. It is so important to maintain a balance between all your obligations and your self-care. Writing can be self-care of course, it definitely has been for me this year, but if it’s not feeling that way? Time to reevaluate.

As I said earlier, you’re not going to feel pumped and motivated every day of your writing life, however, it is important that throughout the process you feel an underlying current of excitement about your project. It’s an act of endurance to write a novel and if you’re not excited about it, there is no book. If you’re just feeling dread about a project, it may be time to put it aside for something that does give you that feeling of escape.

But beyond burnout, there’s another kind of stuck that happens to most of us in the process of writing a novel. Say a plot point or a character arc is tripping you up. How can you get past it?

First, consider what type of writer you are.

Generally, there are two approaches to writing. You’re either a plotter or a pantser. Plotters do a great deal of work before they put the novel’s first words to paper. They structure their book with outlines and character sketches before they start their first draft. On the other side of the spectrum, there are the pantsers (that’s me baby!). Pantsers have a general idea of where we’re going when we start writing, but we only truly find out what our books are about by writing a first draft. Then another. And another.

No matter which camp you’re in, it’s important to stay flexible and go with the flow of your words. If your character is developing differently on page than you had imagined in your head or in an outline, keep writing. Don’t get stuck on trying to stick with the original plan.

The most important thing while writing a first draft is to maintain momentum. Let your first draft be a glorious mess! Kick all the problems you come across down the road– you can resolve them in the revision process.

And when you do hit a speedbump, don’t be afraid to take a break. Make it a structured one: take a day or a week off and do something stimulating: go outside, to the gym, out to lunch with a friend.

Elizabeth Gilbert gives great advice on structured breaks in her book Big Magic. She advises writers to find another creative activity to engage in when they are stuck or in need of a break. I discovered my alternative creative outlet in gardening; it’s my antidote to spending too much time in my head. Like everyone else, sometimes I need a vacation from there!

This week’s exercise: If you find yourself stuck in your writing process, find another creative activity– it can be anything– to do instead of writing until you feel refreshed and ready to go it again.

How to Write Your Novel Part 2: Habits

For the second installment in my series on How to Write Your Novel I’m focusing on what is probably the most important part of being a writer: good habits. This is something I get asked about all the time—and that I’m equally fascinated in hearing from other writers about—when do I write? For how long each day? What do I drink? What are my snacks?

Last week, I addressed the importance of motivation, which is a key factor in getting you through those first few weeks while you’re making the time to write. But as you go, habits become more important because they will save you from needing to be motivated every single day which is unrealistic. The repetitiveness of habits takes the thinking out of the act of writing; it makes writing an automatic part of your day. In the beginning, writing in the morning felt like a practically heroic act of discipline; now my day just feels wonky if I don’t do it.

Writing is more grind than glory and motivation is a limited resource, especially right now in the midst of a pandemic when most of us are so drained. The first day you sit down to write your novel will be an exceptional day and you’ll hopefully be feeling really excited. However, as the process continues, what follows are a whole bunch of regular days where writing just feels like work, not magic.

The most important thing about your writing habits is that they’re sustainable for you personally. Absolutely feel free to disregard dogmatic advice such as “You must write every single day!”; “You must write 1000 words a day, no exception!” I’ve heard a lot of writers give this flavor of advice and they’ve almost always been older male authors who I suspect are lucky enough to have a wife managing the kids, dog, and the electric bill without ever disturbing the art monster in his office to ask him about any of it. (The dream!)

But most of us do have life obligations that more of less constantly intrude on whatever time we have to write, especially this year with homeschooling children and working-from-home spouses and all manner of chaos going on around us.

Now, again, I’m never here for one-size-fits-all writing advice, but I do want to make the case for writing in the mornings.

Last week I talked about how I became a Morning Person™ when, motivated by deep existential fear, I started getting up early to write before heading into my day job at Random House. I have such happy memories of that summer; I would walk around the block to get my Dunkin’ Donuts and sit at my desk for an hour by myself before going off to work. I quickly came to love my morning writing sessions. I felt clear-headed and productive as I got my day’s writing out of the way. I was writing before I got distracted by, well, being a twenty-five-year-old in New York City.

I know many writers who are into mornings, but also some who somehow are able to do it at night after their kids are asleep. I can barely read a book at that time of day but god speed.

While it’s great to develop a writing regimen, it also pays off to be flexible. Just as life demands we balance our days between work, family, friends and writing, it also demands we deal with sudden changes of plans. (Hello all of 2020!) So, don’t be discouraged every time life gets in the way of writing and for 2020 specifically, just expect everything to take twice as long. Seriously.  

Think about your schedule and figure out where you could carve out just a little time for writing. Could you get up earlier in the morning? Stay up later at night? Could you write during your lunch break or over the weekend? Even if it is just for half an hour, you can get a lot done if you take yourself and your time seriously.

So many first and second and third novels have been written by people who have capitalized on life’s in-between moments. One of my favorite stories is that Claire Cook, author of Must Love Dogs, famously wrote her best-selling novel while waiting for her kids to finish up their sports. In fact, if you want good advice about adding writing to a busy life just ask literally any author who is also a mom.

This week’s exercise: Pull up your calendar for the next week and schedule four or five thirty-minute blocks for your writing. And then… write!

How to Write Your Novel Part 1: Getting Motivated

It’s been a long year guys, so I’m going to throw it into reruns and share some of the first videos I made for Instagram. Even though these videos were filmed over a year ago—before my more recent fetching highlights and before I got myself a decent ring light—the topics I covered in these two series are some of my most perennial: how to write your novel and to find an agent. One thing I hope for all of is during this interminable year is that we are finding at least some time to move our own beloved projects forward, even if it’s not as quickly as we’d like.

I’m not sure who’s bonkers enough to be doing NaNoWriMo during this November—owner of the longest election cycle in human history—but if you are cheers! I filmed this series with this in mind, but it is equally valuable if you’re just needing something to kickstart yourself back into the game. What I like about NaNoWriMo is that it gives writers a structure to get going.

For the unfamiliar, NaNoWriMo—or National Novel Writing Month—is a month-long challenge to write an entire novel during the month of November (the goal is 50,000 words which is more of a novella, but still). Writing 50,000 words in a month is a lofty goal under any circumstances, but thousands of people sign up every year, including this one. The challenge can be a great short-term, extrinsic source of motivation.

I’m a firm believer that writing is more about habits than anything, but I think it’s valuable to consider what’s bringing you to the desk in the first place. Not your inspiration, but what’s motivating you to squeeze writing in between your obligations to work, family, school, etc. Writing for most of us is an ‘extra’ thing we’re doing, so it needs to feel worth it if you are going to stick with it.

So, how do you get motivated to do something as huge as writing a novel?

There’s a story I always tell when people ask me about how I got started as a writer. I was a few years out of college, living in New York City and working full-time at Random House as a publicist. While there, I connected with Polly Devlin—a phenomenal writer and singular personality—who was then a Professor at Barnard College. We were out for coffee one afternoon when I felt the need to confess to her that I wanted to be a writer myself. (A young publishing assistant with writing aspirations: the shock!) I went on to explain the difficulty I was having getting through the novel I was working on at the time.

Devlin asked me two questions: What time do you wake up in the morning? and Could you wake up an hour earlier to write before you leave for the office?

Never much of morning person, I balked a bit. Devlin went on to tell me, quite bluntly, that in the morning before work was the only time I was going to be able to work and if I didn’t carve it out, I would be sitting in the exact same spot ten years from now, wondering why I never finished my novel.

That conversation put the fear of God in me in the best possible way. The next morning, I was up and ready to write at 7am (LOL. That felt early when I was twenty-five). Within months, I had finished my novel. Devlin’s blunt premonition gave me a sense of urgency. The specter of being a ‘never was’ was more terrifying than the early alarm clock.  

NaNoWriMo is fun, but motivation has to come from within to be useful. The unvarnished truth of it that no one—including the fine folks at NaNoWriMo—truly cares whether or not you write your novel. NaNoWriMo, writing classes ,and literary workshops are great support systems that can energize you and hold you accountable. But they are by definition extrinsic motivators and as such, they are not enough to carry you to the finish line. Motivation that comes from within is the only thing that can get you out of bed in the morning.

Most novelists have innumerable failed attempts behind them before their work amounts to something, so ask yourself, why will this time be different?  

For me, it was the fear of letting a life-long dream pass me by. For others, it can be grief or anger, revenge or regret. These big and uncomfortable emotions can be the forces that make us sit down and write.

This week’s exercise: Ask yourself, what will happen if I don’t write my novel?

Practical Advice for Writing Outside of Your Culture

I wanted to wrap up my series on sensitivity readers—which admittedly went down quite a few hopefully helpful rabbit holes—by offering some practical advice besides hiring a sensitivity reader if you’re venturing into writing about a marginalized community you don’t belong to yourself.

In everything I read on this issue, I could find nary a voice that said writers should only ever write about people just like themselves. That would be extremely limiting! Obviously. However, it’s a bigger challenge inherently to write something outside our personal experience.

So how can we, as writers, best go about this work?

What I’ve compiled here is some of the best advice I came across while researching this topic. I’m not positioning myself as an authority but more as your helpful guide. I encourage you to read the things I’ve linked to here if you’re going about this. I also suggest getting a copy of Writing the Other by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward: a short, funny, extremely helpful book with fun exercises and excellent advice. And if you have additional advice to share (or if you think I’m just ass-backwards about something, I am humbly yours for the feedback, my friends.

SO, how does an author who wants to do it right go about this?

Interrogate Your Motives

I laughed aloud when I read this interview with Dhonielle Clayton in which she said that whenever she asked an author why they were writing a character of a certain identity, the person always responded by saying they just walked into their head that way. I laughed not at this hapless author in question but at my own damn self because I probably would have answered that question the same way. Oh no!

The truth is that the alchemy of writing fiction is mysterious and we can all get cute about how real and whole our characters are. I feel that way! I feel like they live in my head in a way that is beyond my control. But, of course, we’re all pulling from something in the world that’s inspired us and I think in the case of writing about a marginalized community, it’s important to know what that is for you so that you approach this with integrity. For example, if the answer is something like “well I think racial equity/ LGBTQ rights/ immigration is a hot topic right now and it will help me sell my novel”? Walk away slowly. Have a talk with yourself and then, you know, please don’t.

If you don’t ask yourself why you’re doing something, the likelihood of you having blind spots is so much worse. And hey, if you don’t want to mess with first draft mojo, you can ask yourself this question a draft or two in. That’s what the revision process is for and why that whole argument about this inhibiting creativity rings so false to me.

Read All the Books

If you’re writing about a community that is not your own, or writing a central character from a community you’re not a part of, you should be reading dozens of books from authors in that community: novels, memoirs, nonfiction, all of it.  

Not only is this great for research, it’s just great overall! It’s a massive failing of our industry that books from marginalized communities take more work to seek out; but the Bookstagram community is on it. People such as The Stacks, Lupita Reads, Spines and Vines, and so many others feature great #ownvoices content regularly.

You should do lots of other research including watching movies and shows and reading blogs, but books are especially important because they’re so effective at building empathy. And…

Empathy is Everything

Let your heart and your imagination guide you through this process. I can’t possibly say it better than Brandon Taylor does in his excellent essay on LitHub:

“There can be no story without empathy. Our stories begin because we are able to enter the lives of other people. We are able to imagine how a person might move through the world, how their family might operate, what their favorite foods might be, how their nation works, how their town works, and the smallest, most inconsequential aspects of their lives rise up to meet us at our desks. You can’t write if you can’t empathize. Solipsism is anathema to good writing.”-Brandon Taylor in LitHUb

I think this gets an essential truth that getting characters with different identities right is just about good writing, which is always about empathy and detail.

Understand Stereotypes and Tropes

There are so many stereotypes that are so baked into our culture that we as writers may reproduce them without even meaning to. Even positive-sounding stereotypes like the “overachieving Asian person” or the “strong black woman” have ugly roots. This isn’t to say that characters from marginalized backgrounds should be sanitized to perfection and sainthood, no! All of your characters should have the messy humanity of real people, that’s what makes fiction compelling. But tropes are not just offensive, they’re tired, so know which ones you’re dealing with and avoid them like landmines.

Get Feedback

Whether you go the route of a sensitivity reader or a trusted writer friend or colleague who shares the identity of the character you’re writing about, don’t let your book wend its way through publishing without this step. As we’ve discussed, publishing has a bad track record in this arena and it’s your name that’s going to be on the book

You’ll never write a book to everyone’s liking and no one says that you must take every single piece of feedback but be open to it. And check your fragility at the door, please and thank you!

It’s just writing

At the end of the day, writing outside your own life experience is a bigger challenge than writing from within it. But it’s still just writing. There’s no special trick or technique here other than the diligence you would put towards anything else.

Books full of tropes and stereotypes have always been gross, and have always done harm, long before Twitter existed to form hashtags about it

It can be amazing and enriching to write outside the boundaries of our own life experiences, so go forth and be brave. Just be compassionate too!

Read More:

Fundamentals of Writing the Other / Buzzfeed

How to Unlearn Everything/ Vulture

There is No Secret to Writing People Who Do Not Look Like You / LitHub

Latinx in publishing (And ten books to order right now!)

Last week, I dug up the American Dirt scandal, reanimated it and danced it around the room long enough to give it some feedback that it certainly didn’t ask for (sorry that metaphor went off the rails). So, what’s next?  

So much of the conversation around the book scandals I’ve been covering the last few weeks is a very necessary corrective to publishing’s continued marginalization of BOPIC voices. I’m endlessly admiring of folks like Justina Ireland and Myriam Gurba who are willing to put themselves in the fray with their on-point critiques; often taking on very real risks to their careers and even safety (both have reported numerous death threats) in the process.

At the same time, online discussion can turn into a snake eating its own tail so I didn’t want to leave off without some concrete takeaways and calls to action.

Latinx Folks in Publishing

One of the big issues highlighted in the American Dirt scandal is just how dismal the treatment of Latinx authors is in book publishing. They make up only 3% of the industry overall and suffer from the same pernicious comp title issue that all BIPOC authors do (more about that here). Many Latinx authors came forward during the American Dirt dust-up with their stories of being rejected or pushed to small publishing houses because of the perception that their work couldn’t speak to a wide-enough audience.

#PublishingPaidJeanine

Given the evidence both data-driven and anecdotal of the barriers Latinx writers face in publishing, one can understand the rancor at seeing a white writer (yes, I know she also identifies as Latinx) get paid a massive advance and heralded as the voice of the voiceless. But this wasn’t a story that hadn’t been told, critics argue, it was one that had been ignored until a white writer decided to take it on.

Many wonderful bloggers and Bookstgrammers, including Lupita Reads—whose post started a a movement on Bookstagram—rounded up excellent books by Latinx authors that tackle life on the border around the time of the scandal. (Side note: I’m making my way through Lupita’s list and can so far highly recommend Black Dove and I’m Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter).

I love using these moments to uplift #ownvoices books because it while it’s not readers’ job to fix the systemic issues in publishing, voting with your dollars always makes sense and is immediately actionable.

Readers are the end consumers that publishers care about it, so while it’s not enough on its own, making sure to read and share books by Latinx authors is a great place to start if what I’ve been outlining here on the blog makes you mad.

If you’re so inclined, making donations to places such as Latinx in Publishing, People of Color in Publishing, and We Need Diverse Books—established organizations all working toward equity in publishing—is also great!  

My TBR of Latinx Authors (plus three I just read)

I’m not going to leave you hanging without a list! As always with my lists, these picks reflect my taste—family dramas, psychological thrillers, a little speculative, a little YA—and are all books you may be into if you happen to like my books.

On we go!

Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From by Jennifer De Leon

I read this one after seeing it on Latinx in Publishing’s website (one of the great things they do is keep a running list of new releases). This is the story of a Mexican-American high school student who gets moved across town to a “nicer” school in Boston, all while there is major drama unfolding in her own family about her parents’ immigrations status and the whereabout of her father. This one was smart, funny, and full of heart. If you have teenage kids, it would make a great buddy read with them as a gateway to talk about some of bigger issues of immigration, class inequities, and bias that the book tackles.  

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia You’ve surely seen this atmospheric literary horror story set in 19050s Mexico all over Instagram; and it did NOT disappoint. Glamorous debutante Noemi Taboada is sent to the countryside to investigate the goings-on of an extremely creepy British family who live next to an abandoned mine after she receives an alarming letter from her cousin (who’s married to the dashing heir). Noemi arrives at the crumbling Victorian mansion and things get very scary very quickly. This one was twisty, turning, and just brilliant. It gave me nightmares but was absolutely worth it!  

Afterlife by Julia Alvarez This is the first novel I’ve read by Alvarez and it has me diving for her backlist. In her first adult novel in over a decade, Alvarez tells the story of an immigrant writer and professor whose life is upended when her beloved husband dies suddenly and her luminous but unstable sister goes missing. Things get even harrier when she arrives home from a trip to find an undocumented Pregnant teenager on her doorstep. Alvarez has such a stunning voice, and this novel was so poignant, heartbreaking, and surprisingly funny.

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor This novel in translation is about the death of the local witch in a damned Mexican village, as told by an unreliable narrator (one of my favorite devices when pulled off well). This seems like another good atmospheric, scary one for Fall and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez This is the new one from the bestselling and National Book Award-winning author whose last book The Friend I also have a copy of on my TBR shelf. This is a series of interconnected stories about human connections that the narrator listens to passively until she gets drawn in by an extraordinary request.

Once I was You by Maria Hinojosa  This is the new buzzworthy memoir from the host of NPR’s Latino USA, an award-winning journalist who’s reported on marginalized communities for over thirty years. And once again, if your interest was piqued by the American Dirt controversy, I cannot recommend enough listening to Hinojosa’s interview with the key players.   

Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories by Donna Miscolta. This is a coming-of-age novel of about a young Mexica-American girl in the 1960’s and 70’s. I love Miscolta’s writing (she’s a fellow Seattle author!) and can highly recommend her last book Hola and Goodbye as well.

Spirit Run by Noe Alvarez. In this running memoir, the author undertakes a Peace and Dignity Journey, which is an epic marathon that Indigenous runners take to reconnect with the land. Alvarez is the son of fruit pickers from Yakima, WA where my husband grew up and in-laws still live, so I’m really looking forward to see this perspective on the place.

The Undocumented Americans Karla Cornejo Villavicencio Another one that’s gotten a lot of buzz is this memoir by one of the first undocumented students to graduate Harvard, a Dream Act-recipient who set out to record the stories of her fellow undocumented Americans after the 2016 election. When I’m finished, I’m going to check out The Stacks episode about this one!

Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin. This one is another horror story (‘tis the season! The election! Halloween!) about the interconnectedness of our current lives. Sounds very creepy!

If those sound good to you, please go order them! If you can’t afford to buy them, getting them from the library also helps because the more holds, the more copies the library orders. So, do what you can! And when you’ve read them. rate and review on Goodreads and Amazon, post about them wherever you social, and tell your friends however you tell your friends things. It makes a HUGE difference, I promise you. Publishing has a lot of work to do, but readers can help move the needle by voting with our wallets. Word-of-mouth is still the most powerful force in this industry.

Also, don’t forget, when possible, get books from your indie bookstore OR shop Bookshop.org which supports indies. If you’re an audiobook lover, use Libro.fm, so you can buy your audiobooks from your favorite indie bookstore. Now more than ever, these places need your support!  

Read More:

https://bookshop.org/lists/latinx-adult-fiction-2020-books

https://www.thebookslut.com/post/our-most-anticipated-latinx-reads-of-2020

https://parade.com/1085033/lolamendez/latinx-hispanic-heritage-month-books/

https://www.buzzfeed.com/zoraidacordova/ya-books-by-latinx-authors-2020

https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/g33336785/latinx-books/

Monday Morning Publicist: American Dirt

For the last few years, the majority of the conversation around diversity and inclusion in book publishing has happened in the Children’s Lit and YA world, where the debate over hiring sensitivity readers has grown especially heated. Obviously, authors of books meant from a young, impressionable audience should be especially mindful about both inclusion and harmful tropes and characterizations. But I was beginning to wonder why we weren’t talking about that more in the adult-sphere.  

Then American Dirt happened.

Unlike the other book scandals that I’ve recapped thus far where I was looking at them in the rearview, this one I followed in real time, rather breathlessly I have to admit. I remember meeting with a good author friend around this time for lunch (in a café! With no masks on! We hugged hello! Remember those times?) and parsing the whole thing. I just kept thinking: what would I tell Jeanine Cummins if I was her publicist? And what would I do if I were this author?

Those are the questions I’m going to attempt to answer today in a new feature I’m calling Monday Morning Publicist.

I want to be clear that I’m not writing this to pile on Cummins or to somehow claim I’m the authority on Latinx representation in books. If you’ve been following this scandal, you’ve read plenty of critiques of how she and the publisher handled it. Today, I’m attempting to think through what a more helpful response might have looked like.  

Let’s Dig In

You’re forgiven for forgetting the details of this since it happened way back in January of this year, approximately a century ago. So, I’ll start with a quick recap of what happened.  

American Dirt came out January 21st from Flatiron Books. This novel by Jeanine Cummins follows a Mexican bookseller who is forced to flee her home in Acapulco and try to cross into the US with her young son after her journalist husband is murdered by a drug cartel whose activities he’s been reporting on.

The hype around this book was deafening – with blurbs from Stephen King, Anne Patchett, and Sandra Cisneros who called it “the great novel of las Americas”. Don Winslow called it “a grapes of wrath for our times”. It received support from prominent Latinx writers such as Julia Alvarez, who predicted the book would “change hearts and transform policies.”

The book was originally sold at auction where it received a seven-figure advance and it was basically given every bit of marketing push a book could possibly get. It was an early favorite of booksellers and a star at BEA where that infamous flower arrangement happened. Things truly hit a fever pitch when it was named as an Oprah Book Club pick.  

The Backlash

The backlash to the book kicked off with a scathing review from Mexican-American writer Myriam Gurba about a month before publication. Gurba’s review didn’t pick up much steam at first but went viral after Oprah made her pick and several Latinx celebrities promoted the book. This was followed by a charged New York Times opinion piece from author David Bowles.

Now, I truly could go on and on recapping each piece of this scandal. I read everything I could and even signed up for Apple+ so I could watch the Oprah roundtable discussion (pretty meh IMO). I’ve included a round-up below, but if you listen to ONE thing about this book, I recommend Maria Hinajosa’s interview with the key players—including Cummins—it’s truly one of the more compelling pieces of radio I’ve ever heard.  

What’s the Beef?   

There’s nuance here but there were really four big sticking points as far as I could tell:  

·       The Author’s identity. Critics claimed that though Cummins had previously identified herself as white—notably in a 2015 op-ed in the NYT— she began saying she was ‘white and Latinx’ in the prepublication lead-up. She also mentions in her author’s note that she wishes someone ‘slightly browner’ than her had written the book (which leads me to believe she anticipated some of this criticism). The publisher was also accused of playing up the fact that Jeanine’s husband is formerly “undocumented” which critics felt was misleading given that he’s from Ireland. Jeanine also mentions this in her author’s note.

·       The positioning of the book. This book was not labeled as a book about the border but the book about the border—as told to us by a white writer who has no personal connection to Mexico. In a note that went out with the galleys, the publisher introduced the book as ‘giving a face to faceless’ and Jeannine herself used the term ‘faceless brown mass’ to describe the way that Americans see people at the border. Many critics felt that this was a book written for white people—or as Gurba called ‘trauma porn wearing a fig leaf of social justice’—and that that’s why it sold for so much money. To see it positioned as a definitive account felt like a slap in the face to many Latinx writers.

·       The book itself: Many readers felt the book trafficked in stereotypes, and that the author didn’t do enough research, leading to some jarring inaccuracies and Spanish malapropisms. The most damning accusations suggested that Cummins actually cribbed parts of the book from Luis Alberto Urrea and Sonia Nazario, two authors she cites as inspiration.

·       Publishing’s Overall Treatment of Latinx Writers: The huge advance and the massive marketing push around the book emphasized the ways in which Latinx writers are pushed to the margins of the publishing industry. According to the Lee & Lowe 2019 survey: Latinx folks comprise only 3% of the publishing industry. Many Latinx writers reported being routinely told that their stories don’t have wide enough appeal to be published in a big way, or published at all. Luis Alberto Urrea’s book—which Cummins said inspired her—was rejected for ten straight years and given feedback such as: ‘nobody cares about starving Mexicans’ and ‘no American reader is going to read a book with a name as strange as yours’. This was back in the 90’s but sadly, it’s unclear that things have changed much.  

I want to emphasize here that NO ONE said that Cummins shouldn’t have tried to write about Mexico or the boarder, just that she missed the mark. David Bowles, one of her most prominent critics, said this.

“There is nothing wrong with a non-Mexican writing about the plight of Mexicans. What’s wrong is erasing authentic voices to sell an inaccurate cultural appropriation for millions.”-

So, What Happened?

The publisher ended up cancelling Cummins’ 40-city book tour citing ‘safety concerns’ and apologized for ‘serious mistakes’ in the positioning of the book. The publisher didn’t specify what threats were made, and this further enraged some critics who saw an implication that the Latinx literary community critical of this book was somehow inherently dangerous. It’s worth nothing that Myriam Gurba received numerous death threats after her review and subsequent commentary.

The folks from Flatiron met with Dignidad Literaria—a group formed to address some of the concerns brought up about the industry by this publication and which included both Gurba and Bowles. Obviously, the pandemic broke out right after this and now publishers across the board are facing a reckoning over their issue with race and representation, so we shall see what comes of that.  

Monday Morning Publicist

I should start by saying that I have not actually read this book. Given everything I read about this book before it came out, I just thought there was no way I could digest it with an open mind. The point here is not for me to say if and by how much Jeanine Cummins got it wrong with American Dirt—that’s been covered by the far more qualified people I’ve namechecked here, among others. Nor am I intending to pile on Cummins just for the sake of it; I have empathy for her even as I thought some of her responses were misguided.  What I want to do here is play out the thought exercise of what I might have done—or advised her to do as her publicist—if I happened to find myself in this particular hot seat.

Prepare

I began this series by talking about sensitivity readers—one of many tools a writer might rely upon when writing about a culture that they’re not a part of. Such tools, in addition to lots of research, may help you prepare your actual work so it doesn’t feature some of the jarring inconsistencies critics picked up with American Dirt.

In addition to preparing the book itself, however, if you’re writing about a hot-button topic, you need to prepare for possible controversy, to think of the possible criticisms and how you’ll respond far in advance of the publication date.  

I went through this with my last novel We Came Here to Forget because I was dealing with a sensitive issue—Munchausen by Proxy— that is widely misunderstood and mischaracterized. I thought about all the ways I might get questioned about this and what I wanted to say, which let me keep my cool and take the most advantage of the platform I was given to discuss it.

If there’s an issue you’re hoping to raise awareness about in addition to telling a good story with your novel, think about what you hope to get across and write some talking points for yourself that you can keep coming back to.

Note that this strategy isn’t a question of turning the conversation back to your intentions or deflecting but of making sure that you’re using whatever platform in the best possible way.

For example, Cummins could have pointed to the stats around migration each time she talked about this controversy as well as pointing to those statistics I’ve mentioned here about publishing’s inequity itself. She was assuredly aware of the latter as she alludes to it in her author’s note and because she worked for Penguin Publishing for ten years, so she was not naïve about the industry going in.

Give a Good Apology

If you think you have something to apologize for, of course. If you don’t, then stand by what you’ve put out there. The world doesn’t need more bullshit apologies, that’s for sure. I’d much prefer people say what they mean in the public sphere.

At any rate, assuming Cummins found some validity to her critics’ arguments, she could have referred to the apology section of White Fragility which gives an extremely helpful framework for apologizing for missteps, and which I’m cribbing from here.   

·       First: Vent to a friend who will listen and give you honest feedback. Get all of your feelings out of the way and figure out what you may need to answer for.

·       Second: Apologize for the impact of your actions and show understanding for the actual problem at hand. Resist the urge to deflect by saying things like “that wasn’t my intent” or “I’m sorry people were offended”.  

·       Thank your critics: I love this step because it’s really this last part that creates an opportunity to move forward. It takes courage to call someone to account, especially when you’re an author (as most of these critics are) and on the other side of the debate is a major publisher and Oprah-freaking-Winfrey. Also, most of us want to know if we’ve done harm, difficult as that is to hear, so gratitude is actually an appropriate response.

In the interviews with Jeanine throughout the controversy, she sounded defensive and shell-shocked, as though she were working through step one on mic. These are completely understandable reactions, but things she’d have benefitted from tackling privately. She talked about how upset she was, what she’d meant to do, and even tried to redirect at one point to say that she was broke when she was working in publishing and had to bartend, which felt to me as though she was leaning on the well-worn trope of “class is the real issue here”. (I’m not saying that was her intention mind you, just how it read to me).

She also invoked the idea that people were trying to “silence” her and that writers should be allowed to write about whatever interests them, which—say it with me—not one single person was saying she shouldn’t have.

Again, my intention here isn’t to demonize Jeanine Cummins or pick on her. I just kept wanting her to take this opportunity by the reins and move the issue of how marginalized Latinx authors are to the forefront, rather than continuing to point out that this fact was not her fault.

Make it Right

In general, I’m all for making donations and doing good deeds privately rather than feeling the need to immediately announce your good works all over social media. But this is an exception. I would have advised Cummins to make a big donation, do it publicly, and do it quickly. Perhaps even calling on Oprah and Flatiron to match her in it.

Cummins has claimed to financially support some of the organizations she worked with during the course of writing the book (listed here on her website) and I believe her, but I can’t understand why she demurred to say where and how much she’d donated when initially asked. In this case, it’s less a question of bragging than a show of good faith to the communities who’ve been hurt.

I also would have suggested making donations to places that serve migrants and places like We Need Diverse Books, Latinx in Publishing, and People of Color in Publishing. Doing so publicly in the midst of such a high-profile scandal could have helped raise the profile of those organizations, hopefully encouraging others to donate as well. It’s also just a public show of good faith.

Again, I’m not saying that Cummins hasn’t donated money, and indeed I saw on Twitter (in one of her only tweets since the scandal took hold) that she was offering matching donations for up to 100k to the International Rescue Committee. Which is awesome! My argument here is that there is a time and place for a swift and public move to put your money where your mouth is and I wish she’d taken it.

In the End

While this seemed like HUGE controversy in the publishing world, it’s worth nothing that American Dirt has spent many weeks at number one on the New York Times bestseller list and remains there today. It appears the overall impact of the book is what one would expect from any Oprah pick, scandal or no. The book has racked up almost 14k reviews on Amazon, averaging 4.5 stars, and a whopping 158k reviews on Goodreads with a 4.3-star average.

This tells us that many, many people bought this book and loved it. I’m sure it felt awful to be in Jeanine’s shoes last January, but whether it actually impacted her career negatively in a lasting way I’m not so sure.

Conclusion

So. The book was hyped, there was a considerable skirmish, it still sold like hotcakes. What’s the takeaway?

I can’t speak for Cummins or speculate on how she might be feeling about all of this at this point, but it’s generally true that most authors aren’t cold-blooded capitalists. Most of us care about the impact of our words quite a lot. We care about telling our stories in a way that will resonate and hopefully not in a way that will harm.

My advice to authors who find themselves a bit anxious about all of this is to be brave and write what compels you and to understand if you have a mega-hyped book about a hot button issue, you should be prepared for possible blowback.

And should you find yourself on the defense, realize that being called out is an opportunity, even if it’s a hard one. I believe that it’s possible to engage in these conversations in a meaningful way, especially with people who are offering thoughtful critique, and not just trolling.

I wanted to write about this because I don’t think the system sets authors up for success on this front. There are so many wonderful, smart people in publishing, but because of systemic issues in the industry, many are ill-equipped to see these things coming. It’s always going to be the book and the author that people associate with the scandal, rather than the publisher. Proceed accordingly.

Read More:

Myriam Gurba’s original review / Tropics of Meta

Publishing’s American Dirt Problem/ Publisher’s Weekly

Flatiron Cancels American Dirt Tour / Publisher’s Weekly

Latino Response to American Dirt / LA Times

American Dirt: Dignity & Equity / David Bowles, Medium

How Not to Write a Book About a Minority Experience / The Walrus

Case Studies Part Two: American Heart & The Continent

You truly cannot read a thing about sensitivity readers without the word censorship coming up, and in all of the op-eds I read there were four case studies that got name-checked over and over as evidence of this ‘slippery slope’ argument.

Last week, I talked about two of the books—A Birthday Cake for George Washington and When We Was Fierce—that were actually pulled from publication for being offensive: the first by the publisher, the latter by the author.

But two of the other most commonly cited books made their way to bookshelves and can be purchased today if anyone so chooses.

So why do those two books—American Heart and The Continent—keep coming up as examples of censorship?

Because people were mad about them.

Philosophically, it seems to me one has to tie themselves in a real pretzel to argue censorship while simultaneously wanting to silence the discussion around the thing in question.

One could make a separate case about the degradation of online discourse around books and everything else in the world, but that’s not the argument being made. Ryan Holiday accused sensitivity readers and authors who employ them of burning books. Burning books!

So, while I truly cannot see how these books represent a case for a slide toward censorship, I do think they make instructive cases and shine a light on some of the issues in publishing that I’ve been attempting to unpack these past few months.

Let’s take a look!

American Heart

First up is American Heart, which came out in January of 2018 from HarperTeen by bestselling author Laura Moriarty.

This YA novel is about a fifteen-year-old white girl from Missouri called Sarah-Mary who lives in a future America where Muslim-Americans are being held in detainment camps. Sarah-Mary supports the camps until she meets a Muslim woman named Sadaf who is a fugitive from one of the camps. Sarah-Mary helps Sadaf escape to Canada and the experience causes her to question her prejudices.

This is the first case I’ve discussed here in which the author actually did reportedly use two sensitivity readers pre-publication. What their feedback was and whether the author incorporated it, we’ll never know, but the book did receive some early hype including a starred review from Kirkus which was penned by a Muslim-American reviewer. (For the unfamiliar, Kirkus is a trade publication which uses a mostly freelance reviewing staff whose bylines do not appear with reviews. The publication reviews the majority of books published by large houses and many from small presses as well).

There was an immediate backlash to American Heart from readers, citing the ‘white savior” trope that the book relied on.

Here’s what author Celeste Pewter had to say about the book:

“ it’s impossible to the escape the conclusion that Sarah-Mary’s journey is anything but a bildungsroman that uses the genuine fears of the Muslim-American community as a mechanism for Sarah-Mary to grow. It’s Sarah-Mary’s journey first and foremost, with Sadaf and the actual Muslim-American community’s challenges and concerns, coming in a firm second.”

“Bottom line: this is an example of an author telling a story that they were ill-equipped to tell, both intellectually and narratively.”

If you can take your mind back to 2018—many, many Trumpian scandals ago—you’ll remember that our president was talking about creating a Muslim registry in this country, not to mention that we already have a very ugly history of detaining our own citizens in America. Needless to say, it isn’t as though the scenario that Moriarty uses is terribly far-fetched.

“During a time where Muslim-Americans (and Muslims worldwide) are suffering due to intense discrimination and Islamophobia, this book is not only completely insensitive but seems to be exploiting a “timely” topic while simultaneously silencing Muslim voices.” --Adiba Jaigirdar (Buzzfeed)

In response to the criticism, Kirkus pulled the star and amended the review with a statement from the Editor-in-Chief about the decision (which you can read in full here). 

That action brought the conversation around the book to a fever pitch with people weighing in on both sides. Though the criticism of this book was fierce, the author had many defenders who compared Kirkus’ actions to—you guessed it—censorship. The author made things infinitely worse by publicly cheering these commenters on. As far as I can tell, Moriarty made no attempt to meaningfully address the concerns of her critics.

There’s a lot to be said about when and how an author should address blowback to a book but in my view, it’s never a good look to get defensive and jump into the fracas without a clear message.

So, what can we learn from this?

I think this exemplifies two of the solid arguments around the practice of sensitivity readers: that using them is in no way a free pass and the practice may be used to enable writers to tell a story they’re not equipped to tell because it feels ‘timely’.

Though the Kirkus response feels a bit muddled, they obviously were doing what they felt was in the best interest of their reputation and authority as a reviewing body. Again, not censorship.

The Continent

This debit novel from author Kiera Drake was originally scheduled for a 2017 release from Harlequin. The hype started early with this one, with Publisher’s Weekly reporting a ‘significant’ (which is code for between $250-500k) three-book deal for Drake.  

The Continent is a sci-fi YA novel about a sixteen-year-old who goes on a helicopter tour of a place called The Continent where two “uncivilized” tribes are locked in perpetual war. Her helicopter crashes and she’s rescued by one of the inhabitants. She goes on to save his people from ruin.

Early readers were horrified by the depictions of the two “uncivilized” tribes which were coded as Native American and Asian respectively. The tribe called the “Topi” (one troubling letter off from Hopi) was described as having reddish-brown skin, smearing their faces with war paint, and savagely attacking people with arrows. The other tribe was described as having ninja-like skills and—god help us—almond-shaped eyes.

Kiera Drake—a mid-forties woman living in Salt Lake City— was reportedly unaware of the conversation around diversity and publishing and thus was completely caught off guard by the criticism. When she saw the early reviews, she was dismayed and asked her editor to delay publication while she rewrote the book.

In the meantime, the online debate continued apace with Drake’s husband jumping in for a Twitter rant in which he called YA author Justina Ireland—who’d written a Twitter blow-by-blow about the book—a “bigoted troll” (he and Drake are now separated, so make of that what you will.) It’s worth noting that while many people have called Ireland’s criticism “bullying”, she received rape threats, death threats, a flood of one-star reviews for her own books and even someone emailing her editor to urge him to drop her. All for writing tweets about a book she (and many others) felt relied on racist tropes and stereotypes.

Drake eventually revised the book and moved forward with its release. This version appears to have addressed minor issues such as calling the “savage” tribe the Xoe instead of Topi, removing their war paint, removing descriptions of “almond shaped eyes” and the like and making her protagonist slightly more ethnically ambiguous

Here’s what Laila Shapiro—who interviewed the major players in this drama for an excellent piece in Vulture—had to say about the effectiveness of those efforts:

Drake told me that she took heart from the fact that her sensitivity readers “loved” the revision and just suggested a few minor “tweaks.” But when I spoke to one of the two sensitivity readers Harlequin had hired, she recalled sending suggestions for an extensive rewrite to Wilson, who was reluctant to pass them along to Drake. According to the reader, Wilson said she felt that they’d already put Drake through the wringer, and that another page-one revision would be too onerous. Publishers often cite their hiring of sensitivity readers as proof that they’ve done due diligence, but they pay as little as $250 per read, and they’re always free to ignore the sensitivity reader’s suggestions. Once the reader sends in their notes, they have no control over whether or how that advice is put to use.

I wanted to give this author credit for trying to do the right thing, but it appears she threw in the towel halfway through.

My biggest conclusion here is that sensitivity readers only work if you listen to them, and an author who starts out being completely unaware of this conversation probably just doesn’t have the range for a story like this. If anyone could have salvaged this book’s storyline, it likely wouldn’t have been Drake, at least without a lot more work.

Taproot of Frustration

What’s more important to grasp than the details of any individual scandal here is that this outrage isn’t just about these books. Rather, it’s about an industry that continues to value white authors and racist books over own voices.

“YA Twitter Drama articles hinge on two foundational ideas: one, that the criticism isn’t valid, and two, that the criticism comes from Mean Girl-style antics instead of actual literary analysis.” – Justina Ireland (Medium)

These conversations can get heated, so I think it’s crucial to keep turning back to the data, which tells a consistent story of underrepresentation and marginalization for BIPOC authors and publishing professionals. The problem is real. The frustration is real. The specter of censorship? Not so much.  

As I’ve noted, most of the scandals have taken place within the somewhat insular world of YA and Children’s Lit.

And thennnnn, American Dirt happened.

That’s coming up next week!

Read More:

American Heart, Huck Finn, and the Trap of White Supremacy / Medium

Books by Muslim Authors to Read Instead of American Heart / Buzzfeed

Can You Revise a Book to Make it More Woke / Vulture

 Meet Justina Ireland / Vulture

Case Studies Part One: A Birthday Cake for George Washington and When We Was Fierce

As I was reading up on sensitivity readers, there were four books that came up again and again.  So today I’m getting busy serving up some extremely cold several-years-old scandal. The fact that these books were still being name-checked in op-eds from this year should tell you something about the frequency of the “censorship” that’s been wrought by the “tyranny” of sensitivity reading, but I digress.

These books were held up by the group of detractors making the “censorship” case as examples of wokeness run amok. Because most of this conversation happened in the YA blogosphere and Twitterverse where I don’t spend much time, they mostly escaped my notice when they happened. So, when these same four titles kept coming up, I wanted to dig them up for a little post-mortem to see if there were any useful takeaways.

For most authors (other than Lionel Shriver, who seems to live for it) getting called out for being unintentionally racist, homophobic, etc. is a nightmare scenario, so, though the schadenfreude around these cases can get intense, I think it can also help us illuminate our own blind-spots and also teach us something about where publishing is falling short when it comes to race and representation. Which it is. By a lot.

As with everything on this topic, the more I dug into these four cases studies, the more there was to unpack, so I’m splitting this into two posts. First, I’m going to cover the only two books used as examples that I could find that were actually pulled or cancelled (literally cancelled, not ‘cancelled’, a term I recently learned originated from this hilarious Joanne the Scammer skit—don’t you think it would delight her to know how much sleep Tucker Carlson has lost over it? I do.)

I’m summarizing the controversies here, but have included links below which I highly recommend.

Okay, in we go!

A Birthday Cake for George Washington

The first title that came up consistently was A Birthday Cake for George Washington, released by Scholastic Press on January 1, 2016. This children’s picture book depicts George Washington’s chef Hercules and his daughter—both slaves owned by Washington—baking a cake for their master. The book is cheerful and depicts them as happy and taking a lot of pride in their work.

This book came out hot on the heels of A Fine Dessert a children’s book with similar themes that was produced by an all-white team. Interestingly, the author of A Birthday Cake for George Washington, Ramin Ganeshram, as well as the illustrator and editor on this book were all women of color.

The negative reaction to the book was swift, with readers concerned that depicting images of happy, contented slaves could mislead children about the horrors of slavery

Both the author and editor wrote impassioned defenses of the book (which have been since deleted by I found quoted here) saying that their intention had been to uplift the work of a man who was considered the first celebrity chef in America and that, essentially, there was nuance to the status that some slaves held in relation to others. However, even in the author’s note, Ganeshram mentions that Hercules eventually escaped and left his daughter behind, which belies the idea that he was happy there.

Scholastic ended up pulling the book and, in a statement, said that they respected "integrity and scholarship of the author, illustrator, and editor" but without more context on the "evils of slavery," the book may leave kids with "a false impression of the reality of the lives of slaves."

Given the stellar reputations of those involved with this book (the editor x won a Coretta Scott King Award), it’s hard to doubt the sincerity of the creators’ intentions here. But intention never counts for as much as impact. As authors, we all have to live with the fact that we don’t get to accompany our books into the world to explain what we meant. So, while I can sympathize with the creators, the criticism seems well-founded, and I certainly can’t imagine buying a book featuring happy slaves for my daughter.

When We Was Fierce

Next up, we’ve When We Was Fierce was slated to come out in fall of 2016 from Candlewick Press. This YA novel from bestselling Mexican-American author e. E. Charlton-Trujillo chronicled the struggles of a group of young black men in was she described as a “hyper realist” America. The novel was written in verse in a made-up dialect that resembles African American Vernacular English (or Ebonics). The author had this to say about the prose:

“Right from the jump, I could hear the music of T’s world that hadn’t existed in YA before. Slang can become dated quick, so I had a unique opportunity to incorporate some slang along with a new vernacular.””

Hype always leads to increased scrutiny and this book got loads of it, including raves from Teenreads, Kirkus, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal—which are pretty much all the trade reviews you can get advance reviews from.  Publishers Weekly called the book a “heartbreaking and powerful modern American story,” and Kirkus said it was “...a compassionate, forceful look at the heartbreak and choices these black boys and men face.”

(It will not shock you to know that book review departments have their own issues with race, but that’s a topic for another day. ) 

Anyhow, the trouble started when early readers and bloggers got ahold of the book and began summarily ripping it to shreds.

Unsurprisingly, the imagined AAVE was a major sticking point and while much of the book has been scrubbed, reviews of the book remain including this one from Jennifer Baker (author, activist, and creator and host of the excellent Minorities in Publishing podcast). Here are a few of the examples she includes of what this prose actually sounded like:

o   I was midspeak when I got an interrupt.

o   My think go to racing

o   So, you aren’t worried about Catch in speak with Nacho?

If you can make heads or tails of what Charlton-Trujillo was trying to do here, God speed.

As many reviewers pointed out, AAVE is very much a real linguistic form with a rich history and rules like any other language (if you’re interested in a great deep dive on AAVE and the Ebonics controversy, I highly recommend listening to You’re Wrong About’s episode on it).

Edi Campbell, a reference librarian, literacy activist and blogger, had this to say about the imagined AAVE:

“Typically, when I read black vernacular, I can hear it in my head as spoken by someone in my life and it resonates as a home to me. It is a language with a pattern in how nouns and verbs relate, tense is express and how verbs are conjugated.”

Readers’ issues didn’t end with the prose however, as they felt the book was also full of harmful stereotypes: a pregnant teen, a fragile hard-working single mom, an abusive dad, etc. Again Campbell:

“What adds to the perception of the characters in this story being marionettes is the quick and not at all insightful references to Black Lives Matter and those lost. Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray”

Ultimately, Candlewick announced that the author had pulled the book ‘to work on it further’ but since the book has not materialized in the four years since, I think we can presume it DOA.

This Coffee is Cancelled

So, these books were ultimately pulled but were they censored?

Nope.

The publishers could have made the decision to stand by the books (as publishers do all the time with offensive or controversial books) but likely decided the damage control wasn’t worthwhile. Or perhaps, in the case of Candlewick, they wanted to proceed by the author decided it wasn’t worth the hit to her reputation and/ or had genuine regrets. It’s hard to speculate, but ultimately, book publishing is a business and readers are the consumers, and everyone here acted accordingly.

Read More: 

Publishers Pulling Offensive Books is Just Good Business – Book Riot

Confessions of a Sensitivity Reader – Tablet Mag  

Publisher delays YA novel amid row over invented black 'street dialect' – The Guardian

Review: When We Was Fierce - Edi Campbell

Controversy Around Sensitivity Readers Part Two: Solid Arguments

Last week, I went through what I see to be some of the specious arguments against the practice of using sensitivity reader (these arguments tended to also rope in the general pushback on books for being racist or otherwise culturally insensitive). The handwriting over any of this being a slippery slope to censorship is deliberately obtuse, in my opinion, but there are some arguments that sensitivity readers could be making things worse on the representation front, rather than better. And that’s what I want to explore today.

I’m going to be quoting a couple of very smart people who are far more immersed in the business of sensitivity reading than I am. I highly recommend reading the full articles, which I’ve included below.

Deprioritizing Own Voices

“When our various manuscripts enter the publishing gauntlet, the system, that’s when we see institutional racism, bigotry, homophobia and ableism at work.” – Dhonielle Clayton told The Guardian.

Nowhere did I find anyone arguing that writers never write across cultures, but when books by white writers about the experiences of marginalized groups are being chosen instead of books by writers who belong to those groups, that’s a problem.

This circles back to that thorny mechanism of comp titles, and the fact that publishers often perceive white authors as having a broader audience regardless of the topic. And with racial tension being perceived a “hot” topic at the moment, you can see where these forces would collide in a bad way. Indeed, we saw a very high-profile of this with this year’s American Dirt: a book by a white, American author that was touted as not a story about migrants on the Southern border but the story about migrants on the Southern border. Yikes.

People Use Sensitivity Readers as a Free Pass  

“They are using them as shields,” says Debbie Reese “The writers are doing it and so are their publishers and editors. What they are not saying is that a sensitivity reader might have said ‘do not do this’. Instead, they can say, honestly, that a sensitivity reader worked with them. They don’t have to mention that the sensitivity reader said ‘stop’.”

As I’ve mentioned before, sensitivity readers are consultants and do not serve as gatekeepers of any kind. Publishers and authors don’t have to take any of the feedback they offer. Hiring a reader and ignoring their feedback is like throwing a lifejacket in the back of the boat and assuming it will save you from drowning regardless of whether you ever put it on.

And, of course, even if a sensitivity reader’s feedback is incorporated, no reader is monolith. What offends one woman or black person or disabled person might not offend someone else from that group. Some readers are easily offended, some are not.  

Writing always comes with a risk, and the certainly writing cross-culturally is a steeper challenge than writing within the confines of your own identity. That’s not to say you shouldn’t do it. I’ll keep saying it: no one is telling you not to! But you don’t get to throw your sensitivity reader under the bus if something offends someone. The buck stops with you.   

It Won’t Fix Publishing’s Race Issues

“sensitivity reading is a band-aid over a hemorrhaging problem in our industry. That’s what we should really be talking about — that’s what real censorship looks like. The systematic erasure and blockage of people of color from the publishing industry.”—Dhonielle Clayton

Perhaps the biggest criticism of the sensitivity reader is the idea that anyone could think this would fix what’s broken about publishing. Hiring consultants to make sure that (mostly) white authors get the details of marginalized communities right is not going to make a difference to the paucity of books from those communities in the first place; the punting of those writers to smaller presses; or the lack of BIPOC behind the scenes. These are systemic issues in book publishing and the conversation around them isn’t new. We should all be supporting organizations such as We Need Diverse Books, POC in Publishing, and Latinx in Publishing, who are pushing for real change in addition to making sure our own books don’t cause damage.  

So, should we NOT hire sensitivity readers?

As I said in my first post, if you are writing about a marginalized group that you’re not a member of, hiring a sensitivity reader is probably a good idea even though all of the above criticisms are valid. Hiring a reader can still help you not put harmful content into the world.

There are good questions to ask yourself about your intentions in telling a certain story or writing a certain character (and I will get to them!) and a sensitivity reader doesn’t take the place of good research, but as with any situation where you’re writing about something you don’t know intimately—be it a foreign language, a subculture, or another race or sexuality—talking to an actual human with knowledge of it is just good practice.

A word to the wise here, even if you are working with a major publisher do not expect them to save you from yourself. Your name is on the book, you need to do your best to make sure it’s hitting the mark. Publishers are often not equipped to catch these issues, as we will see next week when I start digging into case studies!

Additional Reading:

Meet Publishing’s Sensitivity Readers - The Guardian

Sensitivity Readers – What the Job is Really Like - Vulture

BIPOC to Publishing: We’re Not Okay - Publisher’s Weekly

How 10 Women of Color Actually Feel About Working in Book Publishing - Bustle

Controversy Around Sensitivity Readers: Part 1

As I mentioned in my first post on this topic, wading into the arena of sensitivity readers immediately had me feeling as though I’d bitten off a bit more than I could chew. I am by no means positioning myself as an expert on this topic, and will continue to encourage you to check out the work of folks like Patrice Caldwell, Dhonielle Clayton, and Jennifer Baker, as well as everyone over at We Need Diverse Books as they’ve been hugely helpful to me wrapping my head around some of this.

As always, I hope to help us wade through these issues together, bringing along my unique perspective as an author and onetime publishing professional and my continued curiosity about how we can make book publishing better. Onward!

As I parsed through the controversy around sensitivity readers, I found myself sorting the arguments into two buckets: the bad faith hand-wringing and the thoughtful, legitimate critique. Of course, there was some crossover, but I think most people generally fell on one side or the other of this debate.

I should say that, of course, this all my personal opinion and I’m not here to speak for anyone or censor them (for God’s sake). I’m including lots of links here, so do feel free to go down the rabbit hole and make up your own mind.  

My own evolution on the topic

I confess that when sensitivity readers first became a widely-used practice (2015-ish), I was skeptical of it. I confess having my own instinctive defensiveness on the topic; which in retrospect seems like the fear and fragility many white writers I have when we think of being called out for stereotyping or being unintentionally racist. In their excellent treatise Writing the Other Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward call this the “liberal dread of the racist label”.

Knowing what I do about publishing, I also worried that use the practice was a band-aid to deal with its inherent racial biases and systemic issues, which were first given some solid data by the Lee & Lowe study that came out around that same time. Interesting, I think this duality pretty well reflects the two sides of this argument. I’ve evolved a great deal on the topic, and I’ll get to that in a future video

But today I want to present, if you will, what the bad-faith case against sensitivity readers looks like

Who’s Making the Case?

For this first side of the argument, I’m pulling from a series of articles and op-eds I found on the subject. Allow me to introduce you to the three main detractors I’m quoting from we’ve got:  

o   Ryan Holiday: bestselling author of The Daily Stoic, Ego is the Enemy, former marketing director of American Apparel and former editor at the New York Observer. Holiday had what sounded like a positive unremarkable experience with a sensitivity reader and yet still found the need to write a long op-ed about why the practice shouldn’t exist in 2019

o   Francine Prose: lauded American novelist, onetime PEN American Center president, and other fancy credentials-haver who wrote an op-ed for the New York Review of Books called “The Problem with Problematic” in 2017

o   Lionel Shriver: author of the bestselling novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, professional provocateur, and patron saint of literary bad takes. Shriver wore a sombrero to give a keynote (to protest censorship?) and wrote a piece called “We Need to Talk About Sense and Sensitivity Readers” (wow) for The Guardian in 2017

As you can see from their impressive bios, all three of these detractors are high-profile and powerful in their own right. I wanted to begin with this who’s-who because as I’ll explain, the power dynamics here are everything.

So, what do these arguments look like?

It’s Censorship

“The sensitivity readers who get to decide which books are and are not okay to publish, and which words can be said and in what context are burning books—along with the fearful authors and publishers who empower them in their eagerness to avoid trouble.” –Holiday

It’s undeniable that the literary voices of marginalized communities have been underrepresented in the publishing world, but the lessons of history warn us about the dangers of censorship. Unless they are written about by members of a marginalized group, the harsh realities experienced by members of that group are dismissed as stereotypical, discouraging writers from every group from describing the world as it is, rather than the world we would like. – Prose

It’s not clear that authors are equally free to ignore the censoriousness of “sensitivity readers”, to whom some American editors are currently sending unpublished work for review. ...There’s a thin line between combing through manuscripts for anything potentially objectionable to particular subgroups and overt political censorship.–Shriver

The buzzword that came up again and again in these arguments was that this practice of hiring sensitivity readers somehow amounted to, or put us on a dangerous road to, censorship. Which, for anyone who needs a reminder, means the suppression or prohibitive works.

This argument deliberately misreads the power relationship here between publishers and sensitivity readers. Just as any other beta reader or consultant might, sensitivity readers wield no veto power and are generally paid between 250-500 per read. They do not hold any kind of gatekeeping role.

In the rare cases, publishers have pulled or delayed books because readers (as in consumers, not sensitivity readers) found them offensive, but that’s a different question (and one that still has nothing to do with censorship). In an era when self-publishing tools are widely available, you can easily get your book out into the world. Might it be less widely distributed? Seen as less credible? Sure! Sorry, book publishing is a business and things don’t get traditionally published for all kinds of reasons.

The bottom line here is that this is censorship like revoking your weird uncle’s invite to the family BBQ after he goes on a racist rant on Facebook is a violation of his first amendment rights

It’s PC Nonsense and Virtue Signaling

“Writers…are not hiring sensitivity readers because their primary concern is other people’s feelings, but because they don’t want to be the next victim of mob justice. Or because they are trying, consciously or otherwise, to advertise their progressive bona fides to their perceived audience.” – Holiday

“Moby-Dick might not exist if a sensitivity reader had objected to Melville’s depiction of the indigenous Queequeg,…should we “dismiss Madame Bovary because Flaubert lacked ‘lived experience’ of what it meant to be a restless provincial housewife”? – Prose

We are literally turning umbrage into an industry. When you reward touchiness, you only get more of it. Thus even after these manuscripts are purified, someone out there is bound to find more transgressions in the published version. – Shriver

I often find that people complaining about things being too PC just want to be able to punch down without consequence and that certainly seems to be the case here. Getting the details of a culture right rather than relying on tired tropes and stereotypes may be politically correct but it’s also just better writing. (I also find it funny that we continue to use the term “politically correct” when political discourse is such a mud-slinging dumpster fire, but I digress…) And as for virtue signaling: readers neither know nor care if you used a sensitivity reader, only whether you’ve written something that feels authentic and inclusive or hurtful and alienating.

I also find it notable that these writers use words like “tyranny, censorship, mob rule” to describe consultants who send thoughtful, carefully worded feedback which they can easily ignore, and/ or readers who on Twitter who are mad at them.

What a bunch of snowflakes, amirite? 

It’s Inhibiting to Writers and will Make Us All Cowards

The other (and perhaps only?) real reason a writer might hire a sensitivity reader is to get permission to write their story. To be able to claim that they had received the green light from the Committee For The People’s Books. This is beyond cowardly and pathetic, and more offensive to the creation of art than any art that has ever offended. –Holiday

Literature will survive online social media bullying just as it has survived book burning and state censorship. One of the ugliest aspects of bullying is the way the aggressor finds easy targets and avoids the bigger, tougher challenges. But these attacks—and capitulations—may make it harder for us to champion the importance of the imagination at a time when we so urgently need to imagine a way to solve the larger crises that face us.—Prose

At the keyboard, unrelenting anguish about hurting other people’s feelings inhibits spontaneity and constipates creativity. The ghost of a stern reader gooning over one’s shoulder on the lookout for slights fosters authorial cowardice. Some writers terrified of giving offence will opt to concoct sanitized characters from “marginalized groups” who are universally above reproach. Others will retreat altogether from including characters with backgrounds different from their own, just to avoid the humiliation of having their hands slapped if they get anything “wrong.” –Shriver

I found this argument the most interesting because it is, at least on its face, an argument about creativity and craft. But to bring us back to the idea of “the liberal fear of the racist label”, it occurs to me that these writers are more afraid of being called a racist than of being racist. It’s not the validity of the concern, but the indignance at having to listen to it that bristles. No one likes to think they might be being accidentally racist, but if the idea of working with a sensitivity reader fills you with fear, that should tell you something

It bears repeating that this is all just a form of feedback and if you’re unable to hear feedback you don’t like and carry on, you are in the wrong profession as an author.

The idea that working with sensitivity readers or otherwise trying to write content that doesn’t punch down at a marginalized culture is somehow cowardly is absurd. It takes, as many of us are discovering, bravery to open ourselves up to authentic and difficult conversations around race, especially where it concerns our own beliefs or work.  

Fantasy Debate Rebuttal

At the end of the day, you can write any old thing you want and Prose, Holiday, Shriver, and their numerous fellow detractors know this. People publish racist, sexist, offensive content all the time. They should be allowed to do so, but not without criticism.

Added up, these arguments are a smoke screen. These authors are using violent language and images to suggest that the people in power are actually the victims of something. Much like the dreaded “cancel culture” literary death by sensitivity exists chiefly in the imaginations of people who fear losing the privilege to say whatever they what with no consequences. Perhaps they long for the days when writers like Norman Mailer could run around saying things such as: “A little bit of rape is good for a man’s soul” and have his career continue unimpeded.

The truth is that the power balance in this relationship is firmly on the side of publishers and authors, especially high-profile ones like those I’ve quoted here. And to suggest that you are being censored or otherwise victimized when you’re in a position of power? That’s cowardly.

In Their Own Words:

Ryan Holiday: The Problem with Sensitivity Readers

Francine Prose: The Problem with Problematic

Lionel Shriver: We Need to Talk About Sense and Sensitivity Readers

A Primer on Sensitivity Readers

If you’ve had anything to do with Young Adult or Children’s Literature over the past five years or so, you’ve likely heard about sensitivity readers in rather exhaustive detail. The practice has become increasingly common in adult literature as well, but I’ve found that it’s often misunderstood or unfairly maligned (I’ll get to that).

I started off to do a simple, instructive post explaining what a sensitivity reader is and why an author might hire one. However, in doing research to supplement what I know about the practice, I found myself almost immediately in the weeds. There’s been a lot of controversy over sensitivity readers (albeit mostly in the tempest teapots of the Twitter-verse and op-ed spheres); and I thought this was well worth unpacking because sensitivity readers—along with the online call-outs they’re meant to guard against—exist right at the intersection of race, representation, and book publishing.

As I’ve discussed extensively over the summer—representation of marginalized groups in publishing is abysmal. As you can imagine, this leads to some truly out of touch and downright offensive content not only being released form big five publishers, but being celebrated and given a massive marketing push (examples forthcoming, HOLD ONTO YOUR HATS!). Sensitivity readers are meant to help bridge the gap between the cloistered, monochrome publishing world and the actual world in which the readers of those books exist. Understanding who they are and what they do—as well as the conversations around the practice—is important as both an author and a consumer of books. Away we go:

What is a sensitivity reader and what do they do?

A sensitivity reader is essentially a beta reader (someone who reads a manuscript pre-publication) who is a member a marginalized group and is hired to read a manuscript specifically with an eye toward problematic issues concerning the way that group is portrayed. This can include problematic tropes, stereotypes, inaccuracies, and offensive portrayals. I’m not alone in wishing the name was different—sensitivity reader sounds a little like something Tucker Carlson would dream up and I find it doesn’t quite do justice to what these readers do. I’ve also heard these referred to as cultural consultants—which I prefer—but since sensitivity reader is the most common term, that’s the one I’m going with.

Examples?

So, what kinds of things might a sensitivity reader be looking for? It obviously depends on the manuscript and the reader, but they may have an eye towards broad issues like tropes and stereotypes. Does your white protagonist have, for example, a ‘sassy black friend’ who exists only to further the former’s narrative? Or perhaps her bestie is a flamboyant gay man who works as an interior designer? Is your book falling into a white savior narrative or does your story feature happy slaves? Readers also might have an eye toward overused and offensive descriptors for characters of color, think ‘almond-shaped eyes’ for Asian characters or comparing the skin of characters of color to various types of foods.  

Sensitivity Readers Add Value

A common misconception about sensitivity readers is that they exist just to scold a writer for being prejudiced. But, as with any other expert you might consult for a book, they can also help add and refine details to make your story ring true. Any writer knows that the believability of characters hinges upon the details. For example, I interviewed four different professional skiers to get detail about that culture—with which I had only a passing knowledge—for We Came Here to Forget. If you haven’t written something outright offensive, you don’t want a jarring detail about dialog, hair products, food, etc. to take your readers out of the moment, a sensitivity reader can help you nail those details. 

Cultural Appropriation

I’m working on some practical advice for trans-cultural writing for a future post, but it’s important to touch on the concept of cultural appropriation at the outset. If you you’re using a sensitivity reader, you’re likely a member of a dominant culture (i.e. white, male, straight, cis) who’s borrowing from a marginalized one. No one is suggesting that you shouldn’t write characters outside of your identity; outright exclusion of any culture other than your own is not a good solution. However, it is tricky to write about cultures you’re not a part of and will take some extra work because the culture around you has not set you up for success. Writers are, at the end of the day, solo artists, so unless we want to work with co-writers, we have to rely on research, expert consultants, and editors to help us get it right. Sensitivity readers can be extremely helpful as part of this team.

Understanding Own Voices

A key piece of framing for this conversation is understanding “Own Voices” and the lack of representation in book publishing. Own Voices began as a hashtag created by sci-fi writer Corinne Duyvis; which is used to recommend books in which “the protagonist and the author share a marginalized identity” and steer readers away from books in which those identities are being portrayed in a problematic way by an author who is not a part of that group. It emerged in response to a slew of controversies around various children’s books in 2015, around the same time the concept of using sensitivity readers became mainstream. Much of this conversation originated in the world of Children’s Lit and YA, where for obvious reasons there is added scrutiny given the impressionable audience. Own Voices has since broadened to encompass reviewers as well and has become something of a shorthand for representation in publishing.  

A Response to Lack of Representation

I’ve discussed this in detail, but it’s worth a quick recap of just how bad the numbers are in book publishing really are. As of the well-regarded Lee & Lowe survey in 2019, 76% of the overall industry is white, along with 86% of editorial (the people who choose the books and work most closely with authors).  The industry’s bias is reflected by its overwhelming tendency to use white “comp titles” to make purchasing decisions and results in big disparities in author advances, and less visibility for BIPOC authors overall. The bottom line is, as an author, you cannot rely on the publishing industry to catch problems around race and representation. Your name is ultimately the one people will remember and you need to take accountability for how you’re representing characters and cultures. As you will see when I delve into the case studies, plenty of extremely troubling content makes its way through the publishing process.

When Might You Need to Hire a Sensitivity Reader  

If a main character—especially one you’re writing from the perspective of, and especially if you’re writing in their voice—is part of a marginalized group you’re not a part of, or if a big theme, plot point, or setting has to do with a marginalized group, it’s probably a good idea to hire a reader in addition to doing lots of research on your own first. Listen, if you were writing big blocks of French as a non-native speaker, you’d want someone to take a look, right? You wouldn’t just run it through Google Translate and all it a day. Hiring a reader can keep you from writing harmful content AND make your writing on that character or culture more authentic, which just makes for a better book.

Keep in Mind

Hiring one, or two, or a dozen sensitivity readers to go through your manuscript does not give you immunity. No one reader can speak for an entire identity, obviously. Sensitivity readers are one tool to help you on your way. You are still responsible for your work so don’t even think of throwing your reader under the bus if you get called out.

Ultimately, sensitivity readers are a band-aid and will not fix publishing’s representation problems. We should all be pushing for book publishing to get its act together on this issue, but since it’s unlikely that things will magically be fixed before your or my next book comes out, sensitivity readers are still a good idea.

Read More:

·       A great interview with Dhonielle Clayton, author, publishing entrepreneur, and one of the chief executives of We Need Diverse Books who has been a sensitivity reader for high-profile authors such as Jodi Picoult. What the Job of Sensitivity Reader is Really Like

·       A thoughtful piece on the problems sensitivity readers are meant to address, as well as the ones they might create: Meet Publishing’s Sensitivity Readers

The Controversy Around #PublishingPaidMe

In early June as conversations around police brutality and racial disparities across industries hit a fever pitch, book publishing came face-to-face with a significant indicator of its own shabby treatment of BIPOC writers. During a Twitter conversation with fellow YA author Tochi Onyebuchi about unfair treatments of black authors, L.L. McKinney created #PublishingPaidMe to encourage authors to share the advances they received from publishers.

Even for those of us who’ve been around the publishing block long enough to expect disparity, the results were pretty mind blowing.

Just as a refresher, here’s how a book advance works. An advance on royalties in the big lump sum an author gets when a publisher buys their book. It’s calculated by the editor making an educated guess on how many copies a book might sell by looking at what similar books—or the book’s comp titles—have sold and then working backwards from there.  

For example, say you think a book can sell 10 thousand copies based on what other books like it have sold. If the author’s portion of each book is one dollar, then you can confidently offer that author a ten-thousand-dollar advance and expect to make that money back. The author gets the advance upfront— usually in three to four installments—and that’s all they make until the book has “earned through” meaning the book has sold ten thousand copies, thus making back the advance. Any additional books sold will earn the author an additional dollar in royalties.

Acquiring editors put together a profit and loss (P&L) statement to present when buying a book to demonstrate these calculations. Sometimes there are other numbers such as the author’s previous book sales, but comps weigh heavily especially if it’s a debut. If this sound like a pretty subjective, inexact way of determining what a book is worth, it is!

I love this quote from Vox’s Constance Grady in her piece about the hashtag  

“Sales projections are based on real numbers, like the sales history of comparative titles. But publishers decide which books are similar to which, and hence which monumental successes should be taken into account and which failures should be ignored, through hunches and guesswork and educated bullshitting.”

It’s worth nothing that only thirty percent of books earn through their advance. Which isn’t to say that editors don’t know what they’re doing, just that it’s very hard to guess what a book will sell roughly two years before it hits the market. Imagine being back in 2018 and trying to predict how the market might receive literally any book this year. Exactly.

So, obviously advances matter because for the majority of authors, that’s all they’ll be paid for a book. A big advance can mean an author can set aside more time to promote their book, write a follow-up, or just, you know pay bills and live their life. But advances also determine how much of a publisher marketing resources a book will get, meaning they can be self-fulfilling prophecies.

Okay, on to the hashtag.

Authors across a variety of genres and identities showed support by disclosing what they made for their books. Some shared publicly and some added their information to an anonymous spreadsheet. To understand what a big deal this outpouring was, it’s crucial to understand just how secretive publishers can be about advances. Even our industry’s major trade publication, Publisher’s Weekly, has a kind of secret code that use to denote the range of the advance for a book when the deal is announced: using  “nice deal” (or no adjective) to indicate under $50k, “very nice deal” $50-$99k, “good deal” $100-$250k, “significant” $250-$499, and  “major” for $500+.

Obviously, data collected from a hashtag is going to be incomplete but it’s still telling. The New York Times crunched the spreadsheet data and found that of the 122 writers who said they earned at least 100k on an advance, 78 of them identified as white, seven as black and two said they as Latinx.

Yikes.

What got even more people talking were some of the big names who shared. Roxane Gay—who I think of as a household name—received 15k for Bad Feminist, which went on to become a NYT bestseller. Meanwhile white author Mandy Len Catron was paid 400k for her debut How to Fall in Love with Anyone, which sold on the basis on one viral essay. That’s a little more than 26 times what Roxane Gay made.

Jesmyn Ward—the preeminent American writer who has won the National Book Award twice—got 20k for Salvage the Bones and revealed that she had to wrestle to get 100k even AFTER winning the National Book Award. Contrast that with white author Chip Cheek who shared that that he received 800k for his debut novel Cape May. That’s nearly forty times as much if you’re counting.

It should be said that both Catron and Cheek seemed also horrified by the disparity and were good sports about the many follow up tweets wondering who they even were.

These were far from the only such examples. And though I wasn’t shocked by the fact of the disparities—and its worth noting that six-figure advances are rare regardless of race—I was still taken aback by just how wide they were.

What this shows us is the downstream effect of the disparities in the industry itself. It’s easy to see how an industry where 86% of the key decision makers (acquiring editors) are white, and the vast majority of the books being used as comp titles to make those decisions are by white authors (around 95% according to Stanford’s Laura B. McGrath) BIPOC authors wouldn’t be treated equitably.

As liberal and progressive as publishing likes to think it is, it’s an American industry and it carries all the history of systemic oppression that every industry in this country does. None of us should be shocked, but we should all be angry.  

L.L. McKinney summed it up best:

“I want black authors to be paid what they’re worth. I want publishing to shift its idea of what a universal story is. White stories are seen as universal. Black stories are seen as niche. Why is that?”

Book Publishing and Race Part One: The Numbers

Book Publishing and Race: Part 2

Today I want to dig into the issue of “comp titles” (comparative or comparable titles) and how they intersect with race and inclusion in publishing. This may look from the outside like an industry specific topic, but comp titles have huge implications for how books are purchased by publishers, positioned in the market, and ultimately marketed to readers.

If you have anything to do with books and publishing, you’ll know that comp titles come up constantly. A comp title is basically a previously published (usually successful) book that you’re using to explain in short order who the audience for an as-yet unpublished book. For example, you might say: Unpublished Thriller A is like Gone Girl meets The Da Vinci Code, using the latter two titles to demonstrate that Thriller A will have wide appeal in the existing marketplace and that it will sell however many copies it needs to in order to justify the advance you want to pay the author.

The conversation around comp title starts early in the process: authors use comp titles to query agents, then agents use them to pitch editors, then editors use them to make a pitch to their bosses in house. Comps often then become embedded in the DNA of the marketing plans for a book and can affect everything from cover designs to marketing budgets.

Readers who don’t know much about the behind-the-scenes of book publishing may not think much about comp titles. But at this moment, we’re all becoming aware of the inequities within the various industries that create the products we consume, and the biases in the media we consume. Book publishing is at the crossroads of two of these things, and understanding the disparities in comp titles is crucial to our understanding of the disparities that happen downstream.  

This matters not only for those of us with a stake in book publishing but as a foundational cultural matter. Reading Imbram X. Kendi’s masterwork Stamped from the Beginning, I was struck by how many times books came up—from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Souls of Black Folk etc.—as being crucial carriers of racist ideas and/ or radical anti-racist thought.

If we all agree that books matter, then we can agree that it matters very much how they get made.

So, as mentioned above, comp titles are a key mechanism that editors us to lobby a book to their bosses and teams when they want to buy a book from an author. Sometimes they may have actual numbers on hand—sales from that authors previous books or some other information about that author’s platform—but with fiction, much of the decision making is both speculative and intuitive, with the editor’s “good eye” carrying more or less weight depending how high on the food chain they are. Comp titles also help an editor make a case as to why this book is worth a ten-thousand-dollar advance, a million-dollar advance or somewhere in between. Comps are being used to say what kind of reader will go for this book, and how many of them there might be out there.

And if you can’t find any comps for a book? That’s going to be a tough sell.

Last week I talked about the fact that the vast majority of the folks having these conversations (86%) are white. Obviously we can assume that lack of diversity behind the scenes would shake out to less diversity on the shelves, but in search of some numbers that could give a better idea of HOW that’s taking place exactly, I came across an excellent piece Laura B. McGrath (an associate director of the Stanford University Literary Lab who is working on a book about the business practices of the Big Five publishing houses) wrote for the LA Review of Books in Jan 2019 called Comping White, in which she talks about the fact that it’s not only the lack of BIPOC editors behind the scenes but also a systemic issue of how books are chosen using the aforementioned comp titles: one which reinforces and perpetuates a very white status quo.

So how bad are the numbers?

McGrath dug in and identified 31,876 comps (three for each book published) over a six year period. She then winnowed this down to the top fifty most comped, a list which actually was made up of 225 books because many were comped the same number of times. Out of that list of 225 books that editors were using to position and sell books across the industry, nine were by authors of color. NINE!

She zoomed out a bit more to the top 500 most comped books and that brought the numbers up to twenty-two.

I want to reiterate here that comps are not based on sales or awards won, they’re not hard and fast, they’re descriptive but they’re used like data point.

And if you can’t find the right comps, you can’t buy the book, or get a big advance, or get a big rollout

The underpinning here is that writers of color have to ‘prove’ that their work can appeal to white audiences by ‘comping white’ as McGrath puts it, unless the book happens to be very similar to one of those very small number of books by BIPOC authors that works as a comp in this context. And the double bind of comping to an already successful BIPOC author is that authors may be met with the response of “it’s already been done”.

The upshot of all of this, of course, is that BIPOC authors are having to compete harder for a narrower set of opportunities than white authors such as myself have to.

What’s especially interesting to me about all of this is that I think that the key assumption about readers—that they only want more of what they’ve already been given—is wrong. Most readers I know purposefully and happily read across a spectrum of genres, perspectives, and categories. One of the most powerful things a book can do is help to open our eyes to a different way of looking at the world, and especially when it comes to readers, most of us want new, different, and fresh, even if we might have our go-to favorites.

I hope this helps unpack this piece of the process. Stay tuned as next week I’m getting into the controversy around the #publishingpaidme.

October Books Preview

In addition to pumpkin spice everything and death by Halloween candy, October brings with it some of the season's biggest books: including one of the most buzzed about books at this year's BEA (The Mothers) and a highly-anticipated new novel by one of the Seattle's own. Read on for my October picks! 

*PSA: one of the best things you can do for an author with a new book out is tell everyone if you love it, so don’t forget to share on you social media and review on Amazon and Goodreads.

Cruel Beautiful World by Caroline Leavitt  (October 4)

Follow Caroline on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram

Review the book on Amazon and Goodreads

It’s 1969, and 16-year-old Lucy is about to run away to live off the grid in rural Pennsylvania, a rash act that will have vicious repercussions for both her and her older sister, Charlotte. As Lucy’s default caretaker for most of their lives, Charlotte’s youth has been marked by the burden of responsibility, but never more so than when Lucy’s dream of a rural paradise turns into a nightmare. CRUEL BEAUTIFUL WORLD examines the intricate, infinitesimal distance between seduction and love, loyalty and duty, and explores what happens when you’re responsible for things you cannot fix.

Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places by Colin Dickey (October 4) 

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Colin Dickey follows the trail of America’s ghosts, embarking on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places. Paying attention not only to the true facts behind a ghost story, but also to the ways in which changes to those facts are made, Dickey paints a version of American history left out of the textbooks.

Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down by Anne Valente (October 4)

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As members of the yearbook committee, Nick, Zola, Matt, and Christina are eager to capture all the memorable moments of their junior year at Lewis and Clark High School, but how do you document a deadly school shooting by a classmate? Struggling to comprehend this cataclysmic event, these four “lucky” survivors vow to honor the memories of those lost. But then, a series of mysterious house fires have hit the families of the victims one by one, and Nick, the son of the lead detective investigating the events, plunges into the case on his own.

The Wangs vs. the World by Jade Chang (October 4) 

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A brash, lovable immigrant businessman who built a cosmetics empire and made a fortune, Charles Wang has just been ruined by the financial crisis. Now all he wants is to get his kids safely stowed away so he can go to China and attempt to reclaim his family’s ancestral lands --- and his pride. Charles pulls Andrew, his aspiring comedian son, and Grace, his style-obsessed daughter, out of schools he can no longer afford. Together with their stepmother, Barbra, they embark on a cross-country road trip to the upstate New York hideout of the eldest daughter, disgraced art world it-girl Saina. But Charles may have to choose between the old world and the new, between keeping his family intact and finally fulfilling his dream of starting anew in China.

Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple (Oct 4) 

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Today, Eleanor Flood will tackle the little things. She will shower and get dressed. She will have her poetry and yoga lessons after dropping off her son, Timby. She won’t swear. She will initiate sex with her husband, Joe. But today, as it turns out, is the day Timby has decided to fake sick to weasel his way into his mother’s company, and also the day that Joe has chosen to tell his office --- but not Eleanor --- that he’s on vacation. Just when it seems like things can’t go more awry, an encounter with a former colleague produces a graphic memoir whose dramatic tale threatens to reveal a buried family secret.

The Mothers by Brit Bennett (Oct 11th) 

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Mourning her mother’s recent suicide, 17-year-old Nadia Turner takes up with the local pastor’s son. Luke Sheppard is 21, a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting tables at a diner. The pregnancy that results from this teen romance --- and the subsequent cover-up --- will have an impact that goes far beyond their youth. As Nadia hides her secret from everyone, including Aubrey, her God-fearing best friend, the years move quickly. Soon, Nadia, Luke and Aubrey are full-fledged adults and still living in debt to the choices they made that one seaside summer.

Dear Hemingway, You are not Entitled to an Audience

“People I care about are readers … particularly serious readers and writers, these are my people. And we do not like to yak about ourselves."

This quote from the ever cranky Jonathan Franzen, in a 2012 Guardian article, was aimed at those who use Twitter to talk about books, or to cultivate an audience for their books. And while there’s plenty to critique about social media, when writers like Franzen dismiss it outright, it feels like someone pulling up the ladder to the treehouse.

I work as a social media and marketing consultant, so my enthusiasm about these platforms is a given. I’ve also been a book publicist, and in that job I spent my days reaching out to the kinds of storied outlets where Franzen is more or less guaranteed coverage (The New York Times, NPR, etc.) This was a very hard job, despite the fact that I was working for a venerable publishing house (Doubleday). The expectations were high and the odds of success, even in such a privileged position, were still low for all but the most flashy and established authors. If Doubleday was the top of the heap, what did that mean for everyone else?

Enter social media. It takes dedicated, consistent, creative work to build a following online, but what social media has over traditional media is that it’s accessible. Anyone willing to do the work can find and connect with their particular audience, directly, without an institution giving them the green light. It’s no secret that systemic racism and misogyny run rampant in publishing—both books and newspapers—usually in the less blatant but still insidious form of non-inclusion. This isn’t just my impression, the VIDA count does the diligent—if depressing—work of running the numbers each year. For writers who will never be taken seriously by The Establishment because what they write about doesn’t fit the narrow definition of what’s considered serious or worthy fiction, accessibility counts for a lot when building a career.

This is why I love social media. This is also, I suspect, what makes it so easy for some writers to be dismissive of it. Without gatekeepers, they fear, the system that has propped them up so successfully will crumble into utter chaos. And though engagement with social media is more and more widely considered part of one’s job as an author, as I’ve seen, Franzen is far from alone in his attitudes.

In every social media class or panel I’ve done, there is always one. Sometimes they even seek me out deliberately, spoiling for a fight. It’s usually a man (sometimes, but only sometimes, a woman), and I know what they’re thinking when they look at me: what do you know, cheer-squad?

This guy just wants to write his books. He doesn’t want to go on Facebook and Twitter. That bullshit is for teenagers. He wants to hole up in his writing garret and await the adoration that he knows he deserves. Like Hemingway. You remember Hemingway: had four marriages, a drinking problem, and ended up killing himself. No one ever forced that guy to learn about Instagram.

Part of the irony here, of course, is that Hemingway was, by all accounts, a dedicated self-promoter with a meticulously-crafted manly man image. It’s just that this type of author branding happened to mean something quite different in the 1930’s than it does today. To pretend that Papa Hemingway’s beer ads were somehow more pure of heart than an Instagram campaign is both convenient and ridiculous.  

The work I do in my day job is centered on helping authors take control of their marketing efforts, educating them on how to be good community members, online and off. I hope to make it feel manageable and even fun. When I meet authors (both aspiring and published) at conferences and through classes I teach at my local library, I often see palpable relief when I tell them that self-promotion isn’t what they think it is. But, then there’s that one guy.

Sometimes he’s stuck in the aspiring stage for some reason (and mad about it), other times he’s published several books and feels bitter and cheated that his work hasn’t sold better. But whatever the case, he is not having it with what I’m saying.

On some level, I can empathize--I’m a novelist. I know how hard it is to create your work, endure years of rejection, only to be faced with a never-ending to-do list of marketing tasks; all while likely maintaining a day gig. But that is the job: if you don’t like it, do something else.

Some days, I’ll try to unravel Mr. Hemingway’s logic; others, I’ll just focus on the students with better attitudes. Regardless, here’s what I’m really thinking about Hemingway: Why do you think you deserve an audience? Why do you think you’re above having to convince people that they should listen to you? That they should spend their precious money and time on a story that you made up? What is so special about you that you feel that agents and publishers and critics and readers should come flocking to your door without you lifting a finger? The world is chock-full of talented writers, what makes you such a special snowflake?

Because after all, that’s the subtext of their complaints. I shouldn’t have to learn to use these tools that you’re talking about, I shouldn’t have to be friendly to bookstores and be a good patron for them to want to carry my books, I shouldn’t have to read other authors and support them in order for them to support me. I shouldn’t have to come up with a compelling hook, figure out my place in the market, and convince agents and publishers to pay attention to me by showing that I will make every effort to help them support a book they’ve chosen to pour money and resources into it. 

If these folks are already published, they often trot out one of my other favorite tired chestnuts: “My publisher didn’t do anything for me.”

Oh no? Your publisher didn’t do anything? They didn’t, perhaps, give you some money for your work up front, then give you a professional edit copyedit and cover design? They didn’t provide sales support, and distribution into bookstores, and copies of your book in print? They didn’t write you a press release, send your book to media outlets, attempt to find you audio or foreign publishers? Do you know what the real world value of all that is? I do. You’re looking at a minimum of fifteen to twenty thousand dollars for the things on that list, were you to do them on your own. I’m sorry that they weren’t able to convince The New York Times to review your book, out of the other approximately one million books that the book editor received that week. But they did nothing? Come on.

Again, I sympathize. And I do hear the occasional horror story of a publisher really derailing a book’s publication. Some writers do get screwed, just like some people in all professions get screwed. But more often when I hear someone complaining about their publisher, I listen with the same credulity I would when listening to a guy who says his ex-girlfriend is “crazy”. Oh, crazy, really? Did she threaten your life or stalk you or something? Oh, no? Oh, but she cried a lot so… 

If they’re not hating on social media specifically, then the Hemingways are likely bemoaning the unfairness of “luck.” They’ll look at a John Grisham or a Cheryl Strayed, and rather than seeing the five am mornings in the law office writing A Time to Kill or the years of scraping by and missing mortgage payments before Wild hit, they see luck. Is there luck involved in these success stories as well? Sure, but the ‘lucky’ authors I know worked hard, without recognition or gold stars, for years in anticipation of that luck so that when it came, they were ready.

I understand the fantasy of being able to simply write your books and send them out into the world, where they’ll receive unequivocal adoration. I get it. And I recognize that not everyone is preternaturally disposed to the hustle. But when that fantasy becomes an expectation? What you’ve got there is a heaping pile of entitlement.

So, my dear Hemingways, I see you there in the corner giving me the side-eye. You don’t want to hear about how you can be a good part of the publishing community, about the work you can do to support your books and your dreams. You are not buying what I’m selling. And that’s okay. I don’t suspect anyone’s buying what you’re selling, either.  

5 Questions with Social Media Whiz Kristina Libby

One of the things I love about working with social media—both for my own purposes and with clients—is that there is so much to learn. Social media moves so fast that it keeps you learning new methods and platforms all the time. My friend Kristina—who, incidentally, I first met via social media—is a fellow student of the art and one whom I’ve learned a lot from both via our long discussions on the subject and by reading her new book: which I highly recommend for authors as well as entrepreneurs.

I’m so excited to have her on the blog today to chat about her work:

1)      You’re something of a multi-hyphenate—writer, teacher, speaker, PR professional—can you give us a bit of a primer on your career thus far?

I like to say I’m passionately curious but multi-hyphenate is becoming increasingly common as the term. That curiosity has allowed me to jump from International Security (my Masters), to social media (my company), to project management (nonprofit world) and on to my most recent role heading up consumer PR at Microsoft. Just recently, I moved to Texas and am making another career leap: consulting, building a company, hosting conferences, and feeling around for what my next move will be. In the end, I follow the things that interest me and the projects that make me come alive – it’s why I got into fiction writing, but also why I served a short stint as a rodeo clown.  

2)      We both teach people how to use social media as part of our work. One thing we’ve discussed is that that a lot of people get really overwhelmed and even fearful when they’re first learning how to use these tools. How do you help people through that?

This is the number 1 reason I wrote my book. Social media is confusing because there are simply so many things you can do. What people often forget is that at the end of the day, we are all on social media because we want to sell something: our brand, our point of view, our products, etc. So, to simplify social media, you need to get back to what you are selling and how it relates to your entire vision for your business.

To do this, I created a one-page worksheet that helps you connect your social media with your business plan and in doing so streamline and simplify your social media. The book simply helps people to work through this worksheet. At the end of the day, it is not about being on every channel. It’s about being on the ones that work for you and drive the biggest business results. Don’t sweat the other stuff. Just do what you can. Your business will not succeed or fail based on your social media alone.

3)      I love your take on connecting with influencers, a term that’s become almost meaningless in its overuse. Can you talk a bit about your definition of an influencer and how someone who is just building their brand—an entrepreneur launching their first product line or an author with their debut novel—can successfully build their network?

I think working with influencers is simply a means of connecting us back to more traditional word-of-mouth sales. One hundred years ago if you were launching a business in a new town, the way to be successful would be to gain favor with the people in town who knew the most other people, those who were arbiters of style or town gossips. Those people helped you spread the word; this is just the new way of doing that.

When we talk about influencers, the ones you’re looking for are those mid-level influencers who have one or two niches they have a devoted following in. This HBR article describes it well. Essentially, you need “cross-pollinators” who help your book or product spread out of one circle into another. So look for book enthusiasts who are also cooking experts. Or look for teachers who also love YA novels. Fair warning, this is labor intensive but I’m currently developing a software to make it easier – so there is hope that soon we can simplify how to find these folks!

Once you’ve identified them, reach out, introduce yourself to them, provide value to them before you ask for anything. Grow the relationship like you would grow a friendship. Don’t just assume they want to help you because you are awesome. (You are awesome; but show them, don’t tell them). Working with influencers is a long term game so those who have a book or product launching six months or more in the future are best suited to this type of work.

4)      Let’s talk social media “don’ts”. For example, my biggest pet peeve is when people try to build up their follower count by simply following as many people as possible without actually interacting with anyone, which is tragically common. What’s something you see people doing that drives you bonkers?

People who get on social media without making a plan. It’s probably what 90% of my students do because they just want to get out there. To be successful though, you MUST connect your social media properties to a plan and that plan has to be connected to your business plan. Without it you simply won’t be as successful as you could be and that’s totally tragic. Why waste time when you don’t have time to waste?

5)      I always like to remind people that social media is supposed to be fun, even when you’re using it for work. I think it’s a good strategy to focus on the platforms you enjoy the most. I have to say, Twitter (where you and I met) was my number one for a long time, but these days, Instagram kind of has my heart. What’s your favorite platform right now and why?

I still love Twitter because I love news and great suggestions on new articles. Yet, I’m (and I hate to admit it) having a bit of social media burnout right now though. I just struggle to find the time to be active on social media and in my own life, my new business, my new puppy, etc. Not only that, but I felt myself getting too caught up in it for a while where likes and follows and responses meant a lot more than they should. So, right now I’m also following the fun rule. If it’s something I think people would love, I share. If not, and I don’t post for a few days on any platform, then I accept that too. Right now, all the social platforms feel a bit passe to me and I’m actively looking for what comes next – it’s why I’m totally obsessed with chatbots and the future of AI. I don’t believe that social media will be the same in five years. Something is looming on the horizon that will change our obsessive need to fill time with content and to get social approval for it, I’m just not sure what it is yet.

Kristina Libby is a serial entrepreneur, PR professional and storyteller who writes, speaks and teaches on subjects across a wide range of issues including PR, storytelling, writing and occasionally something as bizarre and fun as dragons. You can find her book, You Don't Need Social Media Unless You Are Doing It Right, on helping small businesses simplify social media on Amazon and her new e-course on the same topic can be found here.

Roundup: Back to School!

A lesson in body acceptance from writer Sam Escobar (and Twitter!): http://www.elle.com/life-love/a38962/why-i-dont-lie-about-weight/

The staff of Refinery29 learns what happens when you wear weirdo runway trends IRL. Spoiler: hilarity ensues. http://www.refinery29.com/2016/09/122427/fashion-trends-nyfw-how-to-wear-everyday-life

Blue Apron membership expired? Learn how to cook with what’s in season: http://www.refinery29.com/2016/09/122305/foods-in-season-now

A quick tutorial for house hunters (hey that’s me!): http://www.vogue.com/13473730/things-to-know-before-house-hunting/

In this time of great ideological division, some things still unite us all. Like cheese: http://www.vogue.com/13473211/how-to-make-the-perfect-cheese-plate/

It was a long summer, here’s a primer on where your favorite shows left off. Just in case you’re tuning in for the 115th season of Gray’s Anatomy: http://www.vogue.com/13471868/fall-tv-schedule-where-we-left-off/

Speaking of fall television, Queen Sugar should be on your list because all the reasons: http://www.vogue.com/13472914/queen-sugar-ava-duvernay-review/

Eat, Pray, Love and Live and Learn: http://www.thefrisky.com/2016-09-08/elizabeth-gilbert-is-dating-a-woman-after-an-ironic-divorce-from-her-eat-pray-love-husband/

Lessons from POTUS and FLOTUS in this month’s Essence. How we’ll miss these dreamboats! http://www.essence.com/2016/09/07/president-barack-obama-michelle-obama-cover-october-issue

Kids today AMIRITE? Outstanding: http://www.essence.com/2016/09/08/lauren-seroyer-honored-2016-mcdonalds-365black-awards

September Books Preview

September is a serious month for books. Publishing folks are back from the beach and readers are ready to snuggle up with something substantive, it’s a book lover’s dream. There are multitudes of titles to look forward to this month, here are six of my picks:

*PSA: one of the best things you can do for an author with a new book out is tell everyone if you love it, so don’t forget to share on you social media and review on Amazon and Goodreads.

Everfair by Nisi Shawl (September 6th))

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Everfair is a Neo-Victorian alternate history novel that explores the question of what might have come of Belgium's disastrous colonization of the Congo if the native populations had learned about steam technology a bit earlier. Fabian Socialists from Great Britain join forces with African-American missionaries to purchase land from the Belgian Congo's "owner," King Leopold II. This land, named Everfair, is set aside as a safe haven, an imaginary Utopia for native populations of the Congo as well as escaped slaves returning from America and other places where African natives were being mistreated.

Shawl is Seattle-based and launches her book tonight at one of my favorite locals, University Bookstore.

The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies (September 6th)

Review on Amazon and Goodreads

Inhabiting four lives—a railroad baron’s valet who unwittingly ignites an explosion in Chinese labor, Hollywood's first Chinese movie star, a hate-crime victim whose death mobilizes Asian Americans, and a biracial writer visiting China for an adoption—this novel captures and capsizes over a century of our history, showing that even as family bonds are denied and broken, a community can survive—as much through love as blood.
  
Building fact into fiction, spinning fiction around fact, Davies uses each of these stories—three inspired by real historical characters—to examine the process of becoming not only Chinese American, but American.

The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam (September 6th) 

Review on Amazon and Goodreads

Two and a half decades into a devastating civil war, Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority is pushed towards the coast by the advancing army. Amongst the evacuees is Dinesh, whose world has contracted to a makeshift camp. Alienated from family, home, language and body, he exists in a state of mute acceptance, numb to the violence around him, till he is approached one morning by an old man who makes an unexpected proposal: that Dinesh marry his daughter, Ganga. Marriage, in this world, is an attempt at safety. As a couple, they would be less likely to be conscripted to fight for the rebels, and less likely to be abused in the case of an army victory. Thrust into this situation of strange intimacy and dependence, Dinesh and Ganga try to come to terms with everything that has happened, attempting to awaken to themselves and to one another before the war closes over them once more.

Nutshell by Ian McEwan (September 13th)

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Trudy has betrayed her husband, John. She's still in the marital home --- a dilapidated, priceless London townhouse --- but John's not there. Instead, she's with his brother, the profoundly banal Claude, and the two of them have a plan. But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month-old resident of Trudy's womb. Told from a perspective unlike any other, NUTSHELL is a classic tale of murder and deceit from one of the world’s master storytellers.

There aren’t many writers I would trust to tell a story from the perspective of a foetus, but McEwan is one of them. I will never not be excited that he has a new book out.

Lady Cop Makes Trouble by Amy Stewart (September 6th)

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After besting (and arresting) a ruthless silk factory owner and his gang of thugs, Constance Kopp became one of the nation’s first deputy sheriffs. But when the wiles of a German-speaking con man threaten her position and her hopes for this new life, and endanger the honorable Sheriff Heath, Constance may not be able to make things right. LADY COP MAKES TROUBLE sets Constance loose on the streets of New York City and New Jersey. Cheering her on, and goading her, are her sisters Norma and Fleurette --- that is, when they aren't training pigeons for the war effort or fanning dreams of a life on the stage.

Little Nothing by Marissa Silver (September 13th)

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In an unnamed country at the beginning of the last century, a child called Pavla is born to peasant parents. Her arrival, fervently anticipated and conceived in part by gypsy tonics and archaic prescriptions, stuns her parents and brings outrage and scorn from her community. Pavla has been born a dwarf, beautiful in face, but as the years pass, she grows no farther than the edge of her crib. When her parents turn to the treatments of a local charlatan, his terrifying cure opens the floodgates of persecution for Pavla. Little Nothing unfolds across a lifetime of unimaginable, magical transformation in and out of human form, as an outcast girl becomes a hunted woman whose ultimate survival depends on the most startling transfiguration of them all.  Woven throughout is the journey of Danilo, the young man entranced by Pavla, obsessed only with protecting her. Part allegory about the shifting nature of being, part subversive fairy tale of love in all its uncanny guises, Little Nothing spans the beginning of a new century, the disintegration of ancient superstitions, and the adoption of industry and invention. With a cast of remarkable characters, a wholly original story, and extraordinary, page-turning prose, Marisa Silver delivers a novel of sheer electricity.