as small as a world and as large as alone, If you want diverse books, write them. That's it.

3:12am May 26, 2014

Anonymous asked: If you want diverse books, write them. That's it.

weneeddiversebooks:

alisonroseishere:

weneeddiversebooks:

The point of this campaign is that there are some wonderful diverse books that are published but that don’t sell. Because they don’t sell, they don’t stay in the shelves long. Because they don’t stay in the shelves long, they don’t earn out (meaning they don’t recoup the small advance paid to the authors). Because they don’t earn out, publishers consider them a loss and the authors can’t publish another book. Because they can’t publish another book, other diverse authors also don’t get published.

This is an oversimplification of a complicated problem. But to say if you want them just write them is just plain wrong. It’s like making a comment on a subject you know nothing about. Please educate yourself first.

We need diverse books to do well in the marketplace so that they can STAY in the marketplace and more people can read them.

FFS, not everyone is a writer! Just because I like to read doesn’t mean I can write a fucking novel. I HATE this “just write them” crap because it’s based on this weird idea that writing a book is no big thing, just dash one off this afternoon, like it was a fucking grocery list, and that any random person can sit down and write fiction.

No. I’m a READER. I’m not a writer. But I’m a reader who wants a wide array of authors, characters and subjects to choose from, so I want diversity to be supported and boosted and encouraged and spotlit. The problem is not that there isn’t diversity among authors or books, it’s that this diversity is ignored or neglected or dismissed in favor of the status quo. And we shouldn’t all have to suddenly, magically, become novelists in order to change that.

Reblogging for commentary!!

In general, I can’t stand it when someone says “If you complain about a problem, you should be able to just fix the problem. If you can’t fix it, don’t complain.”

Like there’s circumstances where I’d say something like that, but they’re few and far between. Because the ability to understand something is wrong is not the same as the ability to have all the tools necessary to fix what is wrong.

One time I referred to someone as a bad writer, and someone else said “Like you could do better.” As if that meant anything about my ability to evaluate bad writing.

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