Tag: #weneeddiversebooks

Innate Identity vs. Imagining the “Other”
With all three books of the Tankborn trilogy completed and released into the wild, I’m doing as a writer does and working on my next project. Not to give too much away, but it’s a dark fantasy YA with a multi-cultural cast. No elves/orcs/wizards, but my own invented world. I’m on solid ground with my world-building, because it’s not based on anything except my own fertile imagination.

But what about creating that multi-cultural cast, or more importantly, my main character? She’s Alejandra, a 16-year-old, 2nd generation Mexican-American girl who’s Catholic and lives in Reno, Nevada. She and her mom aren’t below the poverty line by any means, but they struggle a bit financially. She’s not a super-genius, but smart enough to get a scholarship if she works hard.

Some of the cultural/identity elements of the character:
- Mexican American
- Catholic
- Speaks a little Spanish (but not enough to carry on a conversation with her abuelita)
- Lives in/grew up in Reno
- Her family is little lower on the socio-economic scale
- Very close to her mom
- Hard worker
- Not one of the popular kids
Some of my personal cultural/identity elements
- Russian-Austrian-Italian-German-American
- Catholic raised, Jewish heritage
- Speak quite a bit of Spanish (I could carry on quite a credible conversation with Alejandra’s abuelita)
- Grew up in Southern California/live in NorCal
- Have relatives in Reno & have visited there often
- My family was middle-class, but we went through some rough financial difficulties
- I was very close to my mom
- I was a very hard worker in school
- Most definitely not one of the popular kids
Based on who I am, how well can I get into this character’s head? How authentically can I write her identity, her culture?

It might seem like I’ve got it covered since there’s quite a lot of overlap in our life experience. But there’s a very key area missing–she grew up Mexican-American, and I grew up as a white American.

People are people, you might say. We have more in common than we have differences. Absolutely. But if I want to write an authentic character, one with a different core identity than mine, who grew up immersed in a world different than mine, I can only imagine so much. And it’s possible that what I “imagine” about the character will come from my own ingrained stereotypes that will worm their way into my writing.

So what do I not have to imagine? What have I lived? I’ve lived the Catholic upbringing. Catholicism is so rooted inside me that to this day I can’t walk inside the church without reaching for the holy water to dip and make the sign of the cross. Even though I haven’t attended Mass in years, I immediately feel comfortable inside a Catholic church, like I’m home.

By the same token, I often feel out of place during services at other Christian churches. And although I am Jewish by heritage from both sides of my family and am married to a Jewish man, I’m a complete fish out of water in a synagogue. I don’t know the prayers, in either Hebrew or English. I don’t know the songs. Judaism wasn’t part of my upbringing, so it didn’t get into my DNA like Catholicism did.

I know what it’s like to be the unpopular outsider as a teenager. After all these years, that pain still lingers. I know what it’s like to work hard in school. I lived through difficult financial times when I was a kid, where my parents’ worries filled me with anxiety. I know what it’s like to be female, to sometimes be slighted because of my gender, and to sometimes fear men.

But despite all that Spanish I learned over the years, despite living with many Hispanic neighbors in L.A., do I know what it means to grow up Mexican-American? No. Not in any gut way. I’m white, and I lived the white experience, with all its privilege and dominance, during a time when racism was far more accepted. I’ve experienced subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) bigotry and trivialization because of my gender. But it’s a white face I present to the world, and the world has treated me accordingly because of it.

So how do I authentically write Alejandra? To some extent, I use my imagination, but in the end, I need some expert input. A friend has been giving me advice about the Spanish that is sprinkled throughout the book. And before the book ever sees the light of day, I intend to find a Mexican-American beta reader to vet my cultural references and make sure I haven’t let stereotypes creep in.

Could I just decide to write only white characters in my books? I could. But I choose not to. And with that commitment to write diverse, comes the responsibility to make my absolute best effort to do it right.
August 26, 2014
If #WeNeedDiverseBooks, Why Not Just Self-Publish?
A while back, I wrote this post. I ranted about how during the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign, some white folks jumped on the hashtag to flog their own books (which may or may not have been truly diverse). I got into a mostly polite back and forth with an anonymous commenter who among other things suggested that if diverse authors can’t sell their diverse books traditionally, they should just self-publish.

On the surface, this sounds like a splendid idea. Self-publishing has become a much more acceptable route to publishing, and there have been some mega-successes (Hugh Howey and Barbara Freethy come to mind).

But how many self-published authors have actually made a go of it? According to Bowker, in 2012 alone (the most recent statistics I could find), nearly 400,000 books were self-published. So that’s a lot of people striking it rich, right?

Not so much. According to this study by Digital Book World and Writer’s Digest, the bulk of self-published authors (about 82%) make less than $5000 per year. The chart they included with the study shows that 19% of the 82% segment make nothing. Zero, nada, zilch. And the chart also indicates that the percent of self-published authors dwindles even more in the higher income brackets.

So right out the gate, if a diverse author went the self-published route, they, like all self-published authors, have a lesser chance of being compensated for their work. Therefore, by being channeled into self-publishing instead of into traditional, diverse authors are almost certainly placed in a lesser position financially.

So a diverse author self-publishing is very likely going to make less money. How about if we move to the other end of the financial issue–what it costs an author to self-publish. I can speak with some authority on this since I have a dozen or so indie-published books up for sale. Here’s what you have to pay for if you’re not publishing traditionally:
- Editing — If you hope to have any credibility as an author, you need a clean, professionally edited book. Traditional publishers do this in-house, but self-published authors have to pay someone for this service. Costs can be $1000 and up per book
- Cover art — You think you can do this yourself? Maybe some can, but most authors are masters of the written word, not the visual arts. Even using royalty-free clipart, authors usually don’t have an eye for composition, nor do they own the pricey programs need to put the elements together. An unappealing, amateurish cover can lose you sales, so you’ll want to hire someone experienced to do it for you. Expect to pay $100 and up for cover art per book. It will be even more if you’re going to print rather than just ebook since there’s more work involved in a full cover.
- Formatting/Uploading — If you’re a technical whiz, you can probably handle the tedious work of getting your book properly formatted and uploaded onto the myriad of sites that sell ebooks. But as someone who has an MS in computer science, I can tell you that this process has been a trial even for me. The worst thing for any author would be to put up a book that’s riddled with errors. Believe me, readers notice and will warn off other readers. So you may need to go the route I did–hire a virtual assistant to do the work. Depending on what their hourly rate is and the formatting problems the VA encounters, I’d say it could be $50 and up per book.
- Marketing — There are a lot of free avenues for marketing/promoting your book–Twitter, Facebook, e-newsletters. In my opinion, it’s pretty obnoxious to see a million tweets or FB posts urging people to buy your book. But it’s free…and it’s also rarely effective. A lot of people barely register those “Buy me, buy me” tweets, or ignore them entirely. So you might need to go with promotion that costs money, many of which start at $50 or so and go up into the stratosphere cost-wise.
So before a diverse author can get their book up on the virtual shelves of online bookstores, they’ve had to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars. Money that the statistics show they are unlikely to recoup. But there are many out there (like my anonymous commenter) who think that self-publishing is a viable way for diverse books by diverse authors to get into the hands of readers.

Expecting diverse authors, but not white authors, to go the indie route is a ghettoization of publishing. Let’s say two authors, one white, one diverse, both have a well-written, publishable book. We’re saying to the white author, “Step right up to this line, the traditional publishing line. We’ll pay for everything, and give you an advance to boot.” Then we’re telling the diverse author, “You have to go to the self-publishing line over there. You’ll have to take all the risk of getting your book published.”

Just as white shouldn’t be the default for characters in books, self-publishing should not be the default path for diverse authors.
June 5, 2014
Thanks for Adding to the Conversation–But Could You Sit Down and Listen Now?

The first tweet featuring the #WeNeedDiverseBooks hashtag appeared on April 24th, 2014, and since then the campaign has exploded worldwide. The topic was trending on Twitter days before its official three day inauguration, with dozens of people answering the question: Why do we need diverse books?

Those dozens became hundreds, the tweets surged into the tens of thousands and the number of impressions for the hashtag mushroomed into hundreds of millions.

I’m very excited to be on the WNDB campaign team, and I’m thrilled at the attention we’ve been getting from media and like-minded people everywhere. But there are some among us that I’d like to have a little conversation with.

First off, a declaration–I’m white. More specifically, I’m a white author. I’m not rich and famous like @realjohngreen or @_SuzanneCollins, but I’m multi-published. And a few of my published books feature main characters of color.

So you might think I’m on Easy Street being involved with the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign. That I have this giant platform to stand on to trumpet to the world about my books. That I might not be rich and famous now, but I will be soon because I can slap that #WeNeedDiverseBooks hashtag onto the three hundred Twitter posts I’m planning to tweet, complete with “buy links” of my diverse books.

Erm…no. I have not used that hashtag to promote my own books, nor do I intend to. And here’s where I have to have a little conversation with all you fellow white authors out there.

Be honest–have you used the #WeNeedDiverseBooks hashtag to promote your “diverse” book? Maybe posted something like “#WeNeedDiverseBooks and that’s why I wrote DUCK AND WOLF ARE FRIENDS. Buy it here:”

Please stop. Don’t do that. Number one, you’re white, and a big part of the WNDB campaign is to support and encourage diverse authors, not just diverse books. Number two, you’re white, and while I don’t know this for certain about your particular book, there’s a possibility that you have not done your homework and even with the best of intentions, what you think are diverse characters are actually full of offensive stereotypes.

And number three, no matter who you are, as unseemly, tacky, and distasteful as it is to go around blaring to the world on Twitter that people should go out and buy your book, it’s even more unseemly, tacky, and distasteful to do so in the guise of being a supporter of diversity.

Because the way so many of my fellow white authors jumped in, I had to wonder just how important diversity was to them before #WeNeedDiverseBooks made such a big splash. Whether they’d been on the diversity soapbox for years like Ellen Oh and Malinda Lo. Whether those white authors show their support of diverse authors by buying their books, or if they just saw a topic trending on Twitter and jumped right in to take advantage.

Maybe the white authors I saw tweeting about their “diverse” books weren’t as opportunistic as they seemed, jumping on the bandwagon of a successful movement. If nothing else, the campaign has certainly demonstrated that there are people of good will everywhere. All those eager promoters might just be people passionate about diversity.

Either way, I beg of you, white authors. Tout your book on Twitter if you must. But, please, please, leave off the #WeNeedDiverseBooks hashtag.

May 21, 2014