- Joined
- May 21, 2020
At some point I will make the ultimate Afrofuturism masterpiece: Age of Kangz: A Steamfunk Joint.
YABookgate
- Thread starter Puddleduck
- Start date
- Joined
- Feb 19, 2017
As autistic and retarded as this idea probably is, I'd honestly love to see someone write an AU fic where Black Panther is a villain just to see the reaction from the Marvel spergs
Wakanda is a third-world shithole even among third-world shitholes and a totalitarian black supremacist socialist ethnostate that can best be described as "North Korea meets BLM" with T'Challa being a dictator on par with Robert Mugabe, Idi Amin, and Mobutu.
"Vibranium" is little more than Wakandan state propaganda and the country would be "hidden" in the sense that it's actually locked down in NK-style isolationism.
The main conflict is when Black Panther travels to the United States on a diplomatic mission and decides to abuse his diplomatic immunity Lethal Weapon II style as part of some insane revanchist "anti-colonial" plot
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2018
I think part of the problem with the entire Young Adult genre (as a whole) is that you have people writing solely for the sake of getting a movie or TV deal and getting rich. See the mad money Rowling and Meyers made off of Twilight and the Harry Potter books being made into movies, not to mention crap like Gossip Girls and other similar shows getting made into TV shows.
In the past, Young Adult books were 100% mechanical and owned entirely by the publisher. Someone creates Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Sweet Valley High, or Babysitters Club for a publisher and then the entire franchise gets ghost written by poor unpaid interns who churn out books month by month but the original creator is the only one listed on the cover long after they have died even.
A lot of issues with YA fiction is the self-insert/Mary Sue syndrome: the writer was either an outcast or just a forgettable nobody in high school so they steal blatantly from stuff like Save By the Bell or John Hughes movies to give their self-insert a "clique" that are the "best friends they didn't have in high school" and who exist only to fluff the main character's ego (with diversity factoring in to get additional "woke" brownie points.
Similarly, writing druggies with mental problems lets them pretend they were "cool" (and in this case, cool=doing drugs and being able to justify being a cunt to others by claiming mental illness as an excuse) and pretend they were part of the "popular" crowd of fuck ups at school who either shunned them or didn't even know they existed as far as drug addicton/mental illness being the proverbial little black dress that teens exploit for attention these days.
Sounds like a cunt who's bookcase is nothing more than props that she points to or shows off to people to show how "woke/smart" she is. Sort of like the guy who has Infinite Jest on his shelf but hasn't read it or who buys classic novels simply to put it on the shelf and never read it, because they don't like the book but know "smart people read it" and want to look smart when they have company over or when they do attention whoring style posting of their bookshelves on social media.
Last edited:
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2016
I am assuming the whining resulted from this article. Which crunched out that five percent statistic that may or may not be bullshit, but sure looks like it was arrived at by dubious methods. "All books published between 1950 and 2018."
Just How White Is the Book Industry?
Opinion | Just How White Is the Book Industry? - The New York Times
archived 13 Dec 2020 22:52:12 UTC
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah had just turned 26 when he got the call in 2017 that Mariner Books wanted to publish his short-story collection, “Friday Black.”
Mr. Adjei-Brenyah suspected that the contract he signed — a $10,000 advance for “Friday Black” and $40,000 for an unfinished second book — wasn’t ideal. But his father had cancer and the money provided a modicum of security.
Mr. Adjei-Brenyah’s uneasiness over his book deal became more acute last summer. Using the hashtag #PublishingPaidMe, writers had begun to share their advances on Twitter with the goal of exposing racial pay disparities in publishing. Some white authors disclosed that they had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for their debut books.
I, a totally unknown white woman with one viral article, got an advance that was more than double what @rgay got for her highest advance. #publishingpaidme $400,000 for How to Fall in Love with Anyone. I've written an essay about this (forthcoming) but I want to say more here: — Mandy Len Catron (@LenMandy)
Mr. Adjei-Brenyah wanted to share his contract. But he knew that doing so could make his publisher look bad and hurt his career. “It’s scary when it’s your life,” he said.
Reticence gave way to action, though, when he thought about Jesmyn Ward’s tweet about how she “fought and fought” for a $100,000 advance, even after one of her novels won a National Book Award.
Mr. Adjei-Brenyah started to type.
As #PublishingPaidMe spread online, more than a thousand people in the publishing industry signed up for a day of action to support the Black community.
Publishing executives responded by releasing statements expressing support for racial justice, announcing antiracism training and promising to put out more books by writers of color. If they follow through, last summer’s activism could diversify the range of voices that American readers encounter for years to come.
Statements released by publishers on social media last summer condemning racism.
But measuring progress isn’t easy, and requires a baseline to compare against: How many current authors are people of color? As far as we could tell, that data didn’t exist.
So we set out to collect it. First, we gathered a list of English-language fiction books published between 1950 and 2018. That list came from WorldCat, a global catalog of library collections. We wanted to focus on books that were widely read, so we limited our analysis to titles that were held by at least 10 libraries and for which we could find digital editions.
We also constrained our search to books released by some of the most prolific publishing houses during the period of our analysis: Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Doubleday (a major publisher before it merged with Random House in 199
, HarperCollins and Macmillan. After all that we were left with a dataset containing 8,004 books, written by 4,010 authors.
To identify those authors’ races and ethnicities, we worked alongside three research assistants, reading through biographies, interviews and social media posts. Each author was reviewed independently by two researchers. If the team couldn’t come to an agreement about an author’s race, or there simply wasn’t enough information to feel confident, we omitted those authors’ books from our analysis. By the end, we had identified the race or ethnicity of 3,471 authors.
We guessed that most of the authors would be white, but we were shocked by the extent of the inequality once we analyzed the data. Of the 7,124 books for which we identified the author’s race, 95 percent were written by white people.
Author diversity at major publishing houses has increased in recent years, but white writers still dominate. Non-Hispanic white people account for 60 percent of the U.S. population; in 2018, they wrote 89 percent of the books in our sample.
Want your book published? It helps to be white.
100% of fiction books published
Just 11% of books in 2018 were written by people of color
89% were written by
white writers
2010
1960
1970
1980
1990
2000
Note: Among a sample of more than 7,000 books published by Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Doubleday, HarperCollins and Macmillan.·Source: “Redlining Culture” by Richard Jean So
This broad imbalance is likely linked to the people who work in publishing. The heads of the “big five” publishing houses (soon, perhaps, to become the “big four”) are white. So are 85 percent of the people who acquire and edit books, according to a 2019 survey.
“There’s a correlation between the number of people of color who work in publishing and the number of books that are published by authors of color,” said Tracy Sherrod, the editorial director of Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins that is focused on Black literature.
That correlation is visible in our data, exemplified by Toni Morrison’s career as an editor at Random House from 1967 to 1983. Random House’s first female Black editor, Ms. Morrison championed writers such as Toni Cade Bambara, Henry Dumas and Gayl Jones. During her tenure, 3.3 percent of the 806 books published by Random House in our data were written by Black authors.
The number of Black authors dropped sharply at Random House after Ms. Morrison left. Of the 512 books published by Random House between 1984 and 1990 in our data, just two were written by Black authors: Ms. Morrison’s “Beloved” (through Knopf, which was owned by Random House) and “Sarah Phillips,” by Andrea Lee.
(Random House published 12 books during this period by non-Black writers of color such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Michael Ondaatje, according to our data. In a response to our analysis, Random House pointed out that it was the longtime publisher of Maya Angelou, whose autobiography “All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes” was released in 1986; because it is a work of nonfiction, it is not included in our statistics.)
In 1967, the same year that Ms. Morrison joined Random House, Marie Dutton Brown started as an intern at Doubleday and eventually rose to the rank of senior editor. Now a literary agent, Ms. Brown said that she witnessed how ephemeral gains for Black writers can be.
“Black life and Black culture are rediscovered every 10 to 15 years,” said Ms. Brown. “Publishing reflects that.”
Ms. Brown at her desk at Doubleday in 1976.
“Many white editors are not exposed to Black life beyond the headlines,” said Ms. Brown, pictured here at her desk at Doubleday in 1976.Courtesy Marie Dutton Brown
Ms. Brown attributed the fluctuation in publishers’ support for Black writers to the news cycle, which periodically directs the nation’s attention to acts of brutality against Black people. Publishers’ interest in amplifying Black voices wanes as media coverage peters out because “many white editors are not exposed to Black life beyond the headlines,” Ms. Brown said.
The lack of diversity among authors might be obscured by a small number of high-profile nonfiction books written by athletes, celebrities and politicians of color, according to Ms. Brown. “It gives the appearance that there are a lot of Black books published,” while publishers’ less famous “mid-list” authors are overwhelmingly white, she said.
Literary prizes may also make publishing appear more diverse than it actually is. Over the past decade, more than half of the 10 most recent books that were awarded the National Book Award for fiction were written by people of color; Colson Whitehead has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice in the past four years.
Look at the books that appeared on The New York Times’s best-seller list for fiction, though, and a different picture emerges: Only 22 of the 220 books on the list this year were written by people of color.
L.L. McKinney, an author of young-adult novels who started the #PublishingPaidMe hashtag, wasn’t surprised by the statistics on how few Black authors have been published relative to white authors.
“I’ve heard things like, ‘We already have our Black girl book for the year,’” said Ms. McKinney. She also remembered comments suggesting books wouldn’t sell well if they had a Black person on the cover.
In a 1950 essay titled “What White Publishers Won’t Print,” Zora Neale Hurston identified the chicken-or-egg dilemma at the heart of publishers’ conservatism. White people, she wrote, cannot conceive of Black people outside of racial stereotypes. And because publishers want to sell books, they publish stories that conform to those stereotypes, reinforcing white readers’ expectations and appetites.
“It’s amusing to me when publishers say that they follow the market,” said Ms. McKinney. “They’re doing it because of tradition. And the tradition is racism.”
Michael Strother, a former editor at Simon & Schuster, remembers the meeting in 2016 when he realized how limited his white colleagues’ imaginations were when it came to Black authors. Mr. Strother was trying to persuade executives to authorize a large bid for “The Hate U Give,” Angie Thomas’s young-adult novel about the fallout from a police shooting.
Co-workers in the meeting praised the book; others teared up as they discussed its importance. “It was not only a good book, but a marketable book and an important book,” Mr. Strother said. “It should have been an easy yes.”
Some of Mr. Strother’s white colleagues were hesitant, though. One asked, “Do we need Angie Thomas if we have Jason Reynolds?” (Mr. Reynolds is another Black author of young-adult novels.)
“Their books are not similar at all except they both have Black characters,” said Mr. Strother, who is now a law student at New York University.
Mr. Strother, whose account of the meeting was corroborated by one other person who was present, said he was authorized to bid far less than what he knew he would need to win the auction. Since it was published by Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2017, “The Hate U Give” has spent 196 weeks on the Times young-adult best-seller list.
Asked to comment on the acquisitions meeting, Simon & Schuster provided the following statement: “At Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing, we are proud of our long and continuing history of publishing Black voices. While we typically do not comment on the acquisition process, each potential acquisition is considered based on its own merits. In 2016 we made a six-figure bid for Angie Thomas’s debut novel ‘The Hate U Give’ (plus a follow-up novel) in a heated auction between multiple publishers and the book eventually went to another publisher.”
A few days after Mr. Adjei-Brenyah tweeted his book deal, he received a message from his agent: Mariner Books wanted to restructure his contract and pay him “a lot more” for his second book.
Mr. Adjei-Brenyah viewed his publisher’s reaction to his tweet as a small step toward dismantling decades of racism in publishing. “I’ve been growing into my courage,” he said. “Now I have to carry that energy forward.”
A number of signs indicate that publishers are also carrying forward the energy from the summer’s protests.
In October, Hachette Book Group announced the creation of Legacy Lit, one of several imprints started this year that are devoted to publishing books by writers of color. Krishan Trotman, who will lead the imprint, said she’s seen waves of support for Black authors come and go, but that Legacy Lit represents a real commitment to diversity by Hachette.
“There will be a huge boom of books — all of a sudden Black women are hot or urban fiction is hot — and then there will be a backslide,” said Ms. Trotman. “That’s why we need these imprints. They’ll be here even after all the hoopla dies down.”
Krishan Trotman sits on a bench outside.
Krishan Trotman will lead the Legacy Lit, the first imprint dedicated to publishing books by people of color at Hachette Book Group.Simbarashe Cha for The New York Times
Along with Dana Canedy at Simon & Schuster and Lisa Lucas at Pantheon and Schocken Books, Ms. Trotman is one of several Black women who were named to senior publishing jobs this year. Like Ms. Morrison 50 years ago, they may be able to clear the way for more writers of color to flourish.
The bottom rungs of publishing are also a source of hope. When Ms. Brown started at Doubleday in 1967, she was the only Black intern in her year’s cohort. In 2019, almost half of all publishing interns identified as people of color.
Whether those interns can grow into careers like Ms. Trotman’s or Ms. Brown’s will depend on publishers’ continued willingness to hire, promote and listen to people who they have historically sidelined. Our data suggests that progress toward diversity can be as short-lived as a single editor’s tenure.
“The presence of Black editors is really important,” said Ms. Brown. “But you need more than one at the table.”
Mr. Adjei-Brenyah suspected that the contract he signed — a $10,000 advance for “Friday Black” and $40,000 for an unfinished second book — wasn’t ideal. But his father had cancer and the money provided a modicum of security.
Mr. Adjei-Brenyah’s uneasiness over his book deal became more acute last summer. Using the hashtag #PublishingPaidMe, writers had begun to share their advances on Twitter with the goal of exposing racial pay disparities in publishing. Some white authors disclosed that they had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for their debut books.
I, a totally unknown white woman with one viral article, got an advance that was more than double what @rgay got for her highest advance. #publishingpaidme $400,000 for How to Fall in Love with Anyone. I've written an essay about this (forthcoming) but I want to say more here: — Mandy Len Catron (@LenMandy)
Mr. Adjei-Brenyah wanted to share his contract. But he knew that doing so could make his publisher look bad and hurt his career. “It’s scary when it’s your life,” he said.
Reticence gave way to action, though, when he thought about Jesmyn Ward’s tweet about how she “fought and fought” for a $100,000 advance, even after one of her novels won a National Book Award.
Mr. Adjei-Brenyah started to type.
As #PublishingPaidMe spread online, more than a thousand people in the publishing industry signed up for a day of action to support the Black community.
Publishing executives responded by releasing statements expressing support for racial justice, announcing antiracism training and promising to put out more books by writers of color. If they follow through, last summer’s activism could diversify the range of voices that American readers encounter for years to come.
Statements released by publishers on social media last summer condemning racism.
But measuring progress isn’t easy, and requires a baseline to compare against: How many current authors are people of color? As far as we could tell, that data didn’t exist.
So we set out to collect it. First, we gathered a list of English-language fiction books published between 1950 and 2018. That list came from WorldCat, a global catalog of library collections. We wanted to focus on books that were widely read, so we limited our analysis to titles that were held by at least 10 libraries and for which we could find digital editions.
We also constrained our search to books released by some of the most prolific publishing houses during the period of our analysis: Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Doubleday (a major publisher before it merged with Random House in 199
, HarperCollins and Macmillan. After all that we were left with a dataset containing 8,004 books, written by 4,010 authors.To identify those authors’ races and ethnicities, we worked alongside three research assistants, reading through biographies, interviews and social media posts. Each author was reviewed independently by two researchers. If the team couldn’t come to an agreement about an author’s race, or there simply wasn’t enough information to feel confident, we omitted those authors’ books from our analysis. By the end, we had identified the race or ethnicity of 3,471 authors.
We guessed that most of the authors would be white, but we were shocked by the extent of the inequality once we analyzed the data. Of the 7,124 books for which we identified the author’s race, 95 percent were written by white people.
Author diversity at major publishing houses has increased in recent years, but white writers still dominate. Non-Hispanic white people account for 60 percent of the U.S. population; in 2018, they wrote 89 percent of the books in our sample.
Want your book published? It helps to be white.
100% of fiction books published
Just 11% of books in 2018 were written by people of color
89% were written by
white writers
2010
1960
1970
1980
1990
2000
Note: Among a sample of more than 7,000 books published by Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Doubleday, HarperCollins and Macmillan.·Source: “Redlining Culture” by Richard Jean So
This broad imbalance is likely linked to the people who work in publishing. The heads of the “big five” publishing houses (soon, perhaps, to become the “big four”) are white. So are 85 percent of the people who acquire and edit books, according to a 2019 survey.
“There’s a correlation between the number of people of color who work in publishing and the number of books that are published by authors of color,” said Tracy Sherrod, the editorial director of Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins that is focused on Black literature.
That correlation is visible in our data, exemplified by Toni Morrison’s career as an editor at Random House from 1967 to 1983. Random House’s first female Black editor, Ms. Morrison championed writers such as Toni Cade Bambara, Henry Dumas and Gayl Jones. During her tenure, 3.3 percent of the 806 books published by Random House in our data were written by Black authors.
The number of Black authors dropped sharply at Random House after Ms. Morrison left. Of the 512 books published by Random House between 1984 and 1990 in our data, just two were written by Black authors: Ms. Morrison’s “Beloved” (through Knopf, which was owned by Random House) and “Sarah Phillips,” by Andrea Lee.
(Random House published 12 books during this period by non-Black writers of color such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Michael Ondaatje, according to our data. In a response to our analysis, Random House pointed out that it was the longtime publisher of Maya Angelou, whose autobiography “All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes” was released in 1986; because it is a work of nonfiction, it is not included in our statistics.)
In 1967, the same year that Ms. Morrison joined Random House, Marie Dutton Brown started as an intern at Doubleday and eventually rose to the rank of senior editor. Now a literary agent, Ms. Brown said that she witnessed how ephemeral gains for Black writers can be.
“Black life and Black culture are rediscovered every 10 to 15 years,” said Ms. Brown. “Publishing reflects that.”
Ms. Brown at her desk at Doubleday in 1976.
“Many white editors are not exposed to Black life beyond the headlines,” said Ms. Brown, pictured here at her desk at Doubleday in 1976.Courtesy Marie Dutton Brown
Ms. Brown attributed the fluctuation in publishers’ support for Black writers to the news cycle, which periodically directs the nation’s attention to acts of brutality against Black people. Publishers’ interest in amplifying Black voices wanes as media coverage peters out because “many white editors are not exposed to Black life beyond the headlines,” Ms. Brown said.
The lack of diversity among authors might be obscured by a small number of high-profile nonfiction books written by athletes, celebrities and politicians of color, according to Ms. Brown. “It gives the appearance that there are a lot of Black books published,” while publishers’ less famous “mid-list” authors are overwhelmingly white, she said.
Literary prizes may also make publishing appear more diverse than it actually is. Over the past decade, more than half of the 10 most recent books that were awarded the National Book Award for fiction were written by people of color; Colson Whitehead has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice in the past four years.
Look at the books that appeared on The New York Times’s best-seller list for fiction, though, and a different picture emerges: Only 22 of the 220 books on the list this year were written by people of color.
L.L. McKinney, an author of young-adult novels who started the #PublishingPaidMe hashtag, wasn’t surprised by the statistics on how few Black authors have been published relative to white authors.
“I’ve heard things like, ‘We already have our Black girl book for the year,’” said Ms. McKinney. She also remembered comments suggesting books wouldn’t sell well if they had a Black person on the cover.
In a 1950 essay titled “What White Publishers Won’t Print,” Zora Neale Hurston identified the chicken-or-egg dilemma at the heart of publishers’ conservatism. White people, she wrote, cannot conceive of Black people outside of racial stereotypes. And because publishers want to sell books, they publish stories that conform to those stereotypes, reinforcing white readers’ expectations and appetites.
“It’s amusing to me when publishers say that they follow the market,” said Ms. McKinney. “They’re doing it because of tradition. And the tradition is racism.”
Michael Strother, a former editor at Simon & Schuster, remembers the meeting in 2016 when he realized how limited his white colleagues’ imaginations were when it came to Black authors. Mr. Strother was trying to persuade executives to authorize a large bid for “The Hate U Give,” Angie Thomas’s young-adult novel about the fallout from a police shooting.
Co-workers in the meeting praised the book; others teared up as they discussed its importance. “It was not only a good book, but a marketable book and an important book,” Mr. Strother said. “It should have been an easy yes.”
Some of Mr. Strother’s white colleagues were hesitant, though. One asked, “Do we need Angie Thomas if we have Jason Reynolds?” (Mr. Reynolds is another Black author of young-adult novels.)
“Their books are not similar at all except they both have Black characters,” said Mr. Strother, who is now a law student at New York University.
Mr. Strother, whose account of the meeting was corroborated by one other person who was present, said he was authorized to bid far less than what he knew he would need to win the auction. Since it was published by Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2017, “The Hate U Give” has spent 196 weeks on the Times young-adult best-seller list.
Asked to comment on the acquisitions meeting, Simon & Schuster provided the following statement: “At Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing, we are proud of our long and continuing history of publishing Black voices. While we typically do not comment on the acquisition process, each potential acquisition is considered based on its own merits. In 2016 we made a six-figure bid for Angie Thomas’s debut novel ‘The Hate U Give’ (plus a follow-up novel) in a heated auction between multiple publishers and the book eventually went to another publisher.”
A few days after Mr. Adjei-Brenyah tweeted his book deal, he received a message from his agent: Mariner Books wanted to restructure his contract and pay him “a lot more” for his second book.
Mr. Adjei-Brenyah viewed his publisher’s reaction to his tweet as a small step toward dismantling decades of racism in publishing. “I’ve been growing into my courage,” he said. “Now I have to carry that energy forward.”
A number of signs indicate that publishers are also carrying forward the energy from the summer’s protests.
In October, Hachette Book Group announced the creation of Legacy Lit, one of several imprints started this year that are devoted to publishing books by writers of color. Krishan Trotman, who will lead the imprint, said she’s seen waves of support for Black authors come and go, but that Legacy Lit represents a real commitment to diversity by Hachette.
“There will be a huge boom of books — all of a sudden Black women are hot or urban fiction is hot — and then there will be a backslide,” said Ms. Trotman. “That’s why we need these imprints. They’ll be here even after all the hoopla dies down.”
Krishan Trotman sits on a bench outside.
Krishan Trotman will lead the Legacy Lit, the first imprint dedicated to publishing books by people of color at Hachette Book Group.Simbarashe Cha for The New York Times
Along with Dana Canedy at Simon & Schuster and Lisa Lucas at Pantheon and Schocken Books, Ms. Trotman is one of several Black women who were named to senior publishing jobs this year. Like Ms. Morrison 50 years ago, they may be able to clear the way for more writers of color to flourish.
The bottom rungs of publishing are also a source of hope. When Ms. Brown started at Doubleday in 1967, she was the only Black intern in her year’s cohort. In 2019, almost half of all publishing interns identified as people of color.
Whether those interns can grow into careers like Ms. Trotman’s or Ms. Brown’s will depend on publishers’ continued willingness to hire, promote and listen to people who they have historically sidelined. Our data suggests that progress toward diversity can be as short-lived as a single editor’s tenure.
“The presence of Black editors is really important,” said Ms. Brown. “But you need more than one at the table.”
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2018
You are confusing shit.
Metallica produced a prog-metal album in 1988 called "And Justice For All". It was an attempt to broaden their sound after the death of Cliff Burton, who had major role in producing their trademark thrash metal sound.
The songs on the album were very complex and while they were able to pull them off live, the band didn't like playing them because of said complexity and ultimately decided when the tour for AJFA ended, that with the exception of "One", they were never going to play the songs live again. And pretty much kept that vow until late 00s when they started playing them again to promote the 20th Anniversary of Justice and exploited the fact that (outside "One") they hadn't played the songs live for so long, to boost sales for that tour.
The real issue for Lars, is that Metallica had signed a deal to record the theme to Mission Impossible II ("I Disappeared") and that it was a huge deal with the notion that Metallica and the label putting out the soundtrack were expecting huge sales due to it being a brand new Metallica song and the fact that, by this point, it had been several years since Metallica had a new album of original material come out (as Reload was a dumping ground for songs recorded for Load that the band felt passionately about to the extent that they simply put them out on a CD rather than record a new album, Garage Inc was all covers, and S&M was a glorified live album/greatest hits album).
The song leaked onto Napster before the song was officially released and it was widely panned by Metallica fans, many of who had started becoming more and more vocal and critical of the band renouncement of their thrash metal roots with the Black Album and becoming more or less a generic rock band in the 90s. The final insult, was that a major market rock d-jay who's show Lars listened to religiously (and had granted interviews in the past) not only publicly denounced "I Disappear" when he heard it ahead of it's release via Napster, but having been part of the Metallica fanbase who had grown upset with the band "selling out" as it were, decided to force a confrontation with Lars over Metallica's betrayal of it's thrash roots by threatening to play the song non-stop on his program unless Lars called in for an on-the-spot interview to defend the song that everyone hated (which led to an ultra awkward interview where Lars was made aware of Napster's existence and how people were pirating the band's works).
The band and Lars in particular, were so embarrassed and so furious about their fans rejecting "I Disappeared" and how it was leaked online, that THIS was what triggered the lawsuit against Napster and why they were pissy that people were pirating their shit, since the backlash over "I Disappeared" cost them big bucks as far as people not buying the MI:2 soundtrack because the song leaked and fans were able to realize the song sucked balls and wasn't worth paying $20 for as a blind purchase.
- Joined
- Jul 1, 2017
Carolyn Keene or Franklin W. Dixon never existed, they were just corporate pseudonyms for people to write under. Or maybe they did exist but they were black people under Jim Crow so had to use a pseudonym and stay hidden and put racist stuff in their books because racism or something, that's the Twitter hot take.
- Joined
- Aug 1, 2019
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2018
The TV show has an occasional moment where it's good but also lots of moments where they rape the source material HARD.
It also dabbles into "and then one day, out of nowhere, everyone voted for Hitler" by having SJWs who shot Serena Joy and cost her the ability to ever have biological kids, be the moment which led Fred to overthrow the government.
Even freaking Atwood knows this, even though she has to pay lip service to the TDS crowd who have coopted the show like they have; she wrote Testaments as a huge "fuck you" to the SJW crowd by making Aunt Lydia the architect of the downfall of Gilead not Offred.
That said, I'm also fucking shocked the early 90s movie version of Handmaiden's Tale hasn't seen a resurrection to cash in on the book's renewed interest/tv show. Even with the behind the scenes drama* and it flopping, it's a better work than the TV show in terms of staying true to the book.
(IIRC the director and the producer fought over the direction of the film on set as one wanted a dystopian film and the other wanted to just make a big budget softcore porno out of, to the point that one of the side wanting to make a big budget porno eventually ragequit and Atwood literally called down to help the side that wanted to do her book justice help them unfuck the movie best she could)
The irony is that they 100% purge the white supremacy angle of Gilead from the TV show; which pissed a LOT of people off. And the show, while promising to address race relations, double down on removing it by having a dark skinned latina handmaiden (for whom being a handmaiden was a step up from being homeless junkie whore) have her tongue ripped off and killed off, while having season three feature an evil black handmaiden who gleefully snitched on Offred and got a woman helping her secretly meet her lost daughter murdered by the state and then mocked Offred when the state made Offred help carry out the execution, resulting in Offred outing her over "not wanting to have another kid" and getting the other handmaidens to shun her and drive her to murder-suicide.
- Joined
- Aug 8, 2018
So they went back to the 50s? Why? Of course that will skew the numbers, POC didn't even have equal rights yet.I am assuming the whining resulted from this article. Which crunched out that five percent statistic that may or may not be bullshit, but sure looks like it was arrived at by dubious methods. "All books published between 1950 and 2018."
Just How White Is the Book Industry?
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah had just turned 26 when he got the call in 2017 that Mariner Books wanted to publish his short-story collection, “Friday Black.”
Mr. Adjei-Brenyah suspected that the contract he signed — a $10,000 advance for “Friday Black” and $40,000 for an unfinished second book — wasn’t ideal. But his father had cancer and the money provided a modicum of security.
Mr. Adjei-Brenyah’s uneasiness over his book deal became more acute last summer. Using the hashtag #PublishingPaidMe, writers had begun to share their advances on Twitter with the goal of exposing racial pay disparities in publishing. Some white authors disclosed that they had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for their debut books.
I, a totally unknown white woman with one viral article, got an advance that was more than double what @rgay got for her highest advance. #publishingpaidme $400,000 for How to Fall in Love with Anyone. I've written an essay about this (forthcoming) but I want to say more here: — Mandy Len Catron (@LenMandy)
Mr. Adjei-Brenyah wanted to share his contract. But he knew that doing so could make his publisher look bad and hurt his career. “It’s scary when it’s your life,” he said.
Reticence gave way to action, though, when he thought about Jesmyn Ward’s tweet about how she “fought and fought” for a $100,000 advance, even after one of her novels won a National Book Award.
Mr. Adjei-Brenyah started to type.
As #PublishingPaidMe spread online, more than a thousand people in the publishing industry signed up for a day of action to support the Black community.
Publishing executives responded by releasing statements expressing support for racial justice, announcing antiracism training and promising to put out more books by writers of color. If they follow through, last summer’s activism could diversify the range of voices that American readers encounter for years to come.
Statements released by publishers on social media last summer condemning racism.
But measuring progress isn’t easy, and requires a baseline to compare against: How many current authors are people of color? As far as we could tell, that data didn’t exist.
So we set out to collect it. First, we gathered a list of English-language fiction books published between 1950 and 2018. That list came from WorldCat, a global catalog of library collections. We wanted to focus on books that were widely read, so we limited our analysis to titles that were held by at least 10 libraries and for which we could find digital editions.
We also constrained our search to books released by some of the most prolific publishing houses during the period of our analysis: Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Doubleday (a major publisher before it merged with Random House in 199
To identify those authors’ races and ethnicities, we worked alongside three research assistants, reading through biographies, interviews and social media posts. Each author was reviewed independently by two researchers. If the team couldn’t come to an agreement about an author’s race, or there simply wasn’t enough information to feel confident, we omitted those authors’ books from our analysis. By the end, we had identified the race or ethnicity of 3,471 authors.
We guessed that most of the authors would be white, but we were shocked by the extent of the inequality once we analyzed the data. Of the 7,124 books for which we identified the author’s race, 95 percent were written by white people.
Author diversity at major publishing houses has increased in recent years, but white writers still dominate. Non-Hispanic white people account for 60 percent of the U.S. population; in 2018, they wrote 89 percent of the books in our sample.
Want your book published? It helps to be white.
100% of fiction books published
Just 11% of books in 2018 were written by people of color
89% were written by
white writers
2010
1960
1970
1980
1990
2000
Note: Among a sample of more than 7,000 books published by Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Doubleday, HarperCollins and Macmillan.·Source: “Redlining Culture” by Richard Jean So
This broad imbalance is likely linked to the people who work in publishing. The heads of the “big five” publishing houses (soon, perhaps, to become the “big four”) are white. So are 85 percent of the people who acquire and edit books, according to a 2019 survey.
“There’s a correlation between the number of people of color who work in publishing and the number of books that are published by authors of color,” said Tracy Sherrod, the editorial director of Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins that is focused on Black literature.
That correlation is visible in our data, exemplified by Toni Morrison’s career as an editor at Random House from 1967 to 1983. Random House’s first female Black editor, Ms. Morrison championed writers such as Toni Cade Bambara, Henry Dumas and Gayl Jones. During her tenure, 3.3 percent of the 806 books published by Random House in our data were written by Black authors.
The number of Black authors dropped sharply at Random House after Ms. Morrison left. Of the 512 books published by Random House between 1984 and 1990 in our data, just two were written by Black authors: Ms. Morrison’s “Beloved” (through Knopf, which was owned by Random House) and “Sarah Phillips,” by Andrea Lee.
(Random House published 12 books during this period by non-Black writers of color such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Michael Ondaatje, according to our data. In a response to our analysis, Random House pointed out that it was the longtime publisher of Maya Angelou, whose autobiography “All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes” was released in 1986; because it is a work of nonfiction, it is not included in our statistics.)
In 1967, the same year that Ms. Morrison joined Random House, Marie Dutton Brown started as an intern at Doubleday and eventually rose to the rank of senior editor. Now a literary agent, Ms. Brown said that she witnessed how ephemeral gains for Black writers can be.
“Black life and Black culture are rediscovered every 10 to 15 years,” said Ms. Brown. “Publishing reflects that.”
Ms. Brown at her desk at Doubleday in 1976.
“Many white editors are not exposed to Black life beyond the headlines,” said Ms. Brown, pictured here at her desk at Doubleday in 1976.Courtesy Marie Dutton Brown
Ms. Brown attributed the fluctuation in publishers’ support for Black writers to the news cycle, which periodically directs the nation’s attention to acts of brutality against Black people. Publishers’ interest in amplifying Black voices wanes as media coverage peters out because “many white editors are not exposed to Black life beyond the headlines,” Ms. Brown said.
The lack of diversity among authors might be obscured by a small number of high-profile nonfiction books written by athletes, celebrities and politicians of color, according to Ms. Brown. “It gives the appearance that there are a lot of Black books published,” while publishers’ less famous “mid-list” authors are overwhelmingly white, she said.
Literary prizes may also make publishing appear more diverse than it actually is. Over the past decade, more than half of the 10 most recent books that were awarded the National Book Award for fiction were written by people of color; Colson Whitehead has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice in the past four years.
Look at the books that appeared on The New York Times’s best-seller list for fiction, though, and a different picture emerges: Only 22 of the 220 books on the list this year were written by people of color.
L.L. McKinney, an author of young-adult novels who started the #PublishingPaidMe hashtag, wasn’t surprised by the statistics on how few Black authors have been published relative to white authors.
“I’ve heard things like, ‘We already have our Black girl book for the year,’” said Ms. McKinney. She also remembered comments suggesting books wouldn’t sell well if they had a Black person on the cover.
In a 1950 essay titled “What White Publishers Won’t Print,” Zora Neale Hurston identified the chicken-or-egg dilemma at the heart of publishers’ conservatism. White people, she wrote, cannot conceive of Black people outside of racial stereotypes. And because publishers want to sell books, they publish stories that conform to those stereotypes, reinforcing white readers’ expectations and appetites.
“It’s amusing to me when publishers say that they follow the market,” said Ms. McKinney. “They’re doing it because of tradition. And the tradition is racism.”
Michael Strother, a former editor at Simon & Schuster, remembers the meeting in 2016 when he realized how limited his white colleagues’ imaginations were when it came to Black authors. Mr. Strother was trying to persuade executives to authorize a large bid for “The Hate U Give,” Angie Thomas’s young-adult novel about the fallout from a police shooting.
Co-workers in the meeting praised the book; others teared up as they discussed its importance. “It was not only a good book, but a marketable book and an important book,” Mr. Strother said. “It should have been an easy yes.”
Some of Mr. Strother’s white colleagues were hesitant, though. One asked, “Do we need Angie Thomas if we have Jason Reynolds?” (Mr. Reynolds is another Black author of young-adult novels.)
“Their books are not similar at all except they both have Black characters,” said Mr. Strother, who is now a law student at New York University.
Mr. Strother, whose account of the meeting was corroborated by one other person who was present, said he was authorized to bid far less than what he knew he would need to win the auction. Since it was published by Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2017, “The Hate U Give” has spent 196 weeks on the Times young-adult best-seller list.
Asked to comment on the acquisitions meeting, Simon & Schuster provided the following statement: “At Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing, we are proud of our long and continuing history of publishing Black voices. While we typically do not comment on the acquisition process, each potential acquisition is considered based on its own merits. In 2016 we made a six-figure bid for Angie Thomas’s debut novel ‘The Hate U Give’ (plus a follow-up novel) in a heated auction between multiple publishers and the book eventually went to another publisher.”
A few days after Mr. Adjei-Brenyah tweeted his book deal, he received a message from his agent: Mariner Books wanted to restructure his contract and pay him “a lot more” for his second book.
Mr. Adjei-Brenyah viewed his publisher’s reaction to his tweet as a small step toward dismantling decades of racism in publishing. “I’ve been growing into my courage,” he said. “Now I have to carry that energy forward.”
A number of signs indicate that publishers are also carrying forward the energy from the summer’s protests.
In October, Hachette Book Group announced the creation of Legacy Lit, one of several imprints started this year that are devoted to publishing books by writers of color. Krishan Trotman, who will lead the imprint, said she’s seen waves of support for Black authors come and go, but that Legacy Lit represents a real commitment to diversity by Hachette.
“There will be a huge boom of books — all of a sudden Black women are hot or urban fiction is hot — and then there will be a backslide,” said Ms. Trotman. “That’s why we need these imprints. They’ll be here even after all the hoopla dies down.”
Krishan Trotman sits on a bench outside.
Krishan Trotman will lead the Legacy Lit, the first imprint dedicated to publishing books by people of color at Hachette Book Group.Simbarashe Cha for The New York Times
Along with Dana Canedy at Simon & Schuster and Lisa Lucas at Pantheon and Schocken Books, Ms. Trotman is one of several Black women who were named to senior publishing jobs this year. Like Ms. Morrison 50 years ago, they may be able to clear the way for more writers of color to flourish.
The bottom rungs of publishing are also a source of hope. When Ms. Brown started at Doubleday in 1967, she was the only Black intern in her year’s cohort. In 2019, almost half of all publishing interns identified as people of color.
Whether those interns can grow into careers like Ms. Trotman’s or Ms. Brown’s will depend on publishers’ continued willingness to hire, promote and listen to people who they have historically sidelined. Our data suggests that progress toward diversity can be as short-lived as a single editor’s tenure.
“The presence of Black editors is really important,” said Ms. Brown. “But you need more than one at the table.”
They used the Big Five Publishing houses. The ones that only accept a handful of new books a year. Maybe, just maybe, this isn't due to racism and was simply because a white person just...wrote a better story. Publishing is really hard to get into, plenty of authors of all races get rejected for it, ESPECIALLY when we're talking about Big Five.
Actually, we know who started those pseudonyms. It was the same guy and he hired various people to ghostwrite. Here's the Wiki article.
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- Aug 7, 2018
Granted it was the Case Files incarnation from the 1980s that I read*, but I always liked the Nancy Drew ones over the Hardy Boys ones. In part, because Nancy tended to stay in her hometown and a lot of the mysteries focused on the dark seedy side of the town and how Nancy and her crew reacted to it and them having a much closer friendship dynamic.
Hardy Boys (at the least the Case Files incarnation) was more globe trotting and outside one of the brothers mourning his dead girlfriend, you never much got much of a feel for them, their hometown, and family dynamic or friends outside each other.
*I tried reading the original first gen Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books but they sucked. The Hardy Boys were way juvenile and Nancy Drew's stuff was stilted and lacked a lot of the modern day sensibility that the Case Files books had updating Nancy for the 80s and 90s.
Lenny didn't exist when B&TB came out. IIRC he joined Law and Order after the film's release as Briscoe, though in typical L&O fashion, he had appeared in Season One as a defense attorney.
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- Feb 4, 2018
The Faye Dunaway film right? That was actually better I agree. The TV show is stupid and I find it painfully ironic that a Scientologist is the lead protagonist.
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They also limited it to just fiction, no nonfiction. Probably because at least one imprint of a "Big 5" publisher prints nothing BUT books by black people. Amistad Press was acquired by HarperCollins in 1999, though it started life in 1986 as an independent publisher.
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Why would you go all the way back to the 1950s for this study? That's going to completely skew the numbers, and shit's changed so much since then it isn't all that relevant.
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Because it'll completely skew the numbers, of course.
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- Mar 29, 2019
Can I just say how amazing the word afrofuturism is?
It sounds like satire yet is taken seriously, poe has won again.
It sounds like satire yet is taken seriously, poe has won again.
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- Jan 3, 2017
Afrofuturism is basically this Family Guy sketch, except applied to Africa, replace booze with Whitey, and taken so dead seriously that if you question it you will be annihilated.
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McDuffie was also a huge fucking race baiting piece of shit in his last decade on Earth. He threw a never ending shit fit over Static Shock getting canceled (it was a middling hit and got canceled with around 52 episode, the basic minimum for syndication) and believed it should have run for 10-15 seasons simply because Static was black. He single handedly rendered John Stewart so fucking radioactive that they had to create a new black GL (Simon Baz) as McDuffie used the character as a vessel to live out out his Mary Sue fantasies (complete with having him shack up with Hawkman, along with unpersoning Kyle Raynor in the DCU until fan complaints led to him finally acknowledge Kyle and the episode of STAS that introduced him and only then to have John rant about how Kyle is a piece of shit and how "The Guardians forced him to live on Oa as an honor guard simply to keep him out of trouble"). McDuffie also had a HUGE hate boner for Hal Jordan and pretty much all of the white Green Lanterns (to the point of saying that anyone who didn't like John/think John should be the only GL is a KKK member).
He also hated OTHER black characters not John. When he took over Justice League (largely due to him bullying DC into giving him the gig off the back on his cartoon work), he got rid of Hal and replaced him with John and then pushed HARD to get rid of a Red Arrow/Hawkgirl relationship so he could force John/Hawkgirl onto the comic and then did his fucking damnest to get rid of Vixen and Black Lightning. He also got stuck with Firestorm (the black one) via editorial mandate but made Rusch incompetent and constantly had him get the shit kicked out of him and wrote out Black Lightning by doing the same (having the shit kicked out of him). Editorial had to cockblock him from getting rid of Vixen, let aloe forcing him to resolve the dangling plotline of Vixen suddenly experiencing a power boost that happened out of nowhere; which led to him having a character from said arc resolving the storyline screech about how he was "being forced to do stories he didn't want to do.
His anti-Hal bashing forced editorial to restore Hal to the team for a bit (when McDuffie had Hal removed, DC tried to run damage control by announcing Hal was getting his very own JLA team/spin-off, but the artist was so slow that it was repurposed into Cry For Justice and held off until after Final Crisis). And because fans had complained that JLA was utterly detached from the greater DCU in the early 00s, especially in the lead up to Infinite Crisis, DC ordered McDuffie write material that would help build up to Final Crisis, which McDuffie disliked and complained bitterly about.
His final straw was when went onto the DC Comics main message board and posted a pity party screed that basically had him blame everyone but himself for his JLA run flopping and got pulled from the book and ultimately replaced with James Robinson (who was supposed to write the Hal and the JLA spin-off) after a fill-in arc from longtime DC writer/editor Len Wein. McDuffie then died, which buried a LOT of the shit from the last decade of his life and his asshole behavior being swept under the rug in light of his early untimely death with Rich the leech Johnston leading the brigade, as he posted said pity party on his website and brought it to the attention of DC's top brass that led to his dismissal.
If Dwayne was alive, he'd be as insufferable and obnoxious and dangerous as a thousand Mark Waids or Andy Khouris. The exact opposite of Christopher Priest, in that Dwayne believed in playing the race card and playing it from a rigged deck to get what he wanted and crying racism if he didn't get what he wanted.
(He was also BFFs with sexual predator Warren Ellis, which adds to McDuffie being not the best person in terms of company he kept)
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- Nov 15, 2016
Award-winning non-binary author was told their trans teen romance ‘would never sell’. They proved all their doubters wrong
archive.is
Oddly, this video is at the link but is unlisted on YouTube. 38 views and no up/downvotes when I checked it out.
Mason Deaver: Non-binary author told trans YA romance wouldn't sell
archived 20 Dec 2020 02:06:42 UTC
Oddly, this video is at the link but is unlisted on YouTube. 38 views and no up/downvotes when I checked it out.
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- Dec 4, 2020
God, the grammar in the headline gave me a headache. How could somebody write that and say, “ Yup, makes sense.”
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- Jul 1, 2017
Because you have to do it or else you're invalidating (which is literal violence and attempted murder) the non-binary snowflake. Being non-binary rules because you can enforce your oh-so-quirkiness on society at large.