Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NARRATOR: There are people out there who need your example.

If your book is out there, your voice is out there,

your face is out there, you're contributing literally just

by existing.

You are not just writing for yourself anymore.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Let's be blunt here.

The publishing industry is no different

from any other major institution in American society,

or English speaking language society,

because it's very similar in other countries.

It has a huge problem with systemic and endemic racism,

sexism, a bunch of other isms, and the bulk of the power

players are cishet white guys.

The editors, for the most part, are cishet white women,

but the people actually making decisions

at the CEO level or the publisher and up level

tend to be men.

So depending on how far you choose to make your text

veer from what their preferences are, because it has to be

said that there are a lot of marginalized people

throughout the history of literature

in this country who've concealed their problematic identities

and gone on to publish fiction where they just don't mention

what people look like or they just

don't mention those aspects of people's lives.

And so it's certainly possible to publish

books that are of meaning and value

to the people who are decision makers, whether you yourself

come from a marginalized background or not.

People who come from marginalized backgrounds

all know how to speak the language of the center.

We all have read all of the books

with the white guys in them.

We know what kinds of stories are popular with that audience.

Everybody knows that.

That's what makes them the center.

The thing that is relevant or the thing

that you do have to kind of keep in mind as you're

writing if you choose to conceal your identity and sort of just

go in with-- go with the flow, basically,

is that you're effectively participating

in your own marginalization.

You're participating in that bigotry.

You're complicit with it.

And that's not necessarily a state

that everybody wants to be in.

So let's say that you're a writer, though,

who wants to fight the power.

You want to push back against that bigotry.

You want to find a way to break in when the primary decision

makers who determine whether your career happens or not

are people who not only don't understand your identity,

but may not even really believe that an audience exists

for your identity.

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One of the feedback pieces that I got when I first

tried to publish my true first professional novel,

"The Killing Moon," was, an editor wrote back and said,

I love this, but I'm not sure I know how to market it.

And that sentence has never left my head.

It's verbatim in my head because it immediately told me

that this editor did not believe that Black people read books,

did not believe that white people would

buy a book about Black people or that featured Black people.

Because "The Killing Moon" isn't about being Black.

It's about ninja priests sucking dreams out of people's heads,

but there were Black, and so this was apparently a problem.

And so you've got to deal with that.

You've got to be prepared to encounter some dog whistley

bigotry and sometimes very blatant bigotry.

I know other writers from marginalized groups

whose characters have been rendered on cover art

in these really kind of completely inaccurate ways.

Black characters written as white, characters

of one gender rendered is a completely different gender,

people who are described in the text as fat

and depicted as conventionally skinny and pretty.

And so you've got to be prepared to encounter some of that

and you've got to be prepared to fight,

and you have to choose your battles.

You have to choose which one of those

battles you're willing to fight and die on a hill for.

Some authors have had to accept completely inaccurate racist

or otherwise bigoted cover art because the alternative

was their voice did not get out there.

Their stories did not get written.

One of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors,

"Dawn" by Octavia Butler.

When I first encountered this book back

in the '80s when she first started getting published,

the book cover had an image of a white woman pulling

another white woman out of some kind of weird alien plant.

When you actually read the book, though, the protagonist

of that story, the person who pulled the white woman out

of the alien plant was herself a tall Black woman

with an Igbo name.

And so this is what she had to deal with in order to break in.

If she hadn't existed in the industry,

if her voice had not been out there, if her example

and trailblazing had not happened,

I might not be able to have a career even now

because one of the reasons I chose

to start trying to get published was

because I knew Butler had had a thriving career

in this business.

But in order to have that thriving career,

she had to swallow whitewashing on her book cover.

You've got to decide how many of these battles

are worth fighting and how hard you're willing to fight,

but you do have to fight.

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I think it's absolutely crucial that if you

are on the brink of becoming a published author

and you get the opportunity to become a published author,

you need to understand that you are not just

writing for yourself anymore.

There are people out there who need your example, who

need you to go forth and fight that battle so they

won't have to fight as hard.

And it's worth it to fight that battle so that they won't have

to fight as hard because if anybody sort of paved

that way for you and made things a little easier for you,

you kind of have an obligation to pay that forward.

And understand that even if you feel like you've lost a battle,

if your book is out there, your voice is out there,

your face is out there, you're still helping.

You're contributing literally just by existing.

And if you can manage to do more than exist,

if you cannot just survive, but thrive,

then you may end up changing the industry ultimately.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

If you, like me, are a marginalized writer or a writer

from a visibly known marginalized background,

you're going to encounter some bigotry.

It's unavoidable.

That is the nature of the world that we live in in these days.

As a Black woman in this business,

I have had to deal with some shit.

Most of it has come in the form of online harassment

because my career kind of started after the internet.

When I first published "The Hundred Thousands

Kingdoms," my first published novel, shortly

after it came out and I think got some nice favorable reviews

in a few places, I got an email from someone who basically

cussed me nine ways to Sunday.

Told me that it was terrible that my book had gotten

published as affirmative action and effectively

was a death threat.

Said that if they ever saw me, they would teach me a lesson.

So that was my first introduction

to fan mail and things just kind of continued from there.

My fan mail is a lot better these days and the people

that I deal with, for the most part, 99% of them

are absolutely fine.

That 1% of [GROANS] people I've had some trouble with

and I've had to kind of configure my life in such a way

as to protect myself and be prepared for that.

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What you can do to prepare for it is make sure

that you and the people close to you are as safe as they can be

and then that you are in the safest

possible position from which to choose your response.

It's perfectly valid to have no response.

It's perfectly valid to decide that you

don't want to have that particular fight right now.

There will be other fights.

What you can do to prepare yourself

includes sort of covering your online footprint,

making sure that you are as removed as possible from easy

methods of figuring out where you live, for example.

Specific techniques that I've used

have included things like sweeping the internet

periodically for my name and address.

If you self search, you will find engines

like Spokeo or Whitepages where they've

scraped people's addresses from public documents like leases

or homebuyer documents, things like that.

If you, at any point, have filed something with the city,

then your personal information is public record

and there are search engines out there

whose job it is to scrape that data

and sell it to whoever the heck wants to pay them for it,

and that's a great way for you to eventually be doxed.

You may want to sweep through those search engines

and remove your name.

You can do so.

Another thing that I've had to do

is I finally purchased a home after years

of dreaming about being able to be a homeowner

and I incorporated a shell company in order to do so.

It's a pretty well-known technique

used by big name folks who want to try and kind of cover

their tracks.

But then that way, city records of the home sale

will only list the name of whatever company

it is that you've got and not your own individual name.

You also want to make sure that you're

using two-factor authentication on any of your social media

outlets, really on anything that you're doing online.

If you have the opportunity to put two-factor security on it,

you should do so.

You want to try and do basic internet self-protection things

like making sure you're not using the same password

everywhere, but you also want to make sure

that you're doing a little bit more esoteric stuff.

If you put pictures of yourself or your family online,

look at the background before you put that out there.

Look at where you are and consider

whether anything in your background

is revealing your location or the location of your home.

Sometimes people will take selfies

and they happen to have the street

signs in the background that indicate

what block they live on and what city,

and you want to make sure that you're

kind of being a little careful about that.

Among other things, I also stopped

announcing in advance, or very far in advance,

where I was going to be at any given time.

When I go on book tours and things like that,

I often will not mention that I'm

going to be in a particular location

until just a day or two beforehand,

and that's just a self protective measure.

If you are going to go forth into the world

and put your name out there attached

to your ideas, your dreams, your beliefs,

and if your ideas, dreams, or beliefs

are in any way challenging to other people,

then you need to make sure you're protecting yourself.

Even something as simple as what name you choose to use.

You may want to use a pen name and not put your real name out

there at all.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

One of the resources that I use for how

to cover my own tracks online and how to protect myself

against this kind of potential harassment is Crash Override.

Crash Override is a great organization that developed out

of Gamergate, one of the better known

horrible online harassment campaigns targeting women,

and people of color, and Queer people

who are in the gaming industry.

And they have a resource page that's

got some really good techniques and suggestions

for how you can cover your tracks

and protect yourself online.

It may seem terrifying that you have to protect yourself

in this manner just to exercise your creative self,

but the world is what it is.

And if you think of it this way, putting down

the sort of initial steps of protecting yourself

is part of your development as a writer as well.

You are an anticipating fame.

You are anticipating becoming super well-known and super

popular and you are doing what you

need to do to move in that direction safely.

So don't be discouraged by the fact

that you've got to do this.

Just think of it as part of the preparation

that you have to do to enter pretty much any profession,

but especially one where you're going to be really visible.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I'm not going to say that you shouldn't be demoralized.

Those are valid feelings and the world should be more fair.

It's grotesque that it isn't.

And you're going to have to deal with that

in pretty much every aspect of your existence.

In your day job career, in the writing career,

in walking down the street.

If you are visibly marginalized, you're

going to have to deal with that.

If you are a disabled person looking for--

just trying to get through your day,

you're going to have to deal with the lack of accommodation

everywhere and so on.

The reason to keep fighting is so that things can get better.

And it's a constant drain.

It's a constant war.

It's a war that you know will not end in your lifetime.

And you're going to get tired of fighting at various points.

You're going to need to find ways

to recharge from that fight at various points.

If you need to stop trying to get published for a while,

take a break, breathe, and kind of remind yourself of what's

important to you, then do that.

But come back.

Because at the end of the day, your struggle

and your sacrifice make someone else's life

that much easier in the future.

And I'm blunt about the fact that I would not

be here if Octavia Butler had not dealt with all the crap

that she had.

I don't write anything like her.

I'm not really trying to be her or anything like that.

But just the fact that she, as a tall, heavyset, deep voice,

dark skinned Black woman, was able to walk

into this incredibly white establishment that is science

fiction's sort of upper echelon, and she blew it out

of the water.

She did an amazing job with her work.

Her writing leaves a mark and changes

anyone who reads it of whatever background.

She changed the industry by being here.

I do not aspire to have that same impact.

Whether I do or not will depend on my work.

I leave that to history to decide.

But I am aware of the fact that, just by striving,

other people will be inspired to do it too,

and together, we rise.

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