nora
@nora

instead of saying "when does this book get to the representation i was promised" ask yourself "am i actually enjoying reading this book" and if you aren't, stop reading the book. unless you think it's going to get good on its own terms, i guess.

i also distrust anyone whose recommendation is just an 5 words and vague enthusiasm. especially if they are also an author. author recommendations are just for them to network with each other, you can't trust them to mean anything.


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in reply to @nora's post:

There are unfortunately many books where having representation is the only selling point and the actual plots read like that genre of Tumblr post that goes "what if the princess doesn't need saving and she's a lesbian" then someone says "what if the prince is asexual and doesn't even want to save her" and then someone goes "OMG take my money I need this"

I think a lot of it is because librarians and booksellers don't have the time to actually read every book so publishers have these events called Book Talks where they basically rapid fire pitch their new books to us and we are, face it, by and large nerdy white ladies with AO3 accounts. It's easier to get us to remember these tropey tumblr posts of books than things that are more complex and publisbers care about sales to distributors.

that makes sense! when i worked at the bookstore we read on the clock when it was slow so we had a lot more breadth of knowledge, but when you have to know a lot more books than you can feasibly read i can see the practical value

Also authors are, as a general rule, terrible at marketing books

The worst example of this is whenever there's a pitch event happening on twitter and 80% of the "pitches" are lists of tropes and character identities with emojis next to them. Zero idea of what the book is actually about.

That would be bad enough if it was just new authors trying to get an agent, but I've seen this from authors marketing their books, reviewers recommending books, publishers pitching to reviewers...