Last week, I was tagged on Instagram by Jennifer Givhan, an author whose work I love and like to scream about. I checked the post and saw a giveaway for her book, The Sleeping Sisters, but also a call to action. Givhan asked those of us on her unofficial street team (of which I was called La Reina, talk to me nice) if we might consider spreading the word about the importance of preorders, requesting books from libraries, etc, which of course I am happy to do. The bummer here is that this isn’t just a general PSA in Givhan’s case, but a plea for help.
Despite her work garnering countless awards and all sorts of rave reviews, Givhan’s publisher says her numbers aren’t high enough. This isn’t an unfamiliar story. Do sales matter? Absolutely. But the world of publishing is deeply imbalanced when it comes to which stories continue to get the big marketing budgets, who gets more chances, whose books always get greenlit, and which stories are considered worth telling. Givhan is one of at least four writers in my feeds, all from marginalized backgrounds, who have come to social media platforms in the last week to report similar messaging fr...
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