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For a 2021 literary lookback, we noticed Phenomenal Media mature this year with the addition of a book club focused on exposing readers to works by underrepresented authors, particularly women of color.
The four-year-old company founded by Meena Harris launched the Phenomenal Book Club in November with choosing The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story and its young readers’ companion The 1619 Project: Born on the Water as the inaugural picks and inviting author and editor Nikole Hannah-Jones and illustrator Nikkolas Smith to a virtual event. Phenomenal Book Club was the exclusive book club partner for the books based on The New York Times project named after the year enslaved Africans first came to the U.S.
A bona fide social media star, lawyer, and activist, Meena is best known for being the niece of our first female, first Black, and first Asian second-in-command, Vice President Kamala Harris. Her pro-vaccine Dec. 21 tweet announcing she has a breakthrough case of Covid-19 after receiving her booster shot went viral with over 70,000 likes. The success online, her family connections, and her entrepreneurial activism spirit has opened doors for her to grow her media company named after Maya Angelou’s famous poem “Phenomenal Woman.”
Besides her history-making aunt, Meena’s family tree also consists of her mother Maya Harris, who has also developed a reputation expressing her activism via Twitter as a lawyer and policy expert; her stepfather Tony West, the chief legal officer at Uber; and her late grandmother Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher and civil rights activist whose story is told in Kamala’s 2020 memoir The Truths We Hold: An American Journey.
Expressing activism through books
Like her aunt, Meena has a publishing career. She wrote two children’s books: Ambitious Girl, published by Little, Brown Young Readers and illustrated by Marissa Valdez, about a girl finding her journey to overcome the “too ambitious” label; and Kamala and Maya’s Big Idea, published by HarperCollins’ imprint Balzer + Bray and illustrated by Ana Ramírez González, about the kid versions of her aunt and mother organizing their community. Both New York Times best-selling books came out in the last year and most likely served as inspiration for Phenomenal Book Club.
Meena’s company started in 2017 as Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign, a community-oriented organization focused on social causes mainly through message shirts. Top campaigns include the #PhenomenalVoter campaign to encourage voters to exercise their right in the 2018 midterm elections to the Justice for Breonna Taylor last year that manufactured shirts saying “Arrest the Cops Who Killed Breonna Taylor.”
So far, the merch maker’s interaction with over 1,000 celebrities, athletes, and activists has catapulted it into a multimedia venture that also includes Phenomenal Productions that’s described as having “a specific emphasis on communities of color and underrepresented voting blocs.”
Curating books for children
The mother of two daughters, Meena has voiced her opinion that anti-racism works need to be incorporated into children’s libraries through their parents since schools on average have failed to add these works to their curricula. She wrote in The Washington Post op-ed published Nov. 15:
Of course, for Black and Brown parents, this isn’t exactly a revolutionary concept. Many of us have already taken it upon ourselves to give our children the full, accurate history lesson we know they must hear — just as our parents did for us, and their parents for them. But it’s time all American families start taking time at home to discuss the injustices that shaped our nation’s past, the work still to be done in our present, and the values that should define our future.
The new book club will announce selections quarterly and highlight a book already published between those selections. One of the missions of the book club is to aid the publishing industry in upholding its commitments to anti-racism and equity after the George Floyd protests.
Community chats last week were featured on the book club’s Instagram for its first highlight, Severance by Ling Ma, and promoting a giveaway on social media for 50 editions. For the holidays, Phenomenal is selling sweatshirts with a reproductive rights message and cookbooks by women of color.
Tennis superstar Serena Williams recently announced that she is releasing a children’s book next year based on the adventures of her daughter Olympia’s doll Qai Qai. Black doll sales have the potential to be positively impacted by this news alone as we approach another pandemic holiday season.
What started as cute photos of Olympia playing with her real-life version of Qai Qai, pronounced kway-kway, has evolved into an empire that digitally animates the milk chocolate-skinned, doe-eyed doll on social media and replicates the doll for buyers online. Now, the moneymaking doll will be featured in The Adventures of Qai Qai written by Serena, illustrated by Yesenia Moises, and co-edited by Foyinsi Adegbonmire at Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group imprint Feiwel and Friends. The book will go on sale in September 2022.
“Since realizing @RealQaiQai’s ability to spread joy to our own family and also millions of others around the world, we’ve wanted to tell her story in every way possible,” Serena posted on Instagram. “We are so proud to announce Qai Qai’s first book, ‘The Adventures of Qai Qai,’ a story about the power of friendship and imagination.” The book is a story about the power of friendship and imagination, she adds in the caption.
Technology brings doll alive
Qai Qai has 3.2 million followers on TikTok, 353,000 followers on Instagram, and 25,500 followers on Twitter. Her interactive website sells merch from mugs to T-shirts and the reproduction of Olympia’s doll retailing for $30 exclusively on Amazon.com. She recreates your favorite memes and TikToks and roots for Serena on the sidelines of tennis matches.
Joining social media in 2018 a year after Olympia’s birth, Qai Qai was your average plastic doll abandoned in such places as on the sidewalk and between couch cushions, even sporting a purple cast for a broken leg. In November 2018, the doll became digitized and started to make more appearances than the real doll.
Alexis Ohanian, Serena’s husband and Olympia’s father, co-founded Reddit. His internet business connections have brought Qai Qai alive in a way we’ve never seen an independent Black doll be portrayed before.
The Black doll evolution
The doll industry in 2020 raked in $3.64 billion in the U.S., according to data from NPD Group, with nearly 11% growth from 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the toy industry overall since more families stayed at home and had to find more ways to entertain the kids.
Though data focused on the sale of Black dolls and other non-White dolls are hard to find, Black dolls have had a long history of being seen in a negative light.
In the 1930s, Black psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark handed Black children four dolls of varying light and dark complexions to choose which one was “nice” and which one was “bad.” Most of the children said the Black dolls were “bad,” and they saw themselves more in the White dolls. The infamous experiment showed that Black children were aware of the segregation and perceived inferiority impacting their communities.
The legacy of the experiment shows how racism in America affects girls who simply want to play with dolls. Today, Black dolls continue to evolve with more realistic Afrocentric features and accessories from Mattel implanting kinky hair into its Black Barbie dolls to the 1990s favorite Kenya doll that’s still available with her Kente outfits and hair lotion.
Serena’s family made the statement to not only have their biracial daughter play with a Black doll and share the fun with millions via social media but to create a character that’s building its own metaverse that now includes literature.
Coining itself the home of the “world’s most talked-about book adaptations,” streaming giant Netflix is debuting a book club series hosted by a star of one of its first book-to-TV hits.
Orange Is the New Black star Uzo Aduba will host the Netflix Book Club‘s social series “But Have You Read the Book?” premiering Nov. 16 on streamer’s YouTube and Facebook channels. November’s book selection is Passing by Nella Larsen, which will also have a Nov. 10 book-to-film release on Netflix starring Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson.
The first book club episode will have Uzo interview the film’s stars and director Rebecca Hall.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked friends, ‘But have you read the book?’ So I’m excited to host Netflix Book Club and bring together loyal book fans, TV and movie obsessives and the creators behind their favorite stories,” Uzo said in a statement. “I can’t wait to dive deep into the creative process and what it takes to bring a book to life.”
Passing follows two Black women who are fair-skinned enough to pass as White. Clare Kendry sees her childhood friend Irene Redfield in a hotel, and they chat about what life has been like since their upbringing in Chicago. Irene quickly learns that Clare has been passing full-time as a White woman married to a White man who has no idea his wife is Black. With her complexion, Irene can pass, too, but she chooses to have her Black family and engage with the Black community she’s always known. Clare tries to convince Irene she is living the ideal life until Irene meets Clare’s bigoted husband and realizes the danger Clare has put herself in. Both women struggle to have each other in their lives in case anyone finds out their shared secret.
Nella Larsen, who was born in 1891 to a Black father from the Danish West Indies and a White mother from Denmark, was considered one of the most well-known female authors during the Harlem Renaissance. Passing, her second novel released in 1929 after her debut Quicksand, soon became a standout at the time in the elite arts community, rivaling the popularity of Zora Neale Hurston‘s 1937 classic Their Eyes Were Watching God. Nella received a Guggenheim Fellowship to write a third novel in 1930, according to her current publisher Penguin Random House, but she couldn’t find a publisher. She died in 1964.
Passing also has enjoyed modern-day success thanks to the film and the best-selling gold of Brit Bennett’s 2019 literary fiction masterpiece The Vanishing Half about fair-skinned Black twin sisters who lead separate lives as one decides to live her life as a White woman. Brit, who recently had a book-signing cameo on HBO‘s Insecure, wrote the introduction to the newest copies of Passing. The Vanishing Half is being developed into a miniseries for HBO.
“From Bridgerton, To All the Boys and Sweet Magnolias to Queen’s Gambit, Unorthodox, Virgin River and of course Orange Is the New Black, Netflix loves bringing books to life on screen and creating conversation with passionate readers and fans,” said Netflix chief marketing officer Bozoma Saint John in a statement about the book club series. The marketing maven herself has a forthcoming book with Viking Books called The Urgent Life that will be focused on her life during and after her late husband’s cancer diagnosis.
Starbucks is partnering with Netflix to bring the book club to social media.
A magazine for teen girls mistakenly confused two Black young adult authors in a tweet that took six hours to come down.
Middle grade author Karen Strong chronicled the Twitter debacle on Sunday after noticing Girls’ Life Magazine had tweeted about a giveaway of the YA best-seller A Song Below Water by Bethany C. Morrow. Except the social media team behind the magazine’s account tagged the author as Dhonielle Clayton, also a well-known YA author.
Dhonielle tweeted that she didn’t write the fantasy YA novel. Bethany quote-tweeted the tweet.
The magazine deleted the original tweet and soon put out a statement on the mishap.
Soon after the apology, the magazine posted a tweet similar to the original one with correcting the author’s name.
The mistake still resonated on book Twitter, especially among Black women writers, who said it’s another example of legitimate media outlets not tagging the correct Black person, in this case the author as Bethany C. Morrow whose name is on the cover.
The novel coronavirus quarantine has produced another celebrity book club. Supermodel Kaia Gerber, daughter of the legendary Cindy Crawford, started a book club that’s already receiving praise from fans and young Hollywood.
Now a month into her book club, she had an Instagram Live conversation with Jia Tolentino, the author of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, on Friday night with an average high of 2,200 viewers. Kaia started the chat saying she found the book to be a refreshing take on modern-day philosophy.
This is how publisher Penguin Random House describes the essay collection: “Tolentino writes about a cultural prism: the rise of the nightmare social internet; the advent of scamming as the definitive millennial ethos; the literary heroine’s journey from brave to blank to bitter; the punitive dream of optimization, which insists that everything, including our bodies, should become more efficient and beautiful until we die.”
A staff writer at The New Yorker, Jia talked about the ills of the internet and social media, a focus in her book, but also mentioned its current necessity as we grapple with self-isolation and quarantine due to the coronavirus crisis. Jia brought up how the internet and social media has made people perform for attention. She asked Kaia about her personal experiences since the Gen Z model has 5.5 million followers due to her career and stature.
Now 18, Kaia said she started her Instagram at 14 and noticed how social media can change a person and their professional goals and give more attention to influencers rather than, for example, doctors and nurses who are saving lives during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The internet, for better for worse, is the biggest change of this era,” Jia said during the conversation. “It’s become this nervous system of our society… There’s an unavoidable centrality to it that seems like every story in a way is an internet story, no matter what.” She added we have a natural impulse to be seen, to be recognized, to be liked, and the business of social media takes these behaviors and monetizes “every inch of human life.”
They discussed how social media and the internet has to be impacting teens’ lives now and adding unique pressures never before experienced. Jia, a millennial who said she graduated during the Great Recession, said it would’ve been “dark” if she owned a smartphone in high school. With dreams to attend Columbia University, Kaia said as social media became a regular existence around her and she became hyper cautious in order to stay clean for college application times.
Jia pointed out to the feminism parts of the book where women were not able to apply for credit cards alone until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974 and how marriage is supposed to be the main life-changing event for a woman. Kaia brought up how her mother’s wedding dress was revolutionary in a way because it was a slip dress when sexy was looked down upon for a bride.
The chat came to a close with Jia saying how clear it is during the coronavirus quarantine that we can’t wholly replace in-person interaction with the internet and social media. Kaia said she would read anything else Jia writes and added the excitement of being able to have the conversation:
“This is the coolest thing ever. Truly the only people I fangirl over are writers and authors because I admire it so much because the idea of sitting down and writing an entire book is so intimidating to me, but I would read all of them.”
Earlier in the month, Kaia had an Instagram Live chat with the stars of Normal People on Hulu, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal. The TV series is based on Sally Rooney’s literary fiction book about two unlikely friends who develop a complex relationship in high school then college.
Little, Brown and Company shared a quarantine house tweet Monday morning to its almost half a million followers, but it was quickly met with criticism after sharing six houses with all white authors. After most of the responders asked the publisher to delete the offensive tweet, the publisher later did just that and apologized for its oversight. But this incident added fire to the continuous discussion on diversity and inclusion in the publishing industry.
The quarantine house tweet trend has taken over the social media network with users grouping well-known people in a particular industry in so-called houses and asking their followers to pick a number, a house they would want to be quarantined in. The trend is supposed to be a viral uplifter amid the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic where most people are staying home in quarantine. But the fun feel of this tweet backfired.
A few authors and other tweeters quickly noticed that none of the houses featured authors of color. The publisher responded that it purposely highlighted its roster of authors, which isn’t diverse.
Some responders mentioned that the Hachette Book Group imprint is associated with authors of color such as: Attica Locke, who is currently a writer on the Hulu series Little Fires Everywhere promoting her recent book Heaven, My Home; Walter Mosley, who won the Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Award Monday; Malcolm Gladwell, the well-known intellectual with a recent book called Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know; and Marie Kondo, whose new book Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life came out last week. Walter and Marie later were promoted on the publisher’s timeline along with press articles about their work.
Dawnn Karen, the author of Dress Your Best Life: How to Use Fashion Psychology to Take Your Look—and Your Life—to the Next Level, and Leslie Gray Streeter, the author of Black Widow: A Sad-Funny Journey Through Grief for People Who Normally Avoid Books with Words Like “Journey” in the Title, are two black women authors with upcoming books within the imprint. A promotional tweet for Leslie’s book was shared by Little, Brown and Co. and another one was retweeted, so the social media promotion for authors of color ramped up after the quarantine house tweet was taken down.
Little, Brown and Co.’s admission that its author roster was not diverse should force the publisher to take diversity more seriously like Flatiron Books promised to do after the backlash around Jeanine Cummins’ best-selling novel American Dirt. The diversity issue in publishing also coincides with #DVpit Twitter pitch party for marginalized authors looking for literary agent representation next week on April 22 and April 23.
Update: As of Friday morning, The Free Black Women’s Library founder Ola Ronke tweeted that the organization’s Facebook and Instagram account access had been restored.
On Thursday morning, The Free Black Women’s Library founder Ola Ronke tweeted that the national group’s Facebook and Instagram accounts had been suspended for violating community standards possibly over sharing works by Zora Neale Hurston and Audre Lorde.
With the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic raging around the world, Ola Ronke said her events had been canceled, so the social media pages now are the sole source of income for her as a single mother and provides a much-needed connection to supporters during this time of social distancing.
Ola Ronke started a Change.org petition to fight the social media ban, emphasizing that she had been building on the organization’s online engagement for five years. The original goal was to gain 1,500 signatures, but by Thursday afternoon, the petition was asking for 2,500 signatures. By 5 p.m. PST, the petition had over 2,350 signatures. In the petition, Ola Ronke writes:
I have not violated any standards. I post about books and the lives of Black women, I never use hate speech or promote violence. I share Black Women’s poems, stories, history and culture.
The ban came after Ola Ronke said she shared a video of her reading “Sweat,” a short story by Zora Neale Hurston in the author’s latest book, Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick, and “A Woman Speaks” by Audre Lorde in honor of April being National Poetry Month. Ola Ronke said she soon couldn’t log in to the social media pages and received an email about violating community standards that she called “very generic, vague and automated.”
Facebook Inc., which owns Instagram, writes that it prioritizes safety and privacy in its community standards: “Expression that threatens people has the potential to intimidate, exclude or silence others and isn’t allowed on Facebook.”
The Free Black Women’s Library is a pop-up book exchange that collects books written by black women and shares those books with the community through events such as poetry readings and book swaps. The organization is based in New York with chapters in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston, and Detroit. Since we’re based in LA, we have attended several events with The Free Black Women’s Library LA, which launched in April 2019.
Over the last week of the year, news spread of novelist Courtney Milan getting punished by Romance Writers of America for making claims that fellow romance novelists had written racial stereotypes into their works. Knocking diversity down a peg at the 9,000-member writers’ trade group, the news also showed how these groups are still struggling with supporting members of color and maintaining a diverse board.
Now a former RWA board member, Courtney, who identifies as Chinese-American, said on Twitter that fellow member Kathryn Lynn Davis had used stereotypes of Asian women in a book, according to media reports. Kathryn and Suzan Tisdale, who work together at an imprint, filed complaints with the RWA over Courtney’s comments, according to the organization’s statement.
This led to the RWA ethics panel suspending Courtney’s membership for one year and banning her permanently from leadership positions. When this news surfaced online two days before Christmas, RWA changed course to avoid “the spreading of false information, threats, and personal information” and rescinded the sanctions. Several board members resigned over issues connected to the situation while RWA members and other writers continue to express their opinions on social media.
For writers in any genre, RWA is considered one of the most valuable resources in the industry. From experience, I’ve been to one local event where I paid $10 and learned several book marketing techniques from a successful indie author. Around 50 people came to the event, crammed into a school classroom. I had never been to a regular literary group meeting that garnered such high attendance and audience engagement.
When I joined a local board of the Women’s National Book Association and attended the national meeting, other members warmly welcomed me. It was due to the attempt to diversify the board and the association as a whole. This is slowly becoming a priority at these long-standing writers’ organizations yet there are still a lot of missteps. For example, WNBA had a local board with a black president and vice president and the chapter fell apart due to the lack of financial resources the national organization wasn’t willing to contribute.
Like Courtney tweets below, these organizations depend on extra money from their members, who many haven’t yet been published and/or don’t have disposable cash to get the help the organization promises.
https://twitter.com/courtneymilan/status/1212844250137858049
I’ve also been a part of writing critique groups where I would be one of the only people of color in the room. I have expressed to writers when I believe a scene or the use of a character can come off as offensive. Once, I told a writer her story revolving around the police shooting death of her main character’s unarmed black male friend and it turning out to be all about the main character, who was a white female, could be seen as racist and/or insensitive. I added that the reader doesn’t see the black friend’s family or community who would be more devastated; just the white woman and her community. Writers may want to add diversity to their books but how it’s done can make a difference in whether they’ll receive backlash later down the road.
In RWA’s statement, it says Kathryn Lynn Davis lost a three-book contract because of Courtney’s tweets. The New York Times reports Suzan Tisdale has lost potential authors on her imprint over the controversy.
Personally, I’ve found solace and support in the growing number of black women’s writing and reading communities such as Mocha Girls Read, The Free Black Women’s Library, and Well-Read Black Girl. There’s been exponential growth in people of color establishing their own organizations due to not feeling comfortable within industry-respected organizations like RWA.
I started she lit as a literary lifestyle blog for all women because of the thick racial divide between white women and nonwhite women, millennial women and middle-aged women. Ageism also plays a role, where you put all these women from different backgrounds in one room and expect reading and writing to connect us all. But the range of time periods we’ve lived in perpetuates the racism or the general misunderstanding of each other.
The RWA story also touches on the lack of diverse beta readers writers may use. Writers tend to rely on their communities to go over their polished manuscripts, but those communities may not be that diverse, e.g. all women, all white women, all straight women, etc. A diverse panel of beta readers can help detect offensive descriptions that won’t receive such criticism and hurt an author’s career. A literary agent and a publisher may not see those issues because there is a diversity problem in the industry with most agents being white.
This is the second social media blow-up in the last two months involving well-known women writers oversharing a private conversation or matter on Twitter that turned into racial backlash caught by the eye of mainstream media.
Rapper Noname started a book club this past summer and has amassed a strong following with mostly millennial readers looking to discover a variety of books from authors of color.
With its August launch, the book club selected two books: Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire and We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby. Two books remained a constant over the months, with the latest twin picks being The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon and Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi.
The book club blossomed on social media—now having almost 67,000 followers on Twitter and over 38,000 followers on Instagram—and then moved to in-person meetings in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Photos from the meetings and from members make up most of the timelines on the two social media networks as well as vintage and stock photos of black people reading books. Letting members know they are seen and supporting their reading goals shift the book club, though helmed by a celebrity, away from the celebrity book club model that usually keeps the conversations online and seldom acknowledges members.
From cult classics to the words of emergent authors, Noname’s Book Club highlights books that speak on human conditions in critical and original ways.
That’s Noname’s Book Club’s mission statement, and it shows in the actions the group has taken to make an impact on the diverse consumers the literary industry tends to ignore.
supporting black-owned bookstores
The book club sends members to black-owned bookstores in seven cities to purchase the picks and some holding in-person meetings. One example is The Reparations Club in Los Angeles, which has quickly become home to many black creatives since opening earlier this year.
boycotting Amazon
Buying from the independent bookstores came from the book club’s stance on not buying books from Amazon. The boycott movement, popular with many indie booksellers and especially black literary groups, is to bring money back to those booksellers, especially the ones catering to consumers of color since they are usually not the top indie bookseller in their regions. Amazon has been blamed for taking necessary book sales from indie booksellers, especially with the e-retailer giant gaining a stronghold in the publishing industry creating its own books and other media based on books.
connecting with public LIBRARies
This month, the book club partnered with the Los Angeles Public Library to help members find the selected books free of charge. The book club posed the question of what should be its next partnership, and many followers chimed in, with Binghamton, New York getting a lot of votes.
In less than six months, the book club has made a major impact in magnifying the visibility of readers and authors of color, so the next year may bring more advancements in celebrating these literary stakeholders.
This past week, young adult author Sarah Dessen tweeted a quote from a college article by a woman who campaigned against her books in a campus reading program years ago. Many authors including Roxane Gay and Siobhan Vivian came to Sarah’s defense—until fans clapped back when the woman was being called derogatory names by top women authors. The authors backpedaled with some Twitter users accusing Sarah of white female victimhood and the authors of attacking readers with opinions on their works.
As of the weekend, the discriminatory tweets have disappeared from top authors’ Twitter feeds, including Siobhan Vivian, author of YA book We Are the Wildcats, who tweeted “Fuck that fucking bitch” about the quoted woman with Sarah saying “I love you” back.
Dhonielle Clayton, author of multicultural fantasy YA novel The Belles and co-founder of We Need Diverse Books, called the quoted woman a “raggedy ass fucking bitch.” Tiffany Jackson, author of YA novels Allegedly and Monday’s Not Coming, agreed. Siobhan’s Twitter account doesn’t exist anymore and her professional website has been made private, and Dhonielle’s account, which was very active with thousands of followers and tweets, now only has tweets from Nov. 14. 
The Nov. 12 article in question came from The Aberdeen News on Northern State University’s Common Read program. Brooke Nelson, now a master’s degree student, says in the article:
“She’s fine for teen girls. But definitely not up to the level of Common Read. So I became involved simply so I could stop them from ever choosing Sarah Dessen.”
Brooke, according to the article, helped with the 2017 selection, which became Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, a memoir by a civil rights lawyer in pursuit of justice which will be a movie starring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx. Sarah’s 2016 novel Saint Anything was in the running, a Vulture article reported. After Sarah mentioned the criticism in the infamous now-deleted tweet, the university issued an apology on Twitter in support of Sarah and against the free speech of an alum. Even the reporter apologized for adding the quote.
https://twitter.com/kgrandstrandAAN/status/1194307799385300998?s=20
The Washington Post was one of the first news outlets to see the Twitter feud unfold. The reporter interviewed Brooke, who said the quote was taken out of context with her emphasizing she didn’t think Sarah’s book was appropriate as a top book for her college crowd, and asked for her input:
Nelson, for her part, said she hopes the controversy draws more people to read books that will encourage them to think critically about pressing social issues.
“If anything comes out of this larger conversation,” Nelson told The Post, “I hope it is that others will make it a point to read books like [‘Just Mercy’] that push them beyond their usual perspective and challenge their assumptions of society.”
https://twitter.com/sarahdessen/status/1195431073892749315
https://twitter.com/rgay/status/1195405484905250817
https://twitter.com/pronounced_ing/status/1195742500369162240
https://twitter.com/jodipicoult/status/1195744857047928840
https://twitter.com/jenniferweiner/status/1195470675034685441
https://twitter.com/nkjemisin/status/1195745641768652800
Not everybody is going to like your book. And sometimes like in Sarah’s case, your book may be heavily scrutinized in some scenarios, even in a small-town news story about a small-town university’s book program. This comes with the territory.
Also, this story shows even as outspoken writers you have to be careful about what you decide to share publicly. Social media is an important asset to connecting with fans and readers, and now some of the authors involved have chosen to start over or take a break while most just deleted the first tweet in support of Sarah and tweeted an apology instead.
Ignore the haters if you don’t have anything nice to say; if it’s threatening in any way, then report the tweet and block the user, but just breathe when you see something constructive that you don’t like. Let it go, and if someone asks about the criticism, don’t respond or say something diplomatic because at the end of the day not everyone is going to like your work and they have the right to say so.
The unfortunate Twitter saga has some followers promoting a boycott, so we’ll keep a watch on how the authors involved will be impacted. Earlier this year, Netflix announced making three of Sarah’s novels into films.