#and my flute teacher recommended sherri s tepper

[rotationalsymmetry]

About recommendations. There is a thing, where, if Mary reads a book (a novel -- I’m talking fiction here) and recommends it to Jane who recommends it to Tom who recommends it to Bob who recommends it to Alice -- this is called word of mouth, it’s actually hugely important to book sales, ads don’t do nearly as much as word of mouth when it comes to which books take off and which don’t -- and I hope I don’t have to spell out that book sales are directly connected to who gets another book deal and who doesn’t --  if any one person in the chain is like “oh, Tom probably isn’t interested in a book that deals with feminist issues” or “Bob might not like a book that’s mostly about black characters” or “oh, Jane isn’t going to like this book because she’s straight” then the entire chain gets broken. Which means, if Tom just doesn’t like stories that have too much of “that feminist garbage” and won’t read it or recommend it, then the chain gets broken. If Tom would be fine with that feminist stuff but Jane just nervous enough that he might not be that she recommends something “safer” instead, the chain gets broken. If Tom is embarrassed to read a book with a pink cover in public, so he reads it but won’t admit to Bob that he read it, the chain gets broken. Which means that certain kinds of books -- books with feminist themes and pink books and books where everyone’s queer or everyone’s black or whatever -- don’t get as much word of mouth, or only get it through chains of people who ALL like feminist books, pink books, books with black protagonists, etc. And who all know that the person coming after them in the chain likes that kind of book. Etc. (I was going to use Neil Gaiman’s book Anansi Boys as an example, but...I think that’s probably a major exception to this. An author who writes one book centering black characters in a sea of books that don’t, and who’s gotten well known off of those other books, well, that’s different from an author who centers black characters in every book they write, you know? And for people who like Neil Gaiman, any Neil Gaiman book is a pretty safe rec.) And you can’t undo that. You don’t even know it happened. Even if everyone in YOUR network will pass along feminist stuff, other people don’t, and that affects sales negatively. You can’t counter it by being neutral. You have to counter it by preferentially passing on those books. Especially to other people who will preferentially pass those recs along. Which might mean “this show is so great because it has (detailed list of characters’ demographics/because it handles x in y way)” but it can also mean “this show is so good, I love the way romance is handled and I just relate to the characters so hard and it keeps me guessing about what’s coming next” but you know that part of why you’re recommending it is (detailed list of characters’ demographics and how it handles x in y way.) I mean, presumably you’re not only recommending it because of the sj stuff, it’s the sj stuff plus its other good qualities, right? I’m listening to LeVar Burton Reads. I believe I found that recommendation from being an avid Captain Awkward reader. And, a podcast with short stories read by LeVar Burton isn’t a stretch: I love Geordi LaForge in Star Trek TNG, I loved Reading Rainbow as a kid, I love listening to short stories, it’s all good! And, I’ve noticed on several stories he takes a moment after reading it to talk about how the story’s ideas and themes connect to his personal experience, sometimes as a father or some such, sometimes as a black man. And...I wonder. I wonder at the factors leading up to me getting a recommendation like that, vs not getting it. How easy it would be to never have heard about it at all. I hang out with people on the liberal to radical side of the political spectrum. I don’t think I even know anyone who would deliberately not recommend a podcast because the host talks about being a black person. I don’t think I know anyone who would deliberately not recommend a book because it featured black characters. I don’t think I come across as someone who wouldn’t be interested in something like that. And yet, the books I’ve read that were written by black people or center around black characters, there are not many of them. (A lot of bookstores that I’ve been into in the last few years have started centering writers of color, and there’s short story magazines that are prioritizing writers of color and other marginalized folks, and this is new, this was not happening 10 or 15 or 20 years ago, not on the scale it is now. Maybe it happened at some point in the past, but not in my past, not in my adult past.) And yeah, all the times I played up Brandon Sanderson or Terry Pratchett (who...does write about feminist themes? But he’s a guy so it’s different?) and didn’t mention Mercedes Lackey or Anne McCaffrey because I’d never actually met anyone else who liked Mercedes Lackey or Anne McCaffrey. It’s not even that I didn’t recommend them to men. I didn’t recommend them to anyone. Because no one recommended them to me.