Fireside - Examining the BlackSpecFic Editorial
>Fiction, we have a problem.
Racism.
Structural, institutional, personal, universal.
Do non-Western publications have this problem? Or is this a happy way of sharing the blame/responsibility as far as possible.
>We all know this. We do. We don’t need numbers to see that, like everywhere in our society, marginalization of black people is still a huge problem in publishing.
Actually we've already had numbers. People have crunched numbers without payment - and apparently already been forgotten. We have the numbers, we know there's a problem, we know the problem is not with writers because any conversation involving writers turns up pretty much every possible sort of human being capable of setting words together. We can't know the problem *isn't* with readers because we can't test that until the problem with getting stories from writers to readers is solved (but it seems mean-spirited to believe that there isn't an audience for diversity prior to allowing that potential audience to give diverse fiction a go). The problem is the gatekeepers. The problem is a bottleneck that keeps diverse fiction from reaching the same audience as SFF in general. The specific problem is not all-of-us the specific problem is YOU.
>Specifically, as outlined here in Fireside’s special report, we see that marginalization in short fiction magazines and their online equivalents. These same problems persist across publishing, but our study is focused on the world Fireside lives and breathes in: the speculative short fiction market.
We don’t need the numbers to know that racism is a problem in our field. But we have them.
It's a knick-knack Patty Whack, give the frog a loan...
>Are you fucking kidding me?
Sadly, no.
This reaction from a casual reader with no interest in how SFF gets published would be forgiveable - from a zine... Wow just wow. You shouldn't be surprised. Even fake surprised. It's disrespectful.
>These numbers are powerful. Because what they point to is this: this isn’t random. This isn’t some fluke, as Cecily Kane, Ethan Robinson, and Weston Allen, the report’s researchers, found.
I am at a loss as to how a continual lack of diversity in SFF could possibly be viewed as random except by people who have no idea where or how to use the concept of randomness.
You know, the kind of people who think that a man punches his wife as a random act of violence.
>The probability that it is random chance that only 1.96 percent of published writers are black in a country where 13.2 percent of the population is black is 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000321%.
see
If I have a drawer of 100 socks of all colours of which at least 13 are black but of the socks I take from the drawer I choose only 2 black ones. The chances of my having done that are 100%.
Expressing what *has* happened as the probability of that event happening provides the same curious disconnect as telling people that their chance of winning a lottery is close to zero when they see people win lotteries every day, or expressing a number with so many noughts that you could add or subtract half a dozen off without anyone noticing the edit - because the number has no meaning in most people's heads beyond 'fooking lot of zeroes on that'
To put it another way...
In 2015, when a black writer sent a great story in to a market, that story would be rejected more than six times as often than it would have if the writer were not black.
Six times as much rejection to get a single story published.
Stick that on a pretty graphic...
And that doesn't take into account market realities - including that established authors are more likely to be published than new-comers - and I have no idea how many of the stories Fireside counted are by established black writers. Because established black writers may be asked for stories, that means that the other stories by black writers that make it through have been rejected much much more.
There are a whole lot of stories that are objectively great stories that never get published at all. Their chance of getting rejected, that should have been very low - because they're great and great stories get published - becomes 100% - entirely because they're a story written by a black writer.
>So what’s going on here? There are a lot of factors.
And that lot of factors makes all the statistics kind of weird and pointless but eh...
>Sure, as N.K. Jemisin says in our interview with her, some black writers opt out of the publishing system and self-publish, and have been doing so for years. But before you say, “A-HA! SEE THERE IS NO RACISM,” these writers do this because of the racism in the system. Why bother trying when you know you don’t have a chance?
And even more give up - I'm willing to bet that writers who diverge the furthest from the monoculture also get more form rejections, and more comments about how their perspective is wrong (not the writing of that perspective but the viewpoint itself)
Still, writing is one of those things everyone believes they can do and there is in any case a tremendous turn-over. Writers stop submitting because they stop writing, stop writing short stories, sell to invitation only markets, are published in single writer anthologies... for every writer that stops sending to markets there will be a new fresh face aware that *some* black writers get published and believing the spiel that editors want to see more diverse SFF.
People have little or no chance of winning the lottery, but they still buy tickets.
Again I have no shiny statistics, but I believe Alt POV writers, even suspecting they have little chance of being published, struggle harder and more stubbornly and give up less easily. That's why many eventually self-publish - and even knowing it's not the same as breaking through the barred gates and storming the barricades, I feel uncomfortable at self-publishing under these circumstances being characterised as not bothering.
When people say another is not bothering to try it is seldom true that they respect the individual they're talking about.
>Overt racism is only a small part of the problem, though.
Wait, at what point was there a discussion or admission of overt racism? That subtle accusation that the reader of this piece would decide there wasn't any? The folks who don't think there's racism don't get far enough into this to be mocked.
Where's the overt racism and why is it being let slide unchallenged?
>It’s the more subtle biases that really do us in
Umm,
> There’s the editor who “doesn’t get” a great story set in a black community.
That's not subtle. Seriously. If you can 'get' a story set on an alien world but not in a black community that's not a subtle bias at all.
[This is where any writer whose thinking of this as not being about them and that they're reading and worrying about this because they want to support other writers should be worried for themselves too... An editor thinks that it is a minor thing to reject a great story because the setting is a black community. An editor thinks that minor details of setting trump great writing and great story-telling as a cause for rejection. Whoever the writer is, their story would be rejected for a creative choice that a writer of any background might choose to make... ]
> As N.K. says in her interview and as Tobias Buckell writes, there’s the casual dismissal of any conversation about racism by saying, “Well, here are four black authors I can name off the top of my head.”
You guys run in some really... limited circles.
I have spent the last decade listening to people talk about how publishing seems content with having go-to colour, and how that is no reflection on their chosen-ones and the quality of those writers' works, but still not the pathway to a genuine widening of access.
Continually talking about and to the people who do not see a problem is not the way to change.
>It’s always the same four authors, though. The names change, but the implications don’t.
The same four authors are writing all of it but changing their names? Sorry couldn't resist.
>The advice to write “what the market wants” is code for white characters and white stories.
No. That's way too simple a dismissal of what is seldom meant by those who say it to mean write white.
And in general the advice is even worse because it's 'write what you know' or 'write what you believe in' because writers continue to believe that editors are genuinely looking for great stories above all. It is wonderful hopeful advice, but as long as publishing the best damn stories they can get their hands on is *not* what publishers are doing it is only the stories which get close enough to the required monoculture that will be accepted.
I don't think there is a code. That would be way too organised and subtle. Possibly if you're being groomed as a chosen-one.... But I do think writers eventually work out for themselves, and from editorial comments, that the way they view the world is not the way they should view it if they want to sell a story.
>The opportunities to network, like six-week writing workshops or weeklong conventions, are really only open to those with the means to miss work.
Umm, I get uncomfortable applying this to black people only - and it isn't why stories aren't getting accepted. Networking can help make you the next chosen-one but all the stories being accepted, when the stories by writers of other backgrounds are rejected, are not written by people with the right networking connections.
[or if they are SFF publishing is in an even worse situation than being racist, because once only the friends of the in-crowd get published the genre's doomed]
>The entire system is built to benefit whiteness, and to ignore that is to bury your head in the flaming garbage heap of history.
Raving against the entire system and being angry at the system is wonderfully florid - but the bit of the system that seems to be the bit that really isn't working is the editorial selection process.
Fireside's bit of the system.
Not writers, not readers, but the people who've buried their heads firmly in the idea that racism is something big that needs attacking from the outside.
The problem is that editors are picking stories to conform to a narrow set of tastes which could be described as 'white' but are actually even narrower than that.
Ask women how represented they feel by those narrow tastes.
Ask pretty much anyone who isn't the kind of person who can say, without irony, that SFF is a fiction of ideas.
The solution is for editors to pick stories that both satisfy and widen people's tastes.
>Our goal in publishing this report is not to call out individual magazines. It’s to call out the entire system.
Is there going to be fisticuffs?
I'm a little confused by what 'the system' is here, much as I get confused by Trump's speeches. The system, or process, is not the problem really... The system is supposed to be that writers send in stories, slush readers reject the unpublishable and pass the rest on to editors who select quality stories to be published. Some experience with slush tells me that you don't actually get that many publishable stories (especially if you don't auto-accept the trunk-dump from better published writers).
The system is not the problem.
The editors are the problem.
Sorry, but the selection isn't random chance, random chance wouldn't pick so few stories by black writers, the editors are *choosing* not to pick great stories. Only they can make that right.
>It may look easy for me to say that, because in 2015, 3 of Fireside’s 32 stories were written by black writers. That’s 9.4 percent! Near the top of the entire list of 63 magazines!
That *rounds up* to 9.4%. You do know that *not* calling out other magazine's whilst talking up your own is tacky, yes?
>Guess what? In 2016, Fireside hasn’t published a single black writer. We have one or two in the pipeline for later in the year, but we’ve failed.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to make of this, it's getting terribly close to the recovering addict who wants praise for having been six months sober last year, while admitting he's got drunk this year but plans to be sober some more, soon. I don't feel that guy really wants to be sober.
> We’re all failing.
Is this addressed entirely to editors? Is this addressed to the editors of the Destroy editions, and those at the magazines who published them?
The whole I'm guilty but so is everyone thing... doesn't work for me these days - too done by too many politicians caught drunk driving (we all do it!).
>You can’t point to, as Nisi Shawl writes, the ones and twos and rarely threes representing the number of black writers in a magazine in the spreadsheet and pat yourself on the back. We’re certainly not.
Says the magazine that just pointed to it's statistics and said - hey we're near the top of the entire list of 63 magazines.
>
So here’s what Fireside is going to do
We’re working with the developer of our submissions system to add in an optional, anonymous form for people to self-report their demographic information when they submit to Fireside. This way, we can take a much closer look at what is going on in our submissions pile.
Because? The only thing I can see statistics from your submission pile really being used for, at this point, is to prove that you're taking the proper number of black writers etc considering the number of stories submitted.
What do you want this data for? I think anyone asked to give demographic information should have a better idea of your plans for the data than that you've given - you're not a government department.
On a side note - editorial chatter always seemed to suggest that writers don't submit the same in any case... those writers the 'system' favours are more likely to fill the slush with unpublishable stories, they send in more stories because they send in everything and refine their stories while they work them through the markets. Writers from other subsets, who're aware that their stories have to be better than those others to be treated comparably, send fewer but better polished stories.
Anonymous statistics may well show that the slushpiles are dominated by white men, and that the majority of those white men are rejected...
>We are going to change our submissions process. Once a year, we will still have one big submission period open to everyone. But several other times a year, we will have targeted submissions windows, each targeted toward a specific marginalized group. So black writers, writers of color generally, LGBTQA writers, women, writers with disabilities, etc. We’re still working out the details on this, but all the dates will be publicized well ahead of time, so that people who don’t have the leisure time to whip up a submission on short notice can get their work ready.
There are so many things wrong with this that it's petty to point out how dismissive and unconvincing the use of etc is in a short list of marginalised groups is. Try substituting 'and others' because at least I won't flash to Yul Brynner in the King and I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JHH6iwgIek
This is a story I wrote to cover the segregated submissions idea.
http://katallen.livejournal.com/375404.html
This is not the same idea as special editions like the Destroys. This is segregation. Sure, it's nice to give those other people a little water fountain of their own, but it's not curing the problem that they're never getting to drink at the big fountain.
>We’re still working out the details on this, but all the dates will be publicized well ahead of time, so that people who don’t have the leisure time to whip up a submission on short notice can get their work ready.
And this makes me wonder if they know many writers. The approved method for getting published is to write stories and send them out. Get rejected, and send them back out. Stories sat on your computer are not sitting in a slushpile. I might hold on to a story because Fireside has a reading period open next week, but for a market to expect me to keep a good story sat on its ass for a month or two just to collect a reject from them... and that's what they're going to ask of 'marginalised' writers. That they keep good stories waiting for the Fireside special submission period.
There's something insincere in making the people who're suffering discrimination reduce their chances of selling even further.
>Fireside’s staff is currently one white man (me), one disabled white woman, and one Puerto Rican man. And that’s OK, but it’s not nearly good enough. As our staff expands, we will be looking specifically to add black people and others who represent marginalized communities. We will also look for more opportunities to work with guest editors from those communities.
And here's the snag, clearly it *isn't* okay. You keep saying there's a problem with the selection system, and you guys are it, you're the selection system. Nor am I comforted by your thinking that you simply add people who you feel represent a marginalised community because they belong to that community, because you may be tempted to pick a person whose tastes in fiction mesh with your own... .
How about you try challenging your biases? Because only the people who're actively selecting against fiction written with 'marginalised' qualities can stop doing that.
>We also want to hear from the black writing and publishing community about what else we could do better. You can email me directly at brian@firesidefiction.com or talk to us on Twitter.
Because it's up to those folks to tell you how to do better, rather than you actually taking time out to look at how you select stories and... try to do better.
>There’s a lot more we can do. And I promise you, we’re going to kick our own asses every day to make sure we are always doing better.
Your asses are not the problem. What were you going to do better other than segregating submissions and getting some other people to help you be less biased?
>A few notes to the manbaby angrily writing a comment on this post or on Twitter about #BlackSpecFic
If you’re about to scream at us about some variation of All Writers Matter, just sit the fuck down. We’re talking about antiblack racism here today. It’s a real, specific problem. Yes, there are a lot of other problems. Being white isn’t one of them. Just delete your comment or I’ll delete it for you. And don’t whine at me about free speech. This is my house. Go take a shit on your own rug.
Wow, seriously, no wonder you can't select good stories over ones written by the kind of people you're yelling at now. You are the kind of people you're yelling at.
>Before you start yelling about “well, it’s just about quality,” go read the essays by Justina Ireland and Troy Wiggins. And the rest of the essays. Maybe you’ll learn something. That’s the whole point of this.
The statistics prove it is just about quality - there are more high quality stories in the slush than editors select for publication. Lots more. Massive amounts more. Which undoubtedly means mediocre stories by the people you're yelling at are picked over those great stories. By editors. By you. It's all about the quality fiction SFF editors don't see because the stories aren't written the way they're defining SFF stories should be written because they're written by people whose view of the world you don't share and aren't interested in. Buy for quality alone and you'll get diversity,
>If you aim anything racist or otherwise bigoted at Fireside here or elsewhere, I will publicly name and shame you, and then block you.
And I will announce this in advance... because you need to be warned, or is it challenged?
>If you aim any of that garbage at the writers involved in this report, I will not only name and shame you, I will fire you into the goddamn sun.
This is definitely not the way to open the floor to comment for a reasonable discussion on how to solve the wholesale racism of SFF editors - picking fights with random people who may or may not exist and may or may not even be writers (because the biggest piece of advice writers get on how to be published is not upsetting editors)
Silencing bigots is not how the racism you're pointing out will get fixed. Challenging bigots is not yaddah yaddah. Convincing editors that stories with an all black cast, or stories that are brilliantly written and you know are stories but feel uncomfortable about because you don't think the writer is talking to *you* but a black guy standing next to you, should be getting published... that's that thing you should be kicking your ass to do better.
Racism.
Structural, institutional, personal, universal.
Do non-Western publications have this problem? Or is this a happy way of sharing the blame/responsibility as far as possible.
>We all know this. We do. We don’t need numbers to see that, like everywhere in our society, marginalization of black people is still a huge problem in publishing.
Actually we've already had numbers. People have crunched numbers without payment - and apparently already been forgotten. We have the numbers, we know there's a problem, we know the problem is not with writers because any conversation involving writers turns up pretty much every possible sort of human being capable of setting words together. We can't know the problem *isn't* with readers because we can't test that until the problem with getting stories from writers to readers is solved (but it seems mean-spirited to believe that there isn't an audience for diversity prior to allowing that potential audience to give diverse fiction a go). The problem is the gatekeepers. The problem is a bottleneck that keeps diverse fiction from reaching the same audience as SFF in general. The specific problem is not all-of-us the specific problem is YOU.
>Specifically, as outlined here in Fireside’s special report, we see that marginalization in short fiction magazines and their online equivalents. These same problems persist across publishing, but our study is focused on the world Fireside lives and breathes in: the speculative short fiction market.
We don’t need the numbers to know that racism is a problem in our field. But we have them.
It's a knick-knack Patty Whack, give the frog a loan...
>Are you fucking kidding me?
Sadly, no.
This reaction from a casual reader with no interest in how SFF gets published would be forgiveable - from a zine... Wow just wow. You shouldn't be surprised. Even fake surprised. It's disrespectful.
>These numbers are powerful. Because what they point to is this: this isn’t random. This isn’t some fluke, as Cecily Kane, Ethan Robinson, and Weston Allen, the report’s researchers, found.
I am at a loss as to how a continual lack of diversity in SFF could possibly be viewed as random except by people who have no idea where or how to use the concept of randomness.
You know, the kind of people who think that a man punches his wife as a random act of violence.
>The probability that it is random chance that only 1.96 percent of published writers are black in a country where 13.2 percent of the population is black is 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000321%.
see
If I have a drawer of 100 socks of all colours of which at least 13 are black but of the socks I take from the drawer I choose only 2 black ones. The chances of my having done that are 100%.
Expressing what *has* happened as the probability of that event happening provides the same curious disconnect as telling people that their chance of winning a lottery is close to zero when they see people win lotteries every day, or expressing a number with so many noughts that you could add or subtract half a dozen off without anyone noticing the edit - because the number has no meaning in most people's heads beyond 'fooking lot of zeroes on that'
To put it another way...
In 2015, when a black writer sent a great story in to a market, that story would be rejected more than six times as often than it would have if the writer were not black.
Six times as much rejection to get a single story published.
Stick that on a pretty graphic...
And that doesn't take into account market realities - including that established authors are more likely to be published than new-comers - and I have no idea how many of the stories Fireside counted are by established black writers. Because established black writers may be asked for stories, that means that the other stories by black writers that make it through have been rejected much much more.
There are a whole lot of stories that are objectively great stories that never get published at all. Their chance of getting rejected, that should have been very low - because they're great and great stories get published - becomes 100% - entirely because they're a story written by a black writer.
>So what’s going on here? There are a lot of factors.
And that lot of factors makes all the statistics kind of weird and pointless but eh...
>Sure, as N.K. Jemisin says in our interview with her, some black writers opt out of the publishing system and self-publish, and have been doing so for years. But before you say, “A-HA! SEE THERE IS NO RACISM,” these writers do this because of the racism in the system. Why bother trying when you know you don’t have a chance?
And even more give up - I'm willing to bet that writers who diverge the furthest from the monoculture also get more form rejections, and more comments about how their perspective is wrong (not the writing of that perspective but the viewpoint itself)
Still, writing is one of those things everyone believes they can do and there is in any case a tremendous turn-over. Writers stop submitting because they stop writing, stop writing short stories, sell to invitation only markets, are published in single writer anthologies... for every writer that stops sending to markets there will be a new fresh face aware that *some* black writers get published and believing the spiel that editors want to see more diverse SFF.
People have little or no chance of winning the lottery, but they still buy tickets.
Again I have no shiny statistics, but I believe Alt POV writers, even suspecting they have little chance of being published, struggle harder and more stubbornly and give up less easily. That's why many eventually self-publish - and even knowing it's not the same as breaking through the barred gates and storming the barricades, I feel uncomfortable at self-publishing under these circumstances being characterised as not bothering.
When people say another is not bothering to try it is seldom true that they respect the individual they're talking about.
>Overt racism is only a small part of the problem, though.
Wait, at what point was there a discussion or admission of overt racism? That subtle accusation that the reader of this piece would decide there wasn't any? The folks who don't think there's racism don't get far enough into this to be mocked.
Where's the overt racism and why is it being let slide unchallenged?
>It’s the more subtle biases that really do us in
Umm,
> There’s the editor who “doesn’t get” a great story set in a black community.
That's not subtle. Seriously. If you can 'get' a story set on an alien world but not in a black community that's not a subtle bias at all.
[This is where any writer whose thinking of this as not being about them and that they're reading and worrying about this because they want to support other writers should be worried for themselves too... An editor thinks that it is a minor thing to reject a great story because the setting is a black community. An editor thinks that minor details of setting trump great writing and great story-telling as a cause for rejection. Whoever the writer is, their story would be rejected for a creative choice that a writer of any background might choose to make... ]
> As N.K. says in her interview and as Tobias Buckell writes, there’s the casual dismissal of any conversation about racism by saying, “Well, here are four black authors I can name off the top of my head.”
You guys run in some really... limited circles.
I have spent the last decade listening to people talk about how publishing seems content with having go-to colour, and how that is no reflection on their chosen-ones and the quality of those writers' works, but still not the pathway to a genuine widening of access.
Continually talking about and to the people who do not see a problem is not the way to change.
>It’s always the same four authors, though. The names change, but the implications don’t.
The same four authors are writing all of it but changing their names? Sorry couldn't resist.
>The advice to write “what the market wants” is code for white characters and white stories.
No. That's way too simple a dismissal of what is seldom meant by those who say it to mean write white.
And in general the advice is even worse because it's 'write what you know' or 'write what you believe in' because writers continue to believe that editors are genuinely looking for great stories above all. It is wonderful hopeful advice, but as long as publishing the best damn stories they can get their hands on is *not* what publishers are doing it is only the stories which get close enough to the required monoculture that will be accepted.
I don't think there is a code. That would be way too organised and subtle. Possibly if you're being groomed as a chosen-one.... But I do think writers eventually work out for themselves, and from editorial comments, that the way they view the world is not the way they should view it if they want to sell a story.
>The opportunities to network, like six-week writing workshops or weeklong conventions, are really only open to those with the means to miss work.
Umm, I get uncomfortable applying this to black people only - and it isn't why stories aren't getting accepted. Networking can help make you the next chosen-one but all the stories being accepted, when the stories by writers of other backgrounds are rejected, are not written by people with the right networking connections.
[or if they are SFF publishing is in an even worse situation than being racist, because once only the friends of the in-crowd get published the genre's doomed]
>The entire system is built to benefit whiteness, and to ignore that is to bury your head in the flaming garbage heap of history.
Raving against the entire system and being angry at the system is wonderfully florid - but the bit of the system that seems to be the bit that really isn't working is the editorial selection process.
Fireside's bit of the system.
Not writers, not readers, but the people who've buried their heads firmly in the idea that racism is something big that needs attacking from the outside.
The problem is that editors are picking stories to conform to a narrow set of tastes which could be described as 'white' but are actually even narrower than that.
Ask women how represented they feel by those narrow tastes.
Ask pretty much anyone who isn't the kind of person who can say, without irony, that SFF is a fiction of ideas.
The solution is for editors to pick stories that both satisfy and widen people's tastes.
>Our goal in publishing this report is not to call out individual magazines. It’s to call out the entire system.
Is there going to be fisticuffs?
I'm a little confused by what 'the system' is here, much as I get confused by Trump's speeches. The system, or process, is not the problem really... The system is supposed to be that writers send in stories, slush readers reject the unpublishable and pass the rest on to editors who select quality stories to be published. Some experience with slush tells me that you don't actually get that many publishable stories (especially if you don't auto-accept the trunk-dump from better published writers).
The system is not the problem.
The editors are the problem.
Sorry, but the selection isn't random chance, random chance wouldn't pick so few stories by black writers, the editors are *choosing* not to pick great stories. Only they can make that right.
>It may look easy for me to say that, because in 2015, 3 of Fireside’s 32 stories were written by black writers. That’s 9.4 percent! Near the top of the entire list of 63 magazines!
That *rounds up* to 9.4%. You do know that *not* calling out other magazine's whilst talking up your own is tacky, yes?
>Guess what? In 2016, Fireside hasn’t published a single black writer. We have one or two in the pipeline for later in the year, but we’ve failed.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to make of this, it's getting terribly close to the recovering addict who wants praise for having been six months sober last year, while admitting he's got drunk this year but plans to be sober some more, soon. I don't feel that guy really wants to be sober.
> We’re all failing.
Is this addressed entirely to editors? Is this addressed to the editors of the Destroy editions, and those at the magazines who published them?
The whole I'm guilty but so is everyone thing... doesn't work for me these days - too done by too many politicians caught drunk driving (we all do it!).
>You can’t point to, as Nisi Shawl writes, the ones and twos and rarely threes representing the number of black writers in a magazine in the spreadsheet and pat yourself on the back. We’re certainly not.
Says the magazine that just pointed to it's statistics and said - hey we're near the top of the entire list of 63 magazines.
>
So here’s what Fireside is going to do
We’re working with the developer of our submissions system to add in an optional, anonymous form for people to self-report their demographic information when they submit to Fireside. This way, we can take a much closer look at what is going on in our submissions pile.
Because? The only thing I can see statistics from your submission pile really being used for, at this point, is to prove that you're taking the proper number of black writers etc considering the number of stories submitted.
What do you want this data for? I think anyone asked to give demographic information should have a better idea of your plans for the data than that you've given - you're not a government department.
On a side note - editorial chatter always seemed to suggest that writers don't submit the same in any case... those writers the 'system' favours are more likely to fill the slush with unpublishable stories, they send in more stories because they send in everything and refine their stories while they work them through the markets. Writers from other subsets, who're aware that their stories have to be better than those others to be treated comparably, send fewer but better polished stories.
Anonymous statistics may well show that the slushpiles are dominated by white men, and that the majority of those white men are rejected...
>We are going to change our submissions process. Once a year, we will still have one big submission period open to everyone. But several other times a year, we will have targeted submissions windows, each targeted toward a specific marginalized group. So black writers, writers of color generally, LGBTQA writers, women, writers with disabilities, etc. We’re still working out the details on this, but all the dates will be publicized well ahead of time, so that people who don’t have the leisure time to whip up a submission on short notice can get their work ready.
There are so many things wrong with this that it's petty to point out how dismissive and unconvincing the use of etc is in a short list of marginalised groups is. Try substituting 'and others' because at least I won't flash to Yul Brynner in the King and I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JHH6iwgIek
This is a story I wrote to cover the segregated submissions idea.
http://katallen.livejournal.com/375404.html
This is not the same idea as special editions like the Destroys. This is segregation. Sure, it's nice to give those other people a little water fountain of their own, but it's not curing the problem that they're never getting to drink at the big fountain.
>We’re still working out the details on this, but all the dates will be publicized well ahead of time, so that people who don’t have the leisure time to whip up a submission on short notice can get their work ready.
And this makes me wonder if they know many writers. The approved method for getting published is to write stories and send them out. Get rejected, and send them back out. Stories sat on your computer are not sitting in a slushpile. I might hold on to a story because Fireside has a reading period open next week, but for a market to expect me to keep a good story sat on its ass for a month or two just to collect a reject from them... and that's what they're going to ask of 'marginalised' writers. That they keep good stories waiting for the Fireside special submission period.
There's something insincere in making the people who're suffering discrimination reduce their chances of selling even further.
>Fireside’s staff is currently one white man (me), one disabled white woman, and one Puerto Rican man. And that’s OK, but it’s not nearly good enough. As our staff expands, we will be looking specifically to add black people and others who represent marginalized communities. We will also look for more opportunities to work with guest editors from those communities.
And here's the snag, clearly it *isn't* okay. You keep saying there's a problem with the selection system, and you guys are it, you're the selection system. Nor am I comforted by your thinking that you simply add people who you feel represent a marginalised community because they belong to that community, because you may be tempted to pick a person whose tastes in fiction mesh with your own... .
How about you try challenging your biases? Because only the people who're actively selecting against fiction written with 'marginalised' qualities can stop doing that.
>We also want to hear from the black writing and publishing community about what else we could do better. You can email me directly at brian@firesidefiction.com or talk to us on Twitter.
Because it's up to those folks to tell you how to do better, rather than you actually taking time out to look at how you select stories and... try to do better.
>There’s a lot more we can do. And I promise you, we’re going to kick our own asses every day to make sure we are always doing better.
Your asses are not the problem. What were you going to do better other than segregating submissions and getting some other people to help you be less biased?
>A few notes to the manbaby angrily writing a comment on this post or on Twitter about #BlackSpecFic
If you’re about to scream at us about some variation of All Writers Matter, just sit the fuck down. We’re talking about antiblack racism here today. It’s a real, specific problem. Yes, there are a lot of other problems. Being white isn’t one of them. Just delete your comment or I’ll delete it for you. And don’t whine at me about free speech. This is my house. Go take a shit on your own rug.
Wow, seriously, no wonder you can't select good stories over ones written by the kind of people you're yelling at now. You are the kind of people you're yelling at.
>Before you start yelling about “well, it’s just about quality,” go read the essays by Justina Ireland and Troy Wiggins. And the rest of the essays. Maybe you’ll learn something. That’s the whole point of this.
The statistics prove it is just about quality - there are more high quality stories in the slush than editors select for publication. Lots more. Massive amounts more. Which undoubtedly means mediocre stories by the people you're yelling at are picked over those great stories. By editors. By you. It's all about the quality fiction SFF editors don't see because the stories aren't written the way they're defining SFF stories should be written because they're written by people whose view of the world you don't share and aren't interested in. Buy for quality alone and you'll get diversity,
>If you aim anything racist or otherwise bigoted at Fireside here or elsewhere, I will publicly name and shame you, and then block you.
And I will announce this in advance... because you need to be warned, or is it challenged?
>If you aim any of that garbage at the writers involved in this report, I will not only name and shame you, I will fire you into the goddamn sun.
This is definitely not the way to open the floor to comment for a reasonable discussion on how to solve the wholesale racism of SFF editors - picking fights with random people who may or may not exist and may or may not even be writers (because the biggest piece of advice writers get on how to be published is not upsetting editors)
Silencing bigots is not how the racism you're pointing out will get fixed. Challenging bigots is not yaddah yaddah. Convincing editors that stories with an all black cast, or stories that are brilliantly written and you know are stories but feel uncomfortable about because you don't think the writer is talking to *you* but a black guy standing next to you, should be getting published... that's that thing you should be kicking your ass to do better.