[Published in the Summer 2025 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF). Posted with permission of the publisher. This material is copyrighted.]

BY THE NUMBERS 10: WHY WE NEED TO COUNT ON EACH OTHER

THERE IS A FALLACY, a set of words which in some minds becomes a mantra: If you write a great story, it will get published. I don’t know where this myth comes from or why so many people believe it, but nothing shatters this myth as effectively as spending a year trying to get published.

Now, if you know anything about me, you probably know that I have interviewed a lot of authors. Early on I discovered that the experiences of some authors were very different than others. As a baseline, the majority of folks who’ve made some headway in publishing will tell you how challenging the industry can be. But what I hadn’t really realized back when I started getting involved in the industry is to what degree the challenges of the industry are unevenly distributed.

I found this really cool Toni Morrison quote a couple of years ago, and I think about it often. I’ll leave it here, near the top of the column, and we’ll come back to it later: “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”(1)

Let’s get right to the numbers.

I sent a survey to 113 authors of color.(2) Of those authors, 53 submitted survey responses. The questions(3) were inspired by experiences that authors of color have shared with me over the years (often during interviews, sometimes off the record). Due to space, I can’t list all the questions and results, but I’ll share a few of the most interesting ones.

Maggie Tokuda-Hall said that when she was starting out, “I was a bookseller and was deeply aware of the lack of writers who looked like me or other people of color, especially among those who received publisher support. All (or at least nearly all, though I can’t remember a POC) our sales reps were white. Most of my colleagues were white.”

The numbers suggest that sometimes due to a lack of representative exemplars on bookshelves or in movies and so on, sometimes due to the predatory nature of colonialism and the way it makes individuals feel about themselves, most authors of color start out writing white characters.

Multi-award winner N.K. Jemisin says, “As a teenager I wrote white guys, then wondered why, then tried to write a (white) woman, struggled, and wondered why it was such a struggle. I started trying to write characters of color in my late teens. It was all I had seen. I finally encountered Octavia Butler somewhere in my teens.” This phenomenon is not limited to the U.S. or the U.K.; it is globally pervasive. Writer/editor Shingai Njeri Kagunda says, “White people were romanticized and Black people were ostracized in the media. It almost felt like the only stories worth telling were about white people, and I wanted to write stories worth telling. Looking back, I see how deeply rooted the internalized racism and self-hatred were.” Writer Wen-Yi Lee says, “It felt basically jarring otherwise. Even when they were characters inspired by (Asian) people I knew, I felt actively resistant to visualising them that way in a story or giving them ‘cultural’ names. There was an underlying sense of wrongness. And I actually live in Asia, so there was a huge disconnect.”

A fair number of respondents elided the issue of race by writing “ambiguous” or “racially unspecified” characters in those early days; and, to be fair, in a few cases, white characters only happened very early on and only very briefly. But based on these numbers, it can be asserted that one of the most insidious aspects of colonialism, reinforced by the paucity of positive diverse representation in literature, is that authors of color often have to undertake an entire personal journey to learn that it is okay to write characters (and stories) that aren’t white.

There are exceptions to this. Usually the difference was early access to diverse reading materials and direct support from parents. Writer Christopher Caldwell said, “My mother was very quick to point out that there was no reason for — say, a detective — to be White, and if there is no reason, why couldn’t I write them as a Black person instead?”

However, regardless of global locale and even age, the initial works of most authors of color reflected the overwhelming presence of white stories. Writers of color often felt as if their own perspectives were unwelcome in the literary world. In almost every case, discovering diverse works helped authors to write beyond the narrow confines of white narratives and characters.

Most respondents believed that racial bias or racism had some kind of negative impact on their career. Samit Basu said, “Yes. It’s been quite unambiguous. And I work in several media, it’s everywhere.” Another author who preferred to remain anonymous said, “Suspected, many times. Confirmed, no. I have had multiple people email me to say something racist that they probably thought was encouraging or supportive, which was that they weren’t going to pick up my book ‘because of my name’ but then they did, or they read one of my short stories, enjoyed it, and realized I’m not writing ‘those kind of stories’ but stories for ‘normal readers.’ Every time I remember one of these emails I feel like I lose another handful of brain cells.”

While a few of the “yes” folks were going on suspicion, in many cases, respondents had received a comment or comments in rejections — from authors, editors, and even agents — with messages that signaled either a lack of understanding of BIPOC content/ concerns or an outright disinterest in publishing BIPOC voices. I am calling some of the responses “unboxed,” which includes one person who did not respond to the question and several responses that I couldn’t in good faith fit into a “yes” or a “no” box — such as an author who felt unsure, but talked about querying, and receiving comments (and later, reviews) about the premise and the characters, leaving her feeling that racially based bias might be the problem; that the issue was her “Asian-coded” characters in “a traditionally white paradigm.” That said, only six of 53 authors definitively stated that they believed racial bias and racism never played a part in missing out on some publishing opportunity.

Just... absorb that for a minute. Only six authors in 53 definitively stated that they believed racism or racial bias never got in the way of their careers.

This was the most agreed-upon answer. Not a single author definitively said “no.”

One author did not respond to the question, and seven authors responded with too much nuance for me to faithfully drop into a “yes” box. As an example of a response I’m placing under “nuance,” one author (with four books and over twenty short stories out) who preferred to remain anonymous said, “I think it’s harder to sustain publishing in the long term because of intersectional factors like book advances and sales, marketing support, and on the short fiction side, low pay rates and insufficient editors of color. It’s not always due to overt prevention or gatekeeping, but the end result is the same — that authors of color have a lower likelihood of a long-term career as writers.” Strange Horizons co-ordinating editor and author of The Wall and The Horizon Gautam Bhatia spoke about what I’d call a related issue — which I slotted in “nuance” — specifically, orientalism: “Literary agents and editors based in the U.S. and the U.K. have certain assumptions of what Indian sf/fantasy should look like, and these assumptions flow from what they believe a U.S. and U.K.-driven market wants — which is essentially an orientalised and Bollywood-ised vision of India that flattens most of its complexity, and forces writers to write narrow, ‘identifiably Indian’ themes. For example, which is the last space opera authored by an Indian writer to get published in the West? The last hard sf novel in the tradition of Banks or Tchaikovsky? These don’t exist.”

Similarly, many authors across several of these questions discussed problematic industry practices of “pigeon-holing” authors of color, or of only seeing value in certain kinds of stories from authors of color, even pressuring them to write certain kinds of stories, and so on. An author who preferred to remain anonymous responded, “Yes, but it also dramatically changes which works by writers of color get published and how they get published.” In response to a separate question, the author said, “I think that tokenism is a much bigger problem in publishing than people generally acknowledge. The industry sets us in competition with one another, which hurts everyone.”

Now, a few people said they deliberately do not read reviews, and two people did not answer the question. But most writers said they have experienced skewed reviews due to a lack of cultural understanding on the part of the reviewer, or some other race-based issue. Nalo Hopkinson said, “Yes, frequently. I’ve also received knowledgeable and/or insightful reviews, sometimes from sources that surprised me. And I cherish the reviewers who share enough of my cultural background and a knowledge of sf/f to be able to speak to both. They are few and far between, but the numbers are growing slowly.” Karin Lowachee said, “Maybe not conscious bias, but bias and ignorance all the same. And maybe not in the overt way of not understanding a specific element of a character or story, but even in the expectation of how a story or novel is constructed. There’s still a lot of Western (read: white) bias that way.”

A few of the other respondents described a sharp contrast between disappointing reviews by white reviewers and more thoughtful reviews by readers with a closer sociocultural context to the author. Some of the responses I slotted as “no” specified that the trade reviews hadn’t seemed skewed but that other kinds of nonprofessional reviews had been quite ignorant or even blatantly racist. An author who prefers to remain anonymous said, “Yes 100%. I think people have a misconception about Asian fantasy as a sub-genre that assumes it is romantasy, wuxia and C-drama vibes. Asian fantasy if anything is a setting, and a terribly vague one at that. They don’t expect the same in ‘British fantasy’ from Terry Pratchett as Joe Abercrombie, do they? I chose to write about diaspora communities within a fantasy world and never meant to write political fiction, but that has been one of the major criticisms: too political. Perhaps existing whilst being non-white is just too political.”

There were so many fantastic responses to this question! I’m just going to copy/ paste a few of them here for you.

Anya Ow: A friend of mine took their non-Asian colleagues to a Malaysian restaurant recently in Melbourne that we both love. None of his colleagues really liked the food, nor did they understand why it was so popular with other Southeast Asian people. As he told me this, my only thought was “well, their loss.” Writing’s similar in a way. If other people don’t like your work, it’s their loss. Someone out there will.

L.P. Kindred: Our peers who benefit more from hegemony (this can include, for me, Black People who aren’t Queer, Queer People who aren’t Black, and Queer and/or Black People who are able as well as White CisHets, broadly) might not have the range to read your work. Range = life experience, decolonization principles, feminist framework. Cultivate a broad beta reader base and pay for sensitivity readers who are honest with you while wanting the best for you and your work.

T.L. Huchu: You are not alone. There are many who have paved the way, and more still fighting to make sure you get a fair shot. Don’t spend too much time worrying orgriping about what you can’t control. Focus on the things you can control, and that’s your craft. Read. Practice. Submit. Don’t you dare fucking stop.

Anonymous: Love writing and write what you want to write. Additionally, do not feel compelled to write only what is expected of you. Take joy in the act of storytelling. If that is your guiding light, then this process of publishing becomes a lot easier to deal with.

P. Djèlí Clark: To thine own self be true. Tell the story you want and need to tell.

Leslye Penelope: I always think about the younger version of me who was so eager to see herself in the books she read, even when she didn’t yet realize it. Giving that to a younger version of you is a gift, and it’s one that I believe should be fought for.

Kel Coleman: I think the best stories are grounded in the personal and real. And since we’re working alongside robots and dragons, your best bet for making your story feel real will be infusing it with your truth and lived experiences.

Shingai Njeri Kagunda: I think often of this particular Kei Miller interview where he was asked about centering a British audience as a Jamaican author and he responded saying how he thinks of his stories as a conversation with his people. The fact that he writes from the U.K. means that the Western audience is bound to overhear the conversation, invited even into the overhearing. The point though is that they do not have to be centered to participate in the sharing of the story. My advice is to write for yourself and yours. The white audience can be invited to overhear your storytelling conversation but your stories are not and do not have to be for them. At least never before they are for you and yours first.

L.D. Lewis: Stop expecting permission to embrace yourself in your storytelling.

Yoon Ha Lee: This is again an unpopular opinion, but it’s absolutely okay to embrace your own culture and perspective (that’s not the unpopular part); I for one am glad to see a greater range of perspectives and cultures represented in fiction today.

At the same time, it’s okay to not! I personally would be bored out of my skull if I were only allowed to write trans men who were Korean-Americans from Texas who had a math B.A. from an Ivy League. I’m just saying. You do you.

Anonymous: Ten to one odds that there’s some white cishet man out there writing a story about your culture and blithely assuming that he knows everything he needs to know to write it correctly and not putting in half the amount of agonizing you’re doing. So you should just write your story about your culture. You’re doing fine.

TLDR: You should just write the story that you want to tell. Fuck everyone else.

Andrea Hairston: Find a posse of writers and friends and hold each other. That means challenge and support one another.

Moniquill Blackgoose: Write the story first. Write it the way YOU want to. Your story is important, and it deserves to be told. THEN and only then worry about pitching it to someone else, and do not change the bones of it upon request. A lot of readers will bounce off your story, and that’s ok — it’s not FOR them.

Victor Manibo: Writing is an act of self-discovery, and good writing will always require embracing one’s identity and culture.

NOTE: A massive THANK YOU to everyone who responded! Respondents were from a number of countries, including the U.S., U.K., AUS, Canada, Hong Kong Singapore, China, several African countries, a couple of Latin American countries, and more. The demographics include authors in their early 20s up to authors with decades of experience. All respondents have some number of “professional” publications to their name, whether in short fiction, novel-length work, or both. There are several here who are multi-award winners or multi-award finalists. Some respondents wanted to remain completely anonymous, which I think we owe to the potential venom of social media, as well as the fear of retribution in publishing which speaking one’s truth might incite. I was just as nervous about writing this piece. Respondents included (in no particular order): Anya Ow, P.A. Cornell, Maggie Tokuda-Hall, L.P. Kindred, Eugen Bacon, Samit Basu, T.L. Huchu, Moniquill Blackgoose, Yume Kitasei, Nisi Shawl, Eliza Chan, Ai Jiang, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Moses Ose Utomi, Yoon Ha Lee, Maurice Broaddus, S.B. Divya, Zig Zag Claybourne, V. Castro, Isabel J. Kim, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, N.K. Jemisin, Donyae Coles, Victor Manibo, Kel Coleman, Karin Lowachee, Naseem Jamnia, Leslye Penelope, Curtis Chen, Cadwell Turnbull, P. Djèlí Clark, Andrea Hairston, Suzan Palumbo, Gautam Bhatia, Nicole Givens Kurtz, L.D. Lewis, Justin Key, Wen-yi Lee, Brent Lambert, Valerie Valdes, Christopher Caldwell, Nadia Afifi, Nalo Hopkinson, and more. Invites were sent to people I know as well as people I didn’t know; to people I suspected would have certain kinds of responses, as well as people I suspected would have very different responses. I was limited by who I had direct access to, as well as time. If you were not invited to respond, no slight or offense is intended: Individuals were selected in a rush, while I was in the middle of many other tasks. Thank you for reading!