this blog tour company has been consistently dropping the ball in all of their work in the name of "boosting" ownvoices books & readers—why are we still letting them do harm to the authors of color they claim to support? impact outweighs intent. this isn't an isolated incident.

look, i'm only in the periphery of all of this, but all the stories i've been hearing make me angry. to-date, this company has:

- allowed negative reviews on their supposedly promo tours for DEBUT AUTHORS OF COLOR
- gave tour spots to white queer "allies" in "ownvoices" tours

- absolutely no vetting of tour posts: one review called the rep in a thai-american book "taiwanese" and nobody has corrected it. just today, a white tour host posted a whitewashed fancast for a brown latinx book
- hosted "tours" where OV participants don't even get ARCs?

- the tour company members join their own tours even if they aren't necessarily OV for the book.
- general misuse of the OV label: look, if the book rep is thai-american, filipino readers from the philippines aren't who you're mainly looking for in an OV-focused tour.*

*not gonna get into the nuances of asian rep here, and giving spots to non-US readers is a GOOD THING. just don't call the tour ownvoices.

- there was a tour for a book by an indigenous author where the author had to publicly correct them that it wasn't "indigenous navajo" rep

- their sign up form also lists "asian, south asian, southeast asian" like east asian is the default?
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i'm tired. we're tired. the callousness with which this company approaches their work, compounded w the fact that they rarely ever take responsibility for their mistakes...

...beyond (returning to item #1) a passive-aggressive email to hosts saying "don't tag authors in negative reviews, feel free to change the verbiage of your posts" when it wasn't FIRST specified in the tour guidelines that less-than-perfect reviews aren't allowed?

they've been given so many chances, and they consistently fail to live up to their goal of supporting ownvoices authors and readers. we need to hold each other accountable in this community—to ignore all of this would be to allow this harm to perpetuate.