There are no less than 16 million knockoffs of The Hunger Games. Most just filed off the serial number and gave Katniss a new wig and it was considered good enough. But let two non-white writers have characters with the same letter name and publishing suddenly can't handle it.

Esp if you're a "no-name" author trying to break in. Unless you have a decent amount of connections, you're gonna have a hard time. It's like you HAVE to have a white vouch for you to make any kind of in-roads in the first place. And THEN you have to be The Most Unique.

Like - Alice and the Wonderland series have been one of my obsessions since I was a child. I knew one day I would write a retelling of it as a published author. Fast forward to the present, and @ElleOnWords has that on lock. (Go read A BLADE SO BLACK!)

So now, it would be really really EXTREMELY difficult for me to write any Alice thing. Because publishing already has Elle. And it's ridiculous! Through no fault of the non-white authors! (Unless they're one of those who also subscribes to the Highlander mentality.)

We get rejections and agents say they can't connect to our stories. We get agented and editors say our stories aren't realistic. We finally get a story sold and get paid less and agents and publishers shrug and say well that's just how it is.

But that's NOT how it is for white authors! We've seen time and again that white authors can have flop book after flop book and STILL pull 6 figure deals, huge marketing pushes, etc. Meanwhile award-winning Black and brown ppl get a bookmark and a thumbs up.

The money is there. They just don't want to spend it on us. They tell us our stories don't sell, but that's because they don't buy and they don't market.

Raze the industry TBH. Build this shit from the ground up. Install BIPOC at every level. Don't just hem and haw about how ~shocking~ these numbers are bc of you talked to even one (1) BIPOC you wouldn't be the least bit surprised.