Some food for thought: if your idea is so away from your experience that you need to pay a sensitivity reader, why not rework the idea and give the sensitivity reader or random PoC author you accosted their time and mic back to tell their own stories?

Just a thought.

Disclaimer: this doesn't apply to everything and I've done some lovely, light sensitivity reads where it was really just a matter of, "Am I handling this okay?"

And when you are paying a person and it is minimum emotional labor, that is GREAT.

But if you can tell you are really starting from zero and you think the solution is to find a PoC to give you Culture/Religion/Experience 101, without thinking about the stats of representation in publishing and still believe that you are doing the right thing? I wonder.

This doesn't relate to anyone at the moment except - well, whoever plopped that "quick question" in Sandhya's inbox - but how much longer are these people going to see these statistics roll out and think they are the solution rather than potentially adding to the problem?