Bounding Into Comics vs. Fonda Lee
I got to meet and hang out with author Fonda Lee at the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop a few years back. Recently, Lee was at Barnes and Noble and observed:
“This is what modern fantasy writers are up against. In my local B&N, most authors are lucky to find a copy of their book, super lucky if it’s face out. There are 3.5 shelves for Tolkien. 1.5 for Jordan. Here’s who we compete against for shelf space: not each other, but dead guys.” (Source)
Her Tweets got a lot of attention, leading to an article by John Trent at Bounding Into Comics that derides Lee and accuses her, among other things, of criticizing Tolkien. Not that Lee ever did this. Her second Tweet in that thread said, “Before you @ me about the importance of classics, I love LOTR too, okay?” One might almost suspect Trent’s comment, “Lee isn’t the first person to criticize Tolkien,” of being an attempt to stir up shit.
An effective attempt, it seems. Lee has been barraged by Tolkien Defenders over on Twitter.
Trent opens his article with the claim, “Science Fiction and Fantasy author Fonda Lee, the writer of the Green Bone Saga, decried Barnes & Noble for stocking popular fantasy authors J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert Jordan.”
Nowhere does Lee say B&N shouldn’t stock Tolkien and Jordan. She’s complaining that these two authors get 4-6 shelves in the B&N SF/F section, which means other authors are left with little or no space at all.
Back to Trent:
“Fonda then explains the business that Barnes & Noble is in. She describes it as as ‘a place of discovery.'”
Lee’s actual Tweet:
“If you think a bookstore should be a place of discovery, who goes into B&N and ‘discovers’ Tolkien? Do they figure people want another 5 copies of LOTR and aren’t interested in all the other work out there?”
Lee isn’t booksplaining the business Barnes & Noble is in. She’s talking about one aspect of bookstores — discoverability. Nowhere does she say that’s the sole purpose of B&N.
And she’s not wrong. For readers looking to discover new books and new authors, 4-6 shelves of two dead fantasy authors is a hindrance. It also makes things harder for other authors trying to get their own work out there.
All in all, Trent’s article seems less about accurate reporting and more about distorting someone’s comments to sic the trolls on her and stir up a game of, “Let’s you and her fight.”
Numerous commenters are happy to take his bait, attacking Lee as an author, claiming she doesn’t write well and she should try “not to suck.”
Let’s see here… Fonda Lee won the World Fantasy Award, the Aurora Award (twice), had her work named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, SyFy Wire, and — oh yes — Barnes & Noble. She’s been a finalist for the Andre Norton Award, the Nebula Award, and the Oregon Book Award. She won the Oregon Spirit Book Award, and was a YALSA Top Ten Quick Pick for Reluctant YA Readers.
Reader, I wish my writing could “suck” as well as Lee’s!
Now, there is a valid point buried in the article and comments. Bookstores are a business, just like publishers and all the rest. Their goal is to make money, and that means stocking books they believe will sell the best. Tolkien and Jordan sell a lot of books.
But there’s also some chicken-and-egg logic to untangle here. All other factors being equal, an author with a three-shelf display is going to sell a hell of a lot better than an author with one or two books squeezed spine-out on the shelf. Bookstores and publishers choose which books to promote, which books to put face-out, which books to put on table or end cap displays, and so on. All those things help to sell books.
Writing a good book helps a lot too, but let’s not pretend that’s the only factor in a book’s commercial success.
The emphasis on these books also sends a message about what kind of customer B&N is targeting. Lee notes that her store had:
- 18 copies of Lord of the Rings
- Only 1 copy of the Nebula- and Hugo-award winning The Fifth Season
- Only 1 copy of Lee’s own World Fantasy Award-winning Jade City
Three titles isn’t enough to make any statistically sound conclusions. But this doesn’t suggest that B&N is interested in a broader, more diverse range of customers, or that they want customers who are looking to discover newer, exciting authors. It feels like “more of the same” marketing. “If you liked this dead white guy’s fiction, you might also like this other dead white guy’s fiction.”
Barnes & Noble knows books by Tolkien and Jordan are reliable sellers. They’re safe.
It’s a choice. B&N has the right to make whatever choice they want about who to feature and how to fill their shelves. Lee’s comments simply point out that this choice hurts discoverability for both authors and readers. She also thanks independent bookstores, which are often more willing to take risks, to customize their selection for their local readers, and to focus on more than just the safe same-old.
I wonder if that’s one of the reasons for the resurgence in independent bookstores…
In the meantime, Lee’s book Jade City has been sitting in my TBR pile for a while. I may need to bump it to the top.
Michael Mammay
March 26, 2019 @ 2:15 pm
Her book deserved the awards. It’s very good.
nonny
March 26, 2019 @ 2:45 pm
When I was in grad school, there was a local indie bookstore that had blurbs of the employees thoughts of books they liked on the shelves with the books. A perfect place for discovery. I moved away decades ago, but still remember it lovingly.
Angus McIntyre
March 26, 2019 @ 4:40 pm
“Jade City” is excellent; one of my favorite reads last year.
The ‘dead white guys own the shelves’ is just an instance of a more general problem: when business markets art, it is inherently conservative. If a business can identify a reliable seller, that’s what it will sell. And that’s why we get corporate pop music that sounds like all the other corporate pop music, endless sequels and reboots at the movies, etc. And, as you point out, that creates a positive feedback loop: Tolkien sells well because Tolkien is what’s for sale, so if you want to know what to sell based on sales, then the answer is always going to look like “more Tolkien”.
It might actually be worth it for bookstores to shake things up: fill the shelves with everything and anything and then measure OVERALL sales. Because there’s a good possibility that many readers are being turned away by shelves stocked overwhelmingly by ‘classic’ books, especially if they’ve already read those books. And B&N (or whoever) has no way to measure the cost of those missed sales unless they try the experiment.
Fraser
March 27, 2019 @ 5:45 am
I used to work in a bookstore. Contrary to Ms. Lee yes, there will be people who come in and discover this Tolkien guy, or wonder if it’s an adaptation of those Peter Jackson films.
But we’d probably have given less space to Tolkien, and just restocked the shelf from the back room when it ran low. That way more writers can get space.
Blurbs by store workers are pretty standard, even in chain stores.
Jjaks
March 27, 2019 @ 7:55 am
Jade City (Kindle edition) is at $1,13 at Amazon, by the way.
Bought it, thank you for making me aware of this interesting sounding book.
Jaws
March 27, 2019 @ 12:06 pm
In economic theory, perhaps the B&N model makes sense; but…
Given the longstanding financial problems at B&N (and before that Borders, and before that Crown), one must wonder if the model of “stock lots of stuff we think will sell but, oh by the way, we’re not very good at determining that” makes any sense. The impulse of shoppers to go to Amazon or other online retailers for “commodity”-type items (which they are much more certain will be in stock) fits in here somewhere, too. Even if that’s what management thinks, and that’s what management does, management is supposed to be working for the stockholders and not themselves. Oops, a lot of B&N’s top management IS stockholders.
Craig Laurance Gidney
March 27, 2019 @ 12:12 pm
I saw that article and was disgusted by it. I view it as yet another white guy attacking a POC woman. Seems to bit of a genre itself.
Olav Rokne
March 27, 2019 @ 12:36 pm
Last autumn, Jade City also won the top Canadian SFF award, the Aurora Award. At the same ceremony, her YA book took the YA Aurora.
Jade City is quite excellent, and deserved all the praise it received.
Honestly, I think the article posted by John Trent did a major disservice to Fonda’s comments, and misrepresented her point of view. A lot of the reaction on Twitter was based on people who had only read the (misleading) headline.
Sienna Saint-Cyr
March 27, 2019 @ 2:24 pm
Thank you for posting this! I keep seeing people share the Bounding Into Comics article and it’s been pissing me off. Fonda is correct and did not say the things the author implied. Frankly, I’m quite disgusted with the people sharing the article and attacking her.
Anne
March 27, 2019 @ 2:54 pm
I love how quickly authors become experts on how to sell books. National chains stock bestsellers because they move at a volume that allows them to stock a larger backlist and a wider variety of new releases. Different stores around the country will have larger or smaller SFF sections based on local sales volume. More shelf space = more sales is not always true when it comes to new releases. Your average B&N has a way better selection of SFF than any indie I have ever been in save Powell’s and the Strand (many otherwise excellent stores have a single randomly stocked shelf). And despite the support B&N gives to new releases (bringing in more copies than any other retailer), the bestsellers each month remain largely the same: Tolkien, Bradbury, Gaiman, Sanderson, etc.
If it was an easy problem to solve, it wouldn’t be a problem.
Camestros Felapton
March 27, 2019 @ 2:58 pm
Larry Correia was also doing one of his confused snarks about it on Facebook – doing his utmost to miss the point.
Jim C. Hines
March 27, 2019 @ 3:05 pm
Anne – Yes, why on Earth would authors study and learn and become knowledgeable about selling books?
“And despite the support B&N gives to new releases (bringing in more copies than any other retailer)…”
[Citation Needed]
“More shelf space = more sales is not always true when it comes to new releases.”
It’s not always true, period. I’m not sure where anyone made such an absolute claim, but thank you for rebutting it, I guess? My only comment on these lines was that, all else being equal, a book with more shelf space will sell better than a book with less.
If you’re going to come in here anonymously to fling snark, please focus on what’s actually being said, and back up your random claims with actual facts. Thanks!
Fraser
March 27, 2019 @ 3:46 pm
In fairness to Anne, a lot of authors do have bad ideas on this topic. A writer acquaintance of mine and I got into a long argument once because she didn’t like her serious literary work being filed in the fantasy shelves. Why not just mix all the books together in author-name order? Shoppers wouldn’t have any trouble finding the genres they want!
As someone who actually sold books at the time, I argued that this would work against genre authors, particularly relative unknowns like herself.
However that hardly applies to Lee’s position, which makes much more sense.
Jo
March 27, 2019 @ 3:49 pm
Anne, agreed.
Often it feels like it comes down to: stock more of my books.
Of course stocking more of your books will sale more of your books. That doesn’t mean it’s in the best interest of the book store, In other words, just because you get a bump doesn’t mean the store gets a bump in comparison to stocking “dead white guys.”
Jim C. Hines
March 27, 2019 @ 3:57 pm
Fraser – Oh, sure. There are absolutely authors out there without a clue when it comes to bookselling. I get particularly annoyed by the “Spam all the social medias all the time to sell all the books!” approach.
I was responding more to the generalization of Anne’s snark. I mean, really, what would authors know about bookselling? Some authors? Yeah, probably not so much. Others should be given a Ph.D. in bookselling. And in general, I suspect authors know a *lot* more about it than the average person on the street.
jose
March 27, 2019 @ 7:07 pm
I would be interested if other genres have the same issue of older/established writers getting more shelf space. Stocking is probably based on some sales algorithm.
I am not saying it is right or wrong, they need to stock what they know can sell in mass. When i moved to San Antonio in 2005 there was 8 or 9 barnes and noble here and 4 or 5 borders book stores. There are 5 barnes and noble now (we are the 7th largest city in the US), they have shrunk in size as well.
Grocery stores do the same thing, you get name brand stuff and then a few smaller companies of the same type of product, maybe local or what not. I know someone is going to chime in about “name brand” and comparing authors to something such as that, but it is true. It is an art, so it is not right, but it is still true.
It is about sustainability.
Smaller “indie” book stores can get away with more, they are usually more of a niche market, they are usually in a smaller or older building with less rent and usually have a devoted following. And that is cool. Amazon can stock everything, it is just a URL and SKU numbers.
I am again not saying this is right or wrong, but I would just be thrilled if books were in the retail store. That might sound like a mean thing to say (and NO that is no my intention), but so many good authors, even those who win awards, will never be in the brick and mortar.
Lenora Rose
March 27, 2019 @ 10:53 pm
We’ve managed to have semi-independant but still large scale book stores have curated sections. McNally Robinson (billed as Canada’s largest Independant bookseller, and McNally Jackson in New York is a *spin-off* of it, not the other way around.) had two stores that were convenient to me, and there was a visible difference in how much SF/F I could find that i personally liked, because the store expert on the genre in both stores had different tastes. One tended towards more SF, and more hard and milSF within SF. The fantasy picks were obvious bestsellers, obvious big names, and those classics in print. At the other store the balance of genres was better, and they seemed to cover a wide variety: the obvious bestsellers and some classics were present but also some moderate and small press works. (I was sad to find Terminal Uprising was not on the shelf the day after its release date, but I suspect that to be an aberration, and likely corrected by now. They ALWAYS had Jim’s books when i looked for them in the past, where Chapters-Indigo did not always.)
I have a perfectly decent experience at Chapters, which is our nearest equivalent to Barnes and Noble, and I generally find something I want. But I more actively look forward to browsing through McNally.
The point is, you can tell. You can tell if it’s curated or if they trust the computer system numbers. And maybe they should do a bit less of the latter and a bit more of the former.
Giselle Bergeron
March 28, 2019 @ 3:35 am
Thank you for sticking up for Fonda. I met her at 4th Street almost 2 years ago, and she was a normal, every day person. ( Soon to have books published that would win awards.)
For many years our Barnes & Noble posted “New Books” in the shelved directly before the beginning of books that had been out for a while. Most had fronts out so a person could see the artwork. The new books section spanned 3 to 4 shelving units, so it took up a fair amount of space. It was fun to browse.
About 2 years ago they stopped doing that and new books are now mixed with old. It’s a lot harder to keep up with new titles from favorite authors or to discover new authors. Without Locus, I’d be lost.
You’d think that they would lose money doing it like that, but their overall assessment is they are selling more books because more people come and inquire at the help desk, and the one-on-one contact helps when dealing with people who don’t normally buy books.
Fraser
March 28, 2019 @ 7:02 am
“I would be interested if other genres have the same issue of older/established writers getting more shelf space. Stocking is probably based on some sales algorithm. ”
When I was in the biz (and it’s been a while) it was a mix of algorithms and individual store staff judgment. Laurel Hamilton was a new author and the algorithm would have had us without any of her earlier books on the shelf. Me and the other staffer who managed the specfic section kept them anyway.
As Lenora says, individual judgment and a fan on the sales force can make a big difference. How much wriggle room B&N clerks have these days, I don’t know.
D. D. Webb
March 29, 2019 @ 6:32 pm
I worked for Barnes & Noble for thirteen years, and currently make my living as a fantasy author. I can attest that Anne’s comment above is fairly accurate, with the proviso that I couldn’t say whether they order the most books from new authors. Let me break down how the system works:
In the end it comes down to sales. BN stocks what sells. To a large extent, that means proven sellers, especially when it comes to genre fiction, which doesn’t generally move a high volume anyway. In my tenure there I had to have this conversation with customers countless times. “Why don’t you have [thing]??” “Because nobody buys it. I’d be glad to order it for you!”
That is the other big deal about BN’s in-store business model which is relevant to Fonda Lee’s original complaint: it heavily emphasizes ordering. Your local BN can get you almost anything that’s currently in print in about a week, and booksellers are trained to push heavily for that. If they don’t have it, they’ll help you find it. This is great for people who are looking for something in particular, but as Lee points out, it does absolutely nothing for people who just want to browse and maybe find something new. I have to agree with her on that point: even as someone who has discovered a lot of authors I love simply from perusing the shelves (I am a Hines reader because I was putting away recovery one night and thought The Stepsister Scheme looked interesting!), the store and the business is simply not set up for that.
Unfortunately, that’s less a fault of the company and more just the way things are now. BN is being hammered by Amazon in every direction, and browsability just doesn’t compete with an algorithm suggesting things you might also like based on what you’ve already bought, delivered to your home. The only significant advantage a physical chain store has over Amazon anymore is a friendly, competent staff who can help you find things and order you things that aren’t on hand. If you go to a Barnes & Noble and the staff is either unfriendly or incompetent (I’ve heard stories of this) it’s either going to get aggressively turned around by corporate, or closed down.
I will say, in defense of Anne’s point, that B&N is aggressive in its support of new authors, in fact to a fault. The majority of display space in the front of the stores goes to faced out stacks of new and often unproven books. They can afford to do this because of its distribution system; most of those new hardcovers will not sell and will reappear in the bargain section eight months later for $6.98, because they can ship unsold merchandise back to publishers to be remaindered out that way. In the industry as a whole, from the publishers down to the stores, unproven authors are usually just not profitable.
But I’m here to tell you, Barnes & Noble tries as best it reasonably can if you’re breaking in. Not every new author gets a front-of-the-store display, but a huge number do. If they have any reason to believe you could become popular, they’ll give that a chance to happen. The company actively scouts for new talent, especially in genre fiction like the mystery and sci-fi/fantasy sections (don’t @ me, speculative fiction purists, that’s what BN labels that category) to promote. There are often large displays with promotional material from both the publishers and BN itself advertising new books by new authors. Most of those end up not selling, either, but they do what they can.
But authors like Lee, who are already established but not pulling down Robert Jordan numbers, do end up sort of consigned to a netherworld where their books are available but it’s just not profitable for the store to keep a bunch of them around.
If you’re at Barnes & Noble and want to discover a new author, look for the Staff Recommendations display. It’ll either be near the front or the cafe, depending on how the store is laid out. Better yet, ask a bookseller; people usually end up working there because they love and have opinions about books, and it’s a job that keeps them informed of what’s new and popular in the industry.
It’s not my intention to evangelize for BN, as I can tell you from experience that a lot of the company’s wounds are self-inflicted and I harbor a measure of lingering bitterness over several of its foibles over the years. It does indeed seem to me in this case that Trent was just seeking cheap attention by siccing a Twitter mob on Lee, which is reprehensible conduct for a “journalist” and ought to be called out. But with those things acknowledged, singling out Barnes & Noble to blame for this issue does indicate to me that Fonda Lee, indeed, does not understand how bookstores work. There is just not enough shelf space for everything, and it has to go to what has the most reasonable chance of turning a profit. That’s what keeps the lights on and the booksellers paid.
If you want a bookstore to carry more of your books, remember: they are motivated by sales. Do signings and events at a store, mobilize your readers to shop there and ask for your work, and that’ll get your titles on the shelves. For a real insider tip: bring treats for the employees. That sounds cheesy but I am not even kidding, booksellers get little respect and barely enough in wages to survive on, and will go the extra mile to promote authors who are nice to them.
The industry is what it is. Barnes & Noble isn’t to blame.
KatG
March 30, 2019 @ 3:11 pm
The bulk of these people aren’t really fans/geeks; they’re activists. They go from pop culture area to pop culture area in coordinated online strikes. From “Gamergate” to Sad Puppies to “Comicsgate,” various controversies in anime, etc. They pick something and claim that non-SCWM people are supposedly being “disrespectful” and pushy and sometimes crooked conspirators, etc. about it. They lie about what is said and keep on lying even when they’re caught out. And they obligingly go after targets online when one of the grifters like this guy blows the hunting horn for bucks and clicks.
Currently, it’s using Tolkien. I’ve seen multiple situations the past couple of days of authors and others being targeted for saying anything that they can spin as not properly worshiping Tolkien as a god. A few years ago, it was Heinlein who they used for that. The point is simply to spread the word that the evil empire of social justice is threatening the hallowed halls of whatever and give the hounds a continual stream of enemies to go bay at, or worse. And it goes on even further outside geekdom — they are having mobs come over at knitters. There’s little reason for a supposedly comics-focused website to go yelling at Lee over B&N book shelves (which, depending on the store, can be horribly set up for SFF or other types of fiction,) and Tolkein, but it’s an opportunity and it’s what they’re doing this week.
Lee is lucky in that Orbit decided to make her book, Jade City, a lead title when they brought it out end of 2017, put it in hardcover and paid B&N to put her hardcover face out on their shelves. They did so partly because she has a solid YA-based fan base, some of whom would read her new, non-YA marketed title, and because they thought the Asian-centered, post-industrial secondary world fantasy would do well and it’s a strong book and has done so. (And that’s quite a good thing, given that within the last decade authors were being told the lie that “Asian fantasy doesn’t sell” by some in the industry.) She got the benefit of extra marketing money from her publisher to B&N because they thought the return would be worth it. And those publishers also pay B&N for the shelves of Jordan and Tolkien books and their face out placement as well. Placement in large chain bookstores is all co-op advertising — publishers pay for all of the displays and cut deals to get B&N corporate central to stock titles.
Those deals can dictate a lot of how B&N shelves look and what books are where. B&N also makes demands of publishers, some of them problematic (such as whitewashed YA covers and mid-list authors having to take on pseudonyms to be a “new” author and get stocked because B&N thinks their mid-list name is played out.) And they will also tailor the mix of books in individual stores based on what the buying patterns for the local area are. If a particular store sells Tolkien and Jordan a fair amount but doesn’t do well with the rest of SFF, then that B&N store will concentrate on Jordan and Tolkien and have a smaller SFF section while other B&N stores may have a broader in-store mix, in both the SFF category section, general fiction areas and special display areas. Those special display areas are where publishers have to pay to be in for their biggest titles and new, lead titles that the publishers are gambling on getting word of mouth attention from a bigger push.
Right now, Lee’s Jade City is “old” for the booksellers — the hc came out a year and a half ago and the mmpaperback edition, which sticks around on shelves for less time, came out over seven months ago. Most of B&N’s sales of the book right now will be online sales. The face out placement doesn’t necessarily stay unless publishers keep paying, which they usually don’t once a book’s been out past a certain date. When Jade War, book 2 in her series, comes out in July this year in hardcover, Lee is probably going to have her cover face out, paid for by Orbit, in the B&N stores, plus more copies of Jade City stocked as well. Other titles won’t be on the shelves at all but will be available on-line. And they’ll have Jordan and Tolkien stocked as popular backlist, particularly Tolkien because his books are used in school and university curriculum each year.
It is increasingly difficult, with B&N becoming the main giant chain of the U.S. and struggling, for authors to get shelf space; she’s not wrong about that. But booksellers and publishers always make a lot of money from their backlist reissues of big books so they’re going to stock those and it’s an issue. Barnes & Noble’s increased desire to codify their policies from algorithms over hand-selling is causing a lot of problems too, including for themselves.
But none of that discussion has anything to do with anti-equality activists trying to create scandals by the “evil liberals” to keep their own opportunities going. It’s just a combo of predatory grifters with people (and bots) eager to prove victory over changing demographics and slight reductions in discrimination. Lee should probably expect a second wave of attacks when Jade War comes out, but then maybe they’ll hopefully move on. Of course, if they do they’ll move on to other targets, which is bad, but solutions are limited when there’s a giant network of pretend media pushing the “SJWs are out to get us” war cry and needing constant fodder for it.
Fraser
March 31, 2019 @ 10:38 am
“It’s not my intention to evangelize for BN, as I can tell you from experience that a lot of the company’s wounds are self-inflicted and I harbor a measure of lingering bitterness over several of its foibles over the years. ”
My favorite example of self-inflicted wounds, from when I worked at Waldenbooks (the smaller sibling to Borders): For several years the company decided to prepare for Christmas by shipping us all the books they thought we would need for the season, even if we didn’t have space for them on the shelves.
Unfortunately we didn’t have space for them in the stockroom either. We wound up with a dozen or so boxes of books and no ability to tell what was in them. If the computers said we had a book but it wasn’t on the shelves, we had no way to know which box it was in, if any of them (logistically getting all those books sorted to store in an organized fashion wasn’t feasible). This was seriously dumb.
Fraser
April 1, 2019 @ 2:06 pm
Competing with dead writers is an issue outside of bookstores too. Sure, it’s easy to order Fonda Lee’s books or Jim’s, or mine, online, but it’s just as easy to order every writer, even those who are dead and out of print. That didn’t use to be the case.
As a reader, I love that, but as a writer, the competition for reader dollars that much tougher.
Pixel Scroll 4/6/19 A Scroll Without A Pixel Is Like A Walrus Without An Antenna | File 770
April 6, 2019 @ 7:59 pm
[…] WATCH OUT FOR THOSE BOUNDERS. Jim C. Hines referees “Bounding Into Comics vs. Fonda Lee” and finds it’s definitely not a fight by the Marquis of Queensbury […]
microtherion
April 7, 2019 @ 7:27 am
“BN is being hammered by Amazon in every direction, and browsability just doesn’t compete with an algorithm […]. The only significant advantage a physical chain store has over Amazon anymore is a friendly, competent staff who can help you find things and order you things that aren’t on hand.”
When I still frequented physical bookstores, friendly staff was definitely a draw. But so was browsability of a well curated selection of books. I don’t see staff helping with ordering as having significant appeal. There’s no way a bookstore can outcompete Amazon in *ordering*.
These days, I read almost exclusively e-books, and much as I’d wish to rely on bookstore employees for curation and advice, I don’t see how a physical bookstore can compete in e-books.
No Country for True Scotsmen: Reading to Be a Better SF Writer – Luna Station Quarterly
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[…] against policing fandom through required reading. What fans are invited and encouraged to read, through the implicit and explicit messaging of bookstore shelves and through the discourse of the community itself, has the power to influence how (and if) people […]
Bounding Out of Facebook | File 770
May 7, 2019 @ 8:21 pm
[…] However, as a culture warrior Trent does not confine himself to playing defense. Last month Jim C. Hines documented Bounding Into Comics’s deceptive criticism of Fonda Lee in “Bounding Into Comics vs. Fonda Lee”. […]