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Shine a light: A new movement seeks to fill bestseller lists with African American works

Dallas-based author Sanderia Faye says she wants to see North Texans show their support.

The hashtag #PublishingPaidMe surfaced on Twitter earlier this month as part of a movement focusing attention on inequities that African American authors face.

Started by fantasy author L.L. McKinney, whose recent work includes the Nightmare Verse series (a retelling of the Alice in Wonderland story from the perspective of an African American girl in Atlanta), the hashtag encourages authors to post the amounts they’ve received in publishing advances.

Details of these advances, which are paid by a publisher before any book sells, showed a wide discrepancy between the amount of money black authors and non-black authors have received.

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“I think it shed a lot of light on what’s been going on in publishing, because it’s been one of those things that we rarely talk about: What deal did you get?” says Dallas-based author Sanderia Faye, who also was one of The Dallas Morning News’ panelists on June 17 discussing the state of the North Texas art scene.

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“Myself, just like everyone else, was taken aback by some of the authors who we thought probably had gotten great deals but didn’t,” Faye says. “We had some award-winning authors that hadn’t received that much for advances.”

Authors such as Roxane Gay, who wrote New York Times bestsellers Bad Feminist and Hunger, and Jesmyn Ward, who won National Book Awards for her novels Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing, took to Twitter to share their advance amounts.

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Author Mandy Len Catron, a white woman, posted her advance in comparison to Roxane Gay’s. According to her tweet, she received three times more than Gay did for Hunger and even more than she did for Bad Feminist.

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Amistad Press launched the movement and hashtags #BlackPublishingPower and #BlackOutBestSellerList to support black authors and get their names on bestseller lists throughout the country.

Tracy Sherrod, editorial director of Amistad, brought this idea to life. She told Publishers Weekly that the goal is “to turn the best-seller lists Black, to take the list over with books by Black writers or by other people of color.”

Through this initiative, people are encouraged to purchase two books by black authors through June 20.

This is a movement Faye says she hopes people in Dallas will get behind, too.

“I believe that the literary community in Dallas should stand up for this, for this movement,” she says.

Faye is the author of Mourner’s Bench, a story about 8-year-old Sarah Jones coming to terms with the traditions of her community in 1960s Arkansas and the progressive nature of her mother, who is involved with the civil rights movement.


Mourner’s Bench, by Sanderia Faye
Mourner’s Bench, by Sanderia Faye
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The book centers on four generations of women, including young Sarah, who have experienced injustice because of systemic racism.

“I wanted to look at four generations because it seems like every so many years, similar things come up and so therefore I wanted to see this through,” she says.

The story is told through the young girl’s lens –– something that Faye says makes it easier to talk about tough issues.

“Sarah is a buffer to discuss systemic racism,” she says. “It’s also easier to see the pain adults experience because I gave Sarah that pain. A child will show true emotions. Because she shows her emotions, when we discuss the book we’re able to talk about racism.”

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In addition to being an author and incoming assistant professor at Southern Methodist University, Faye has been hosting the LitNight Reading Series every second Tuesday of the month for the past two years.

Each month, five to eight authors read their own works for about 10 minutes. Authors do not need to be published to showcase their work at LitNight. There’s a 15-minute open mic at every event, too.

Rosalyn Story, author of "Wading Home," also is a violinist with the Fort Worth Symphony.
Rosalyn Story, author of "Wading Home," also is a violinist with the Fort Worth Symphony.(ROBERT W. HART/Special Contribut)

Despite hosting this event for the past two years, Faye says she’s able to think of only one other local black author who has published with a mainstream publishing house and could be on a nationwide bestseller list: Rosalyn Story, a Dallas-based author and violinist with the Fort Worth Symphony. Faye’s publisher is University of Arkansas Press, and Story’s is Agate Publishing.

“It’s not to say that there aren’t any more people, but I think because I run LitNight reading series, that at least I would know them. I would have heard about them,” she says.

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Story has been in the publishing industry since the 1990s, with the debut of her book And So I Sing: African American Divas of Opera Concert. She’s also the author of More Than You Know and Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans. She is currently working on a book that she hopes to release in the next few months.

She says it’s important to lift up black authors, especially at a time when communities are being hurt by COVID-19.

“It would mobilize us to get behind each other so that our books get some attention in a time where everyone will be fighting for reviews and attention,” Story says. “We don’t know who’s going to be left.”

Story says that while everyone is affected by the pandemic, communities that were already struggling will be the ones hit hardest.

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“People say when the white community gets a cold, the black community gets pneumonia,” Story says.

Ultimately, Faye says, she wants to see the Dallas community rally behind black authors.

“There are many different areas where African Americans have been oppressed,” she says. “Publishing is one of those areas, and I think the #PublishingPaidMe just shined a light on all of it.

“Here in Dallas, I would like to see more African American writers published. I would like to see them receive a larger advance, more marketing for African American writers and to see the media support local writers in a way that they support New York Times bestsellers.”

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CORRECTED at 8:55 p.m. June 18 to correct the spelling of Roxane Gay’s last name.