Thread by @sirens_con

THREAD: Did you know we track the thousands of new books by women, nonbinary, and trans authors in the fantasy + speculative space? Here we highlight data for 1,600 of them, gathered from 2016-2020, with some thoughts and analysis on the patterns we’ve observed. #SirensAtHome

We use this data to make our book lists, and of course, fill our magical, once-a-year pop-up bookstore. If we were gathering at Sirens in-person this year, this would be around the time we’d be opening our community room doors. 😭

For a few days each year, we make real our kind of bookstore—one that is queer, diverse, intersectional, and fiercely inclusive. It takes a year to exhaustively research and our entire on-site conference staff a half day to lovingly unpack and arrange.

So since we’re all at home, we’re gifting you some analysis instead! You should read all the disclaimers + methodology on what we included in this deeply imperfect 1,600-book data set, and what we didn’t (like no sequels): sirensconference.org/news/2020/10/s… #SirensAtHome

These are books sorted by arbitrarily imposed categories that we track and stock. NOT included in this chart: anthologies; select nonfiction as it relates to feminism, gender, intersectionality; and literary criticism and scholarly work on speculative fiction.

But because we’re Sirens, what we really wanted to see was how many of those books were written by an author with a publicly verified LGBTQIAP+ and/or BIPOC identity. Even though books published dropped from 2019 to 2020, these numbers have grown.

But overall—for the past 5 years—cisgender heterosexual white women authored 65% of the 1,600 books we tracked. Out of this dataset, we would have stocked around 1,000 of these 1,600 books in the store, and 48% of those (~500 books!) would be by a LGBTQIAP+ and/or BIPOC creator.

And out of our LGBTQIAP+ data for the past 5 years, only 18.1% of these books have at least one publicly verified LGBTQIAP+ creator. That’s still less than a fifth, but encouraging for 2020, where it went up to 22.0%.

Our BIPOC data has similar numbers. We can say with some confidence that for the past 5 years, an average 21.9% of books we tracked had a publicly verified BIPOC creator. This also went up in 2020, to 28.5%.

Breaking down the 21.9% of books by BIPOC creators that we tracked, and knowing how imperfect these categories are, we see that there’s still a long way to go for everyone. But especially books by Indigenous and multiracial creators. FULL POST: sirensconference.org/news/2020/10/s…

Here’s who’s publishing books by women, nonbinary, and trans authors in the speculative space that we tracked. Out of publishers with an American distributor, Macmillan has the most, but 44.3% of books aren’t published by the Big Five, too!

We have to give a shout-out to independent and international presses, who are often doing groundbreaking work in this space, as well as some specialty SFF imprints you might expect to see. @torbooks @tordotcom @orbitbooks @sagasff @Sourcebooks @angryrobotbooks @AqueductPress

Overall, the increase has been from 2019 to 2020, with a 5% jump for LGBTQIAP+ voices and a 9% jump for BIPOC voices. 2020 has been a singular year—both with fewer books being published due to COVID-19, and social movements supporting Black and trans lives.

We can deduce, though the numbers are still small, that a greater percentage of books that WERE published in 2020 were authored by LGBTQIAP+ and BIPOC voices. Worth noting, but we lament that it took this extraordinary set of circumstances to see these increases.

(It’s not lost on us that, because our LGBTQIAP+ and BIPOC data is publicly verified, authors may have felt more comfortable publicly acknowledging and discussing these aspects of their identity now when they might not have previously.)

In the Sirens bookstore, we try to provide a larger selection of books relating to gender in speculative fiction by marginalized creators. Out of the 1,000 books we would have stocked from this data, 25.0% would have been by LGBTQIAP+ authors, and 30.9% would have been by BIPOC.

That means—of course some creators identify as both—48% of these 1,000 books would have been stocked by creators that identify as LGBTQIAP+, BIPOC, or both. That’s nearly 500 books! Read on for our full bookstore data post: sirensconference.org/news/2020/10/s…

And don’t forget, #SirensAtHome kicks off tonight, with a special Tea and Books session with some of our bookstore staff on Saturday, October 24 at 4:00 p.m. Mountain / 6:00 p.m. Eastern. Learn more and register to get your Zoom links! sirensconference.org/at-home/