Fiction Friction

I'll probably be pilloried for this, but I don't care. Gotta vent, and it's my blog, so deal with it. Okay, so when the first one happened, I rolled my eyes...

Exhibit A (for Ashtabula)

White woman self-publishes a book, nobody turns up for her launch/signing/whatever, and then she complains on Twitter, and (somehow) garners a pile of sympathy/support from a host of celebrities, and than KABOOM! Now she's packing them in.

And more recently, we have a NYT-bestselling white woman author with nearly 17K followers on the Twit doing the same thing, which is parading her disappointment on social media (some mention about crying all the way home):

Exhibit B

And, KABOOM! Outpouring of social media celebrity support, news stories, etc., etc. Is this how it's going to go?

I mean, nobody showing up at book signings is somehow newsworthy? How is that even news???

Or is it only significant if/when white women are saddened by an otherwise painfully routine occurrence?

Kind of like how when serial killers are hunting people, if/when white women are the targets, it's national news -- but if other groups are the targets, meh. Not nearly as much coverage. Studies have been done on it:

Exhibit C

Can you for one minute imagine a white man whining on social media about nobody turning up at one of his events? Or a black man? Or a black woman? An Asian woman or man? Latinas or Latinos? Nah. They'd be run out of a town on a virtual rail (if the white man) and otherwise ignored (if nonwhite).

If anything, in the case of the white man, people would be like "Ha! Serves you right, Dude!"

In addition to that umbrage-inducing reaction this provokes in me, there's also the objective reality of how many of these "white woman writer cries on social media and the world swoops to the rescue" stories are we going to see in the future?

One was bad, two is worse, but I'm already imagining others in the pity-milking posse sharpening their knives for the next travesty of a writer (and, of course, a white woman writer, most importantly) crying about the lack of support.

Newsflash: writers everywhere are in a real jam -- trad and indie -- and it's ludicrous to me that these two instances get national coverage (and international, for fuck's sake). For as much as people love to invoke implicit bias as a weapon, there's a very clear case of implicit bias in operation here.

The moral of these news stories: it pays for white women to publicly cry on social media, at least when they're writers. The mainstream (and mainstream media, especially) hates to see white women writers disappointed, clearly.

I'm morbidly bemused to watch how evergreen this trend (?) ends up being. Like, will the third disappointed white woman writer get as much coverage and support as these first two? The fourth? Fifth? Sixth? How far does it go? When does it end?

EVERY writer is getting pounded by the market these days. Most of us are just not newsworthy, it would appear.

All I know is I'd love to see the dollar value assigned to the amount of free publicity the crying white woman writer earns in those sorts of posts. I hope somebody quantifies it, because it would be instructive. And then compare and contrast with other groups in similar situations, see how that shakes out for them.

That's somebody's doctoral thesis right there. You're welcome.

Postscript (4/8): As if to make my point for me:

Are We Implicitly Biased Against Men and Toward Women?