Accountability Isn't an Attack

transparency, parasocial relationships, and kindness in the book community

Something I’ve been stewing on for a while now that’s really taken over my Very Tori Thesis brain worm is what our duty is to each other in book spaces as authors, as creators, as reviewers, as casual readers. I had been working on this idea for a while now, before Christmas actually. But, in light of recent personal events, this idea really grabbed me and took hold. Mostly, I hope this Substack is a place to find books and talk about different deep dives on romance history and tropes. But I also feel like we need to have this discussion first and get it out of the way so I can move on and so we can do better as a community. So, I hope you’ll stick with me while I try to navigate such a difficult topic and hopefully, approach it with care. Forewarned: this is kind of long!

Friendship vs. Friendly

In the cyclical discourse hellscape that is bookish social media, there’s a repeating pattern of discussions that come around roughly every 3-4 days. What is a reader space? Can authors be in those spaces and how should they be in those spaces? What is crossing the line and what is not? Should an author be on Goodreads? Should I tag an author in a negative review? There’s a million opinions for those questions that pop up. It’s like the Hydra being beheaded in a 21st century digital landscape. The way I’ve navigated this twisty, turny conversation really boils down to one thing I remind myself of frequently when interacting with authors on social media: authors are not my friend.

Now, when I say this, some folks think I’m being mean. I have friends who are authors. Friends I talk to everyday. Friends that would be on a plane to help me in distress if needed in the middle of the night and vice versa. But those friendships developed by bonds forged in DM conversations that transitioned to text conversations that developed into offline friendship over time. However, I have a lot of author acquaintances. We comment back and forth occasionally and maybe have the odd exchange in DMs. But we are not friends and that is not negative. We’re friendly and that is normal! I love their books and I’m sure that in real life, away from the internet, they are just as lovely and amazing as they appear on social media. But! I do not know them. And they don’t know me. The author you love, the author whose backlist you devoured, the author you occasionally exchange comments with on posts and maybe get the occasional “thank you!” from in DMs when you tag them in your story? They’re not your friend. Being friendly and being friends are not the same thing.

That distinction reminds me that, since we are not friends, I would never critique their work and show it to them (i.e. tagging in critical reviews). When I get asked by an author friend to read a WIP and give feedback, we have enough trust between us for it to be a positive exchange. We’ve built that rapport over time and they are actively asking for my opinion and trusting that I’ll give it in a fair manner. I don’t tag authors in critical reviews because they never asked me for that. It’s unsolicited. We don’t have that level of trust and rapport. It’s a jerk move to shove a critical review in an author’s face without their consent.

On the flip side of that, I do not ride to the defense of authors when they screw up, authors whose books I may love, simply because they’re a favorite of mine. We may be friendly, but that’s not the same as an intimate friendship. And, in the spirit of how I handle friendships in real life, when a friend is wrong or inappropriate, I point that out to them, just as I fully expect them to do for me. Friendship is not following someone lemming style while they behave badly. It’s holding each other accountable when we mess up. When you do consider these authors friends, you also have a responsibility to hold them accountable.

Parasocial Relationships and Intent

The thing about social media and the presence of authors and readers in the same space is that we often feel like we know this person when we really don’t. As authors have to unfortunately focus just as much on marketing themselves as they do marketing their books in the age of aesthetic consumerism, we forge a one sided relationship with them. A parasocial relationship. They’re sharing tidbits of their life and beliefs with us in a near constant stream of content. It’s easy to feel like we’re checking in on a friend when we see new posts from them. What’s concerning is when parasocial relationships take a nose dive into “you can’t critique my fav because I love their books and I know their true intentions” territory. Because…how well do you actually know someone you’ve never met and only shared superficial conversations with online? The problem with parasocial relationships is that, because we love and respect this stranger on the internet, or more accurately love and respect their work, we assume we know them well enough to know their intentions. It’s dangerous to assume we know their intentions better than they do.

I was thinking recently about the Jescie Hall situation¹. Jescie Hall’s readers rose to her defense despite the very real harm and hurt she caused with her depiction of a Black character in one of her books. But the response from her dedicated following was that it wasn’t fair to be mad at her because Black readers with valid concerns just didn’t get her intentions. They were wrong and Jescie’s work was being interpreted by people that just didn’t know her like her readers do. But how well do those readers actually know her? Do they actually know her intentions or do they only assume they know because they know she’s in an interracial relationship and they equate that with the inability to be racist/have intrinsic micro aggressions? How well can you know the intent of someone you’ve never conversed with in any way other than the superficial, limited peek they give you into their lives? There’s a distinction between friendship/intimacy and association/admiration but the parasocial relationships developed on social media can make that distinction blurry.

You can love an author and respect their work and whatever they’ve done for their community. But when an author causes harm, be that attacking a reader, writing harmful portrayals in their books, or bullying another author, you as a fan of their work do not get to tell the person or people they’ve hurt that they’re wrong or just didn’t understand. You certainly don’t get to say “I don’t agree with that they did BUT”. There’s no but when someone hurts someone else. This is an extreme example but sometimes extremity is the only way to get a point across in the age of zero nuance on the internet: you don’t get to put in a “but” when someone points out the harm J.K. Rowling has caused just because you spent your formative years loving HP. Sure, transphobia and attacking a reader are not the same level of harm. But it’s the same concept. Your “but” goes out the window when someone hurts someone else. And you don’t get to decide for that person that they can’t be hurt because your fav “didn’t mean it that way” or it was “out of character and had to be a one off”.

The Inherent Power Imbalance

There is a power imbalance between authors and readers. Authors do hold a level of sway over their fans and have a responsibility when it comes to how they wield that power. Thankfully, 99.99% of authors wield that power with responsibility, just like Uncle Ben asked us to. But that 0.01% can use that power to target someone and their fans will leap at the chance to join the perceived fight to defend them, whether they know anything about the situation or not or have been explicitly asked to or not.

And when authors use the “I’m a reader too” card to try and make it seem like we’re on an even playing field, that’s a privilege readers don’t have. I had to appeal to my own humanity as a reader this week in order for commentary about me to stop, and even then, it continued where others thought I couldn’t see it. Authors are never just a reader. Yes, reader is part of their identity, but as long as they operate in a commercial capacity as a public figure, they have a responsibility to be transparent with their readers. Yes, they have the right to defend themselves, if they feel unfairly targeted. But they do not have the right to target someone that asks for accountability in a respectful manner². When an author switches to the role of reader to paint them in a more relatable light, that’s a privilege. A reader or reviewer has nothing to switch to. Our next best option is our roles as humans, the most basic level of decency one can expect. That is a power imbalance. Weaponizing their role as “reader first” or “reader too” is a way to squeeze their way out of taking accountability by putting themselves on the same level as their readers. It’s the equivalent of saying “look at me being attacked! I’m just like you! If this can happen to me, this can happen to you, too!”.

Harm Has Different Levels

In the same way that white women and women of color face a general set of experiences that are universal due to misogyny, white women will *always* have a leg up because they will *always* have whiteness and systemic white supremacy to pick them up when they fall and give them an advantage that women of color do not have. This is why white authors can be the literal worst and still have a flourishing career. Cancel culture doesn’t exist because when does this behavior actually result in damage to a career systemically? When has an author being actively racist, homophobic, transphobic, or expressing any other type of bigotry damaged their career on a systemic level? When has an author bullying other authors or other readers negatively affected their career? LJ Shen actively still has a booming career despite YEARS of reader outcry over bullying. Jescie Hall’s fan base will continue to buy her work and support her. In the same way that authors like Freydis Moon, Kate Stewart, Jamie McGuire, and Sarah J. Maas have continued to have a successful career and bounced back (with little or no apology), authors with any level of bad behavior, from bullying to bigotry, will still have a fan base, because they can weaponize that line between reader and author and switch when it benefits them most to galvanize their fan base to their defense.

Commercial vs. Individual

Sure a reader can cause harm to another reader, but it doesn’t come with the added benefit of A. Being able to switch roles from author to reader and B. Operates on an individual vs. individual level. This Dear Author³ article I recently read talks about how commercial speech (authors) vs private speech (reviewers) inherently operate on a power imbalance. Commercial speech is considered more powerful by way of influence over consumers by US law, hence why it has less First Amendment protections. This is an important distinction to keep in mind when an author behaves badly.

Accountability is not an attack.

Most authors are writing books because they love it, want to make a career out of something they’re passionate about, and love sharing their passion with readers. Most of your authors are also willing to be gently called in when they have made a minor misstep. Or even a major one. Or even just clarify questions and concerns readers have. Consumers should be afforded transparency. That doesn’t mean we, as readers, need to be privy to the minute details of your personal life. It means that when we want to know if a book cover is AI generated⁴ or if steps have been taken to correct harmful content in a book, we are allowed to do that as consumers of a product. Expecting accountability is not bullying. Expressing concern over choices someone has made involving covers or promotional material is not bullying. Our problem in this community is that too many of us think accountability is mean and that expecting transparency is extreme behavior.

We have somewhere along the way developed this idea that kindness and accountability are mutually exclusive. They go hand in hand. When I have made missteps, I researched, apologized, made the effort to educate myself based on the knowledge I had been given, and strove to do better. Because that’s what accountability is. It’s not easy and it can be embarrassing to realize you messed up, especially if you were genuinely ignorant that your choices could be considered hurtful. But I would rather embarrass myself by being ignorant of something, admit it, and learn to do better than to cause harm by sticking to my own pride out of sheer refusal to be wrong. I am far more forgiving than I should be when someone hurts me. But as long as they’re unwilling to change or make amends, they don’t exist to me anymore. An apology without action is not sufficient.

To admit someone you love, someone you admire has caused harm and expect accountability is not a reflection of your own morals. And yes, it can be hard to do, to admit someone you’ve supported screwed up. But, if it is a friend of yours that has caused harm, your responsibility is to call them in. Not lemming style support them, no matter their bad behavior. The proliferation of bad behavior comes from enablers, people that refuse to hold people accountable for their actions, even when they know they are wrong.

We All Have A Responsibility In This Community.

So yes. We all have different responsibilities as authors and as readers. As a community, it’s our duty to foster conversations that may be damn hard, but make the community a safer, more inclusive, more accountable place. It’s our duty to expect accountability from each other when we mess up. It’s our job to ensure that, though there’s never going to be a way to keep reader and author spaces as a separate entity in the age of social media marketing, we try to mitigate exposure to our critiques from those that shouldn’t see it. And it’s the least we can do to ensure our fellow readers are listened to and believed when they say they’ve been harmed by someone’s actions. This is not the end of this happening. It will continue to happen, over and over again until we stop giving bad players breaks because we like their books or think we know their intentions better than what their intentions blatantly state. And until we realize that how we perceive them, whether we believe they’re kind or not, does not trump what their actions prove, there will be a different person behaving badly every two weeks or so that pops up in the cyclical discourse of the internet. The community deserves better than the continued defense of authors that don’t know how to behave and readers that don’t know how to respect boundaries.

I expect us to do better. And I expect us to choose kindness and accountability over retaliation. Kindness is, by definition, the acts of generosity, consideration, rendering assistance, or concern for others, without expecting praise or reward in return. Kindness means calling those in that have done wrong. That’s the only way to foster a community that’s safe and inclusive, something we sadly lack. Readers deserve better, authors deserve better, and the community at large deserves better.

A personal plea

At this point, I don’t know if I’ll be coming back to bookstagram. If I do, it will be after I’ve had time to digest and get over an attack from an author AND the justification of it from some fellow readers. As hurtful as this week has been, the idea bandied around that my calling out of generative AI use and my response to name calling, blacklist threatening, and character slandering was somehow as bad as the actual name calling, character slandering, and blacklist threatening was perhaps the worst part of this. Because when I said someone had hurt me, there was a “but” from other readers. I hope in the meantime, regardless of whether or not I do decide to come back, we work on bettering our community AND holding our community accountable for harmful actions, reader and author alike. I think we deserve that. I think we deserve a community where readers feel safe asking for accountability and authors can expect a respecting of their own boundaries when it comes to reviews.

The loss of joy I feel in bookstagram content creation has been, if I can perfectly honest kind of devastating. Maybe I do feel like I let them win a little bit. Even so, I think a new creative outlet will be good for me! But I hope this can be just as much of an outlet to share my love of romance novels with you all as my bookstagram was. Thanks for being here, pals. <3

---

I’ll be back this weekend with a little write up I had planned for booksta on Maiden Lane, bonkers romance, and why it’s a fan favorite. If you made it this far, thank you for sticking around and letting me get this off my chest. I promise we’re going to talk about actual kissy books now!

Currently reading: Quicksilver by Callie Hart, a buddy read Mak forced me into, but honestly? I’m having a blast for someone who isn’t a fantasy reader!

Currently watching: the foot of snow that’s currently dropping at my house like the freaking apocalypse. Send help. (also Outlander catch-up continues, but I needed to be dramatic for a moment LOL)

1. TLDR: In Jescie Hall’s latest release The Canary Coward, a Black male character is depicted feeding friend chicken to two girls he’s trying to sleep with, has the nickname “Candy” because of the reputations of his “chocolate lollipop”, and expresses his attraction to white women by comparing them to white meat chicken…which he then feeds to them. An ARC reader did point out how bad this was, but her advice was ignored. This is an incredibly racist portrayal of a Black man, not to mention reeks of fetishization of Black men. Jescie Hall’s readers defended her because she’s married to and has children with a Black man.

2. They certainly don’t get to weaponize medical diagnoses to try and wheedle out of harm they’ve done and gain sympathy.

3. Dear Author article here: https://dearauthor.com/features/letters-of-opinion/on-why-authors-have-more-power-than-readers/

4. It is currently snowing in Mississippi and California is tragically being consumed by wildfires that are devastating residents and the wildlife. Please tell me more about how your AI book covers or marketing material isn’t harmful when it produces as much carbon emissions as 300 round trips between NYC and California to train an AI model. Bueller?

https://planetdetroit.org/2024/10/ai-energy-carbon-emissions/