BenS🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈

Since someone thought that a post where I was talking about the percentage of the authors that published a teen book last year who were straight white American males was making things look worse by being to narrow, here's a bit of the broader numbers from my dataset. (Teen fiction only because that's what my job is - teen librarian and author of fiction for teens. The Atlantic article going around has some data from a lady who did similar analysis for this year on middle grade protagonists, which broadly matches what my data shows, though she was looking at protagonists. Protagonists were part of my dataset, but the topic at hand is the authors.) The short version is 17.6% of the books were by men, 75.9% by women. (There are also anonymous authors and nonbinary authors.) LGBT+ data was based on the authors openly talking about their sexuality in places like their Goodreads bio, and just about all of them were from America. Personally I think that the authors from other countries just don't talk about it as much is more likely than there aren't any, so for LGBT+ authors I'm looking at American authors only. 31.9% of the male authors were GBT+, 7.1% of the women. For America specifically, 116 male authors, 602 female, so 2/3 of all the books, and men were 16.2% of the American authors.

Troy Jackson's entire career feels like a normal guy who just kept falling ass backwards into roles. >Be a rural guy with an associates degree working 80 hour weeks >Get pissed that Canadian workers are crossing the border and undercutting your wages >Run for state legislature as an independent because you're pissed >Win in an upset >Join the Democratic Party after they vote for your bill supporting collective bargaining rights for loggers >Keep winning re-election >Eventually get elected by your peers to be minority leader >Then become Senate President when you retake the Senate >Run for governor, lose >Senate candidate drops out >Run for that. Win nomination. >Have 100 days to beat Susan Collins >Beat Susan Collins