One of the things that happens, when - to pick a totally random example - someone keeps talking over you (and not in a cooperative overlap kinda way) is that it could be because I'm a woman, or it could be that the person talking over me is quite sure that what they have to say is more important than whatever piddly thing I had to say. Or it could be both. Awareness of misogyny is useful for us all to know about and push back against. But the individual underlying reason leading to a specific thing doesn't matter to me in the moment. I'm still being talked over.
I was thinking of this over the weekend when two weird and probably unrelated things happened. Hoopla removed a crapton of titles from their library. Since I mostly run with romance authors there was some speculation that romance books, or books that might be sexy, and/or queer might have been targeted. But folks in other genres saw it happening to their books once they were alerted. For me, about half of mine were still there when I first looked. And funnily enough, due to the timing of royalties, I had just gotten royalties from Hoopla. Hoopla is used by a lot of libraries, and one of the reasons I publish widely, is to make sure my books are available to libraries.
And then someone noticed over on Amazon that the Black and African American Romance tag disappeared. You could still get to that category in other ways. Even odder, or perhaps not, it still existed in the stores for other countries, just not the US.
Now Hoopla had apparently sent a note to libraries that they were doing a big quality check to make sure no AI titles had snuck in. And Amazon tweaks their categories a lot.
But I also remember when Amazon stripped the buy buttons from all the books for one major publisher. And Hoopla could have communicated with authors. But they didn't.
In these times of increasing book bans, and weirdos claiming anything with people of color in it, Black people especially, is DEI, as if Black people were a recent invention, it's hard not to get suspicious at these things.
Maybe these are just normal run of then mill things and nothing to be worried about. And maybe not.
Anyway, my books are also published to Overdrive. And many other sites. (And some of my titles are back on Hoopla now.) I haven't started selling them direct, but if that becomes my best option, I will. Because goodness knows, we all need stories these days.
