Mindy: Today's guest is Manuela Velasco, the marketing and publicity director, as well as an editor for Tessera Editorial, which was founded on the idea that publishing can and should be an accessible industry to all people. Through myriad diverse voices in the profession, Tessera Editorial hopes to open the world of books to as many readers as possible. Manuela joined me today to talk about the services that Tessera offers as well as why getting people of color into all aspects of publishing, not just as authors, is important for true diversity and inclusivity in the industry.
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Mindy: You're the marketing and publicity director as well as an editor for Tessera Editorial. Why don't you start by telling us about what Tessera is and what some of the goals of the company are?
Manuela: Well, it's a remote editing company with a free mentorship for people of color Christa Desir began in early 2019 and she's still the mentor for our new groups. So all our editors actually started as mentees, including myself. We do sensitivity reading, copy editing, developmental editing and proofreading. We want to help diversify the publishing industry. There are so many barriers to entry right now and those barriers don't need to be there. Publishing tends to concentrate in NYC and other big cities, so it excludes a lot of talented, often marginalized people. All our mentees are people of color and a lot of them far away from publishing hubs. A lot are neuro atypical or have disabilities and a lot are part of the LGBTQ plus community. So there are people with interesting varied life experiences that publishing was missing out on before. Not every great potential editor has moving to New York money. So we want to show that remote work is a perfect fit for the industry. We've been doing that. We've done sensitivity reads and edits for instance for four out of the five big publishers. We've helped secure internships for five of our mentees and had 24 professional webinars for over 50 people of color. We also work with amazing independent authors who have been super supportive of the mentorship. And we haven't been around for very long, so I'm pretty hopeful for the future.
Mindy: It sounds like you're doing really well if you were established in 2019 and you've already worked with four of the big publishing houses in New York. You bring up a really great point about publishing being very New York centric. It is, and everyone knows that New York is a terribly expensive place to live and that publishing can be very, very hard to break into. That's kind of part of the struggle that everyone faces. Anybody that wants to break into publishing has to face that, but then of course you have the double barrier if you're a person of color or if you have a disability of any type. I want to bring up, I'm pulling up an article. Here we go. There was just an editorial letter in Publishers Weekly by Kacen Callendar. Yeah. Yeah. I'm pulling it up right now.
Manuela: Yes, I know exactly which one you're talking about.
Mindy: It was a letter, an editorial letter from Kacen Callendar who is an award winning author. They were also an editor for some time. I forget which house they were at. But Kacen made a really good point in the editorial letter about people of color not being present in the higher echelons of publishing, so that when a manuscript comes in from a person of color or a disabled person or someone that has had struggles in life that your typical white person is not going to have. And they don't connect with the manuscripts simply because they don't have anything in their life that has ever been like that. They just don't connect with the main character or the story. So therefore a manuscript that might be very representative of many people and reach people and illustrate to others who don't have that experience, what it can be like. Those manuscripts sometimes aren't finding a home in a larger publishing house and therefore achieving larger distribution simply because they aren't landing with people that perceive the value. So that was a great point, that Kacen made in that editorial letter. So I read that and I thought it was great. And I wanted to talk about that here in this podcast because the two issues are connected. So if you could talk a little bit about that particular issue about Kacen's letter, whatever you think is appropriate for you to add to that thought.
Manuela: So we kind of have to look at it as inclusivity rather than reaching a certain amount of quote unquote diversity. You know, I don't want publishers to be putting out one queer book, one Latin X book, one black book, one book with a disabled protagonist, et cetera. You know, I want a bunch of books about queer, black, Latin X disabled people written by authors with those same intersecting identities along with tons of other books, with diverse characters. And the way to do that is to open up the industry to marginalized people at every level. You know, a cis het white editor won't fully understand an Asian nonbinary person's perspective. They won't see that. It's an amazing story that other people will connect with. They kind of see it from their point of view and they're like, I mean, it didn't grab me. You know, I didn't understand the person's motivation or whatever, because a lot of times those are rooted in the person's identity.
Manuela: A lot of marginalized people. We grew up with cis het white protagonists. Some of us didn't even know that we could be protagonists like I, I didn't until I was like, well into my teens. I was like, wait, I thought that, you know, we weren't allowed. I just, I don't know what it was that clicked for me. When I first got a book that had a nonwhite protagonist. I was like, wait a minute, why didn't I have this before? Like what changed? It's kind of crushing because it's hard for us to even imagine ourselves as protagonists in our own stories when we don't see that published. When we don't see that in the wider world by hiring more inclusively and investing in marginalized people in all aspects of the industry will inevitably end up publishing more varied, interesting stories that enrich our lives and our books.
Manuela: Even if a book by a marginalized person is acquired, it might not get the attention that it needs. The publishing house might publish it, leave it at that, you know, they'll, they'll do a little bit of promo for it and I know all of that stuff is really complicated. That in the marketing department always takes care to to do what they can for each book, but if they don't understand the book, if the marketing department is all cis het white people and the book is about a black protagonist who is queer, like they're not going to have the same connection to the book. They're not going to know how to market the book as well to the audience that needs it. They don't have any of that perspective and we need to have marginalized people at every level from the marketing department to editors to the upper echelon of publishing houses. That's the way that will really change the books that we're getting out there.
Mindy: When we're talking about publishing, of course at the end it's a business and they want to make money. When a manuscript goes up in front of an editorial board and they are thinking, bottom line, is this book going to make money? Unfortunately, I think they often do believe that a book about, you know, a queer disabled Latin X LGBT character is only going to be for that sliver of community or only that that percentage of, of the reading public is going to want that. And, and I don't believe that's true. I was a librarian in a extremely rural, pretty much a hundred percent white community. My teens didn't care, they just wanted to read books. And I think we're not seeing that level of open-mindedness in the upper levels where they think, you know, a white person, a white straight person isn't going to want to read this book. I don't think that's true anymore. That might've been true 30 years ago, but I don't think that's true now.
Manuela: And I mean it's also kind of like you said, a lack of imagination because if people only wanted to read about protagonists that were exactly like them, they wouldn't be picking up fantasy. They wouldn't read books about aliens and things like that. And we all need things that we connect with for a protagonist. But that doesn't mean that they have to be the same gender or sexuality or race or ethnicity as us. So certain groups are expected to have a much broader reading list than other groups. I would say disabled people are expected to read books about abled people. We're, all of us are expected to read books with white protagonists and we're supposed to connect with them.
Manuela: It's what we're taught in school. You know, I only had books with non white protagonists for summer reading. Never like during the school year, uh, it was just like we would have a test about that book on the first day and that's it. And they were always issue books. So they, they were always books where the person was going through a struggle or, or something related to their marginalization. It was, I would say demoralizing. It made me kind of think that those kinds of books were, were boring. The cool books were the ones with the white people on the cover. They were able to have fun, you know, they got to do cool things. While we had to like suffer through racism and I get enough in real life, I don't need it in my books, you know, all the time. At least. It's really important for us to show marginalized people having fun and being happy. And I think publishing at the moment is really focused on issue books and yeah, issue books are super important and we should have them, but we also need fun romcoms or happy books where an ACE protagonist gets to like have a really awesome friendship and it's like not an issue. You know what I mean?
Mindy: Yeah, absolutely. You can have a book that is about a gay person or a black person or a disabled person and the plot isn't about them being those things.
Manuela: Exactly. And then they get a happy ending.
Mindy: Yeah, that would be great.
Mindy: Coming up, what a sensitivity read is and what it isn't.
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Mindy: Tessera offers many different editorial packages as well as sensitivity reads, which is something that is come up quite a bit in the past five or six years in publishing. So can you talk a little bit about what a sensitivity read is and also what it isn't?
Manuela: Yeah, it's a look at harmful tropes and stereotypes typically for people writing outside their experience. Some people dislike sensitivity reeds because of the misconception that they're censorship, but it's really just about getting the perspective of someone with direct knowledge about being a certain identity. And the purpose is to get accurate representation that doesn't hurt readers. Ultimately the author decides what stays and what goes and sensitivity readers can't speak for their entire community, but they do a great job pointing out insensitive content.
Manuela: And I mean it's something that even when I'm not doing a sensitivity read, when I'm just editing a book regularly, I tend to still point out sensitivity issues because I know that the author would rather I say something that you know, Oh, I think that this might come off as a little bit hurtful rather than the book be published. And then other people be like, this is really hurtful and I don't think that it should have been published. And how did no one catch this? That's always something that people tend to tweet. How did several editors not catch such and such issue about sensitivity? And it really makes me feel like a duty to make sure that the books that I help edit are as sensitive as possible.
Mindy: Authors, especially white authors have to be aware of that. A sensitivity read also isn't a blanket thumbs up. A lot of people use that as a defense like, well, but I got a sensitivity read and it's like, well you, yes, but that doesn't, it's not a plate of armor that you have on now.
Manuela: Like I said, you know, sensitivity readers can't speak for their entire community and they might miss stuff, especially if there's like a lot of stuff to clean up. And even then, like sometimes they'll, the sensitivity reader might point something out and then the author decides to STET it and well they could say like, Oh, I got a sensitivity to read for it. But it's like, yeah, but did you listen? There's a lot of different angles there. It's important to be open to criticism.
Mindy: Writers in general struggle... I mean, every writer I know and that's across the board... struggles with criticism, criticism, criticism is difficult. Um, but especially if you're writing outside of your familiarity zone, I mean, you've definitely gotta be open and you've gotta be listening. The other thing that comes up for me with sensitivity reads is just accuracy beyond sensitivity. So in my book, Heroine, I have a supporting character that is Puerto Rican. I tried of course, to put language in her mouth that was not just Spanish, it was Puerto Rican. And so it was like, I looked up, you know, Puerto Rican slang and like specific Puerto Rican insults and things like that. And I specifically asked my sensitivity reader, please double check me on these things. And she did and she did wonderfully. And she was like, well no, you know, this one isn't quite, you know, right.
Mindy: And so she helped me out and was really, really, really thorough and did a great job of making this character seem truly, you know, Puerto Rican. And I had the cool experience of Skyping with a book club in Puerto Rico and it was so neat because they were so excited. My, my sensitivity reader even told me, she's like, this thing that you used here, this is like the worst thing you can say to someone. And when I was Skyping with this Puerto Rican book club, the kids were just like, that was awesome. Like they were so, they were so excited to see their slang, to see it like represented correctly. And I was like, well, I can't take full credit for that. I had someone that actually knew what they were doing, but it was really cool for me to see that that just a very small amount of effort on my part, it really mattered. It really mattered and it made this character seem authentic to the kids that needed to see her and that was so cool for me.
Manuela: Seeing yourself is really great, especially when you usually don't get the chance to. I know that sometimes when, at least for me, when I see a Brazilian character in a TV show or something, I'm always like, Oh my God, that's awesome. But then like 10 minutes in and I'm like, Oh no, I wish that this was like, I wish that they just hadn't. I would rather they hadn't because instead of making the character realistic, they often end up just reinforcing stereotypes or being completely inaccurate. Like I've seen a lot of times where they're like, Oh, such and such characters Brazilian, and then they start speaking Spanish and I'm like, Oh no, that's wrong.
Manuela: And so specifically for me, I grew up in a largely Hispanic community. A lot of times people would assume that I spoke Spanish and so that's like a childhood trauma. So every time it happens on like TV, I'm like, no, no, no. Uh, you know, that's why you need a sensitivity reader for things.
Mindy: No, that's absolutely right. Especially when you're dealing with a largely white, largely urban... the entertainment industry is both of those things. Um, on my end, just being a rural person, a person from the Midwest, they never get farming right. Farming's always wrong. It's not about, it's not a sensitive thing for me, but it's frustrating cause it's like, you know, you could just, just ask. Ask a farmer. Like we could have told you.
Mindy: Lastly, diversity as a hot topic in publishing. Is it a double edged sword?
Mindy: Diversity is a hot topic in publishing as we know. But even using the phrase hot topic makes it sound like a trend. And the goal is the opposite. Establishing diversity as the norm, should be the end game. So do you feel like having a spotlight on it is helpful in terms of bringing about awareness? Because that is a good thing, but does it also possibly make it sound like a trend or, or make diversity seem transitory?
Manuela: Framing it as a hot topic or trend does make it seem like something that'll go out of style, but diversity in publishing is a movement. More and more people want accurate representation of our world or good representation of diverse people in fantasy worlds. Fantasy has largely been a very white cis het man's territory. At least a popular ones have been there. There's always been, you know, women and and disabled people, people of color. Everyone has always been writing these things, but they haven't been the ones that have been like lifted up as the, the great voices of fantasy until recently. We all want to open a book and see a world that isn't homogenous and so the more that we have diversity, the more will come to expect it. You know, things like Rick Riordan Presents wouldn't have been possible without the We Need Diverse Books hashtag.
Manuela: We need diverse books. Just having the books out there will start to normalize them and will make readers demand them. If publishing suddenly decides like 2021, they'll just be publishing mostly white says cis men, books. Readers are gonna notice and they're gonna say something. Readers notice. And they will ask. If you take a look at a kid who grew up with books that represented them and they get to adulthood and there are suddenly no more, they're obviously gonna complain. And so it's important for us to be putting in the work to put out diverse books and to, like I said before, you know, put people in every level of the industry that know what that feels like, that know what it's like to want to be represented accurately. There is a double edged sword in terms of the spotlight, because I've seen people say like, it's so hard to be published nowadays as a cis het white man. It's like--
Mindy: It's not.
Manuela: It's about as hard as it was before. A lot of people see things as a competition when they shouldn't be. Um, the publishing industry doesn't need to be a competition. It's not like one person is only going to buy one book. If we bring readers in, they're gonna read more books. It's not about competition. It's about bringing each other up together. It's not like a diverse author is stealing a white man's spot. That's not how it is.
Manuela: Not only is no one owed a spot, but also it's much, much harder for marginalized people to even get to the point of publishing their book. There's so many different barriers. Like I've mentioned, you know, there's lack of access, there's lack of education. Sometimes there's lack of money and time. I work a lot. I'm trying to apply for an MFA and I haven't really had time to edit my story for my, my MFA yet 'cause I've been working a lot and so I can't even imagine working on a whole book right now. I just wouldn't have the time. It's important for for people to recognize that other people having success is not taking away from anything that they might do. You know? It's not a competition.
Mindy: Absolutely. I agree with that 100% When someone buys a book, it's not the last book they're ever going to buy. When you buy a book, all it does is feed you for a small amount of time and then you want another one and you want something new. And I've always felt, whenever I see I guess infighting or I see jealousy or bitterness among authors, it does not make sense to me because if there is a writer whose books are doing really well, and even if you don't like them, and of course I come from this as a librarian, there are books that would just go crazy, wild, popular.
Mindy: And I would be like, I don't see the value in this book, but this reluctant reader, this kid here that I can never give a book to them that they like, they loved it and now they've read 12 books by that author. So great. You know, this author just created a reader that's a benefit to all of us. I mean, books create readers. So any book that does well is a benefit to every single one of us. It doesn't matter who wrote it or what it's about. So let's talk about how can people, how can people, just like my listeners today, how can they contribute to diversity in publishing? How can you contribute from inside and outside of the industry?
Manuela: if you want to support the movement from inside the industry the things you can do differ based on your position. For example, authors can ask that marginalized people work on their books. We've gotten several jobs because of this. Those people in positions of power can look at lowering barriers to entry, partly by actively seeking marginalized people for work and by creating remote paying jobs. People in lower level positions can push for more marginalized people working in their department and speak up when they see unfair barriers being set. And it's also important to invest in people. Companies should be bringing inexperienced people with the express purpose of teaching them.
Manuela: Unpaid internships, especially ones that are in person, keep out a lot of marginalized people who can't afford them. So it's best to try to have remote and paying internships. But if the internship can't be paid, it should at least be remote to give people a little bit more flexibility from outside the industry. You can support people who are diversifying publishing by mentioning them on social media and boosting their stuff. There are tons of great accounts out there like Latin X in publishing and POC in publishing and engaging with their content really helps. You can also donate to diversity efforts. For example, our mentorship program has a Ko-Fi as Tessera Editorial. So with that you'd be directly helping people of color get into the industry.
Mindy: Talk to me a little bit about, just for my own clarity as well, can writers hire Tessera themselves? Like if you are an aspiring author who would like to hire a sensitivity read before querying? Is that something that Tessera is a, does do they offer?
Manuela: Yes. Yeah. We work with a lot of independent authors and sometimes they want something, um, before they start querying. Sometimes they want something because they're self publishing. Authors are 100% welcome to go on our website and ask about our services.
Mindy: Fantastic. And in that vein, then how can people find you? Where can listeners find Tessera online?
Manuela: Our website, TesseraEditorial.com or Twitter is at Tessera Edits and our Instagram is at Tessera Editorial and you know, if you have any questions at all, you can ask them on our social media and I'll be sure to answer them as quickly as possible. I am pretty much always online.
Mindy: Yeah, me too.