It's Thistle & Verse. Before I get into the
video, I figured I should address the
recent followers and the
unprecedented amount of growth I've had
recently. I want to thank Olivia's
Catastrophe, Fantasy Book Addict, and Amber
Dior for the shout outs. Given the
recent murders of Breonna Taylor, George
Floyd, and Tony McDade by the police, I
wasn't really feeling like engaging with
my channel or publicizing my videos.
There was a lot of organizing and
mourning going on on Twitter, and it just
didn't seem like the time. I had an ARC
review that I needed to put up, and I
thought it was important to post because
I was upholding an obligation, but I
didn't really publicize it anywhere. I
wasn't expecting a lot of views, and I
was very OK with that.
Despite that, I've had unprecedented
growth and engagement with my channel. So
again, I want to thank Olivia's
Catastrophe, Fantasy Book Addict, and
Amber Dior for signal boosting for me
and pointing people my way. Given the
ways I've seen bookish people on Twitter
making connections between the recent
organizing around BLM and reading
fiction by Black authors, I feel like I
should emphasize that I'm not an anti-
racism educator.
I have understandings of white supremacy
and anti-Blackness because of
personal reading and life
experience, and I bring those
understandings to my reviews. Snd some of
the books that I read do speak on white
supremacy and anti-Blackness because I am
reading books primarily by Black authors.
But if you don't have the knowledge
of the history and the theory, then
you're not gonna get the same messages
out of the books that I do, and you might
completely miss the message. So now that's
out of the way, I was tagged to do the
Booktube Real Talk 2.0 Tag by Shane of
Luxurious Blu, and given the recent
conversations around treatment of Black
booktubers and how booktube views books
by Black authors, I figured that this was
a good time to do this.
'If you could give yourself one piece of
advice when you started making videos, what
would it be?' I would have advised myself
to sit down and make a
game plan and be very strategic
about where I was gonna publicize my
videos. It's very hard to get traction
when you first start out. You don't
have a rapport with people, so it's easy
to feel isolated and unmotivated to
post. And I was fortunate enough
that I had an in with Onyx Pages,
and she was very generous about
telling people about me and directing
people to me. And for me, I
found the best way to publicize my
videos was Twitter. Getting on
Twitter was huge for me. It was a lot
easier to find community and lother
booktubers doing things I was interested
in. It was a lot easier to let people know
when I had posted and organize
collaborations and all that. 'What are
your thoughts on cancel culture?'
I'm very ambivalent about it. I kind
of roll my eyes a little every time
I hear people say that because mostly when I
hear people complaining about it, it's
people who want to support people
or read books that say racist, sexist,
queerantagonistic, or you know
whatever -ismy thing, and they just
don't want anyone to name it. And I very
rarely see someone actually being
cancelled. I will definitely see
people getting dragged. I will see people
airing their grievances and pointing out
flaws. After someone gets dragged, I very
rarely just kind of see them
disappear off the face of the Earth. Like
they can't work in publication anymore, they
can't write anymore, they can't be
on booktube anymore, like what have you.
And also it seems weird when
people criticize cancel culture. It
seems like they think that strangers are
obligated to certain kinds of support from
other strangers and also that
certain people are owed a platform, and I
don't really agree with that. If
people are doing or saying harmful
things, they're most definitely
not entitled to my financial support, be
that through free publicity or through
buying their book. And also I feel like
this conversation ignores
who can't be cancelled because no
one put them on
in the first place. There's a
lot of discussion going on with
#PublishingPaidMe about how little
POC authors, and Black others in
particular, get paid in advances and
basically how little faith the
publishing industry has in their
ability to sell. Also I feel like people
are just very fickle about cancel culture. Like I
don't know how much people actually care
about the principles behind
the social justice lingo that's
entered the mainstream in the past... I
don't know... six years or so. Because I
feel like on book Twitter, I will see
people calling things out, and I think
that they value a certain thing, but then
their reading might not reflect that. I
feel like people kind of just cancel
people that they already didn't like, and
it just kind of seems like an
opportunity for some people to make it
look like they're doing something when
they're actually not
really doing anything. And also to be
honest, I sometimes wish that people
would actually just get cancelled
because it feels like people's white
faves get pass after pass. So I had to
refilm a bit, and I don't feel like
faking continuity. But I'm gonna just
wrap up my thoughts on cancel culture by
saying that it's also just frustrating
from a selfish standpoint seeing like
how many years of outcry and
grievances and how many people will
have to come forward for us to even
talk about certain authors being
deplatformed. It's very frustrating to be a
person who's negatively impacted by
some of the things these authors are
getting called out for. It's just a
reminder of like how little you're
valued, that people would put someone
who's just making art over your
safety and your value in the
community. And also it's just frustrating
from another selfish standpoint of
thinking of all the Black, disabled
like LGBTQ+... like all these
identities that are stifled in
publishing who like don't even get a
chance to get these huge followings and
these influencing platforms
that these white creators are. And
when they get the chance,
they're just dismissed so quickly
and discredited so quickly and
dragged for so little and get so
little grace. It's just very frustrating
because they often have stories that I
want to hear, and I think are more
innovative and exciting and well crafted
the the faves that people are mourning
for getting cancelled or dragged or what
have you.
'Do you consider booktube to be a
welcoming community?' Yeah. Onyx Pages put
me on. She sent a lot of people my way,
and they were very kind in
subscribing and commenting, and so in
that way I think it is very
welcoming - like word-of-mouth and
the bonds of people build. But I also
aggressively curate my space. I knew getting on booktube that creators
who get really big are mostly white, that
the books a lot of people want to talk
about are by white authors... I think usually
YA... I don't know if that's recent or
not... And I just knew that I'm not a
white booktuber and that I'm not
gonna be reading very many of the books
that are very, very trendy, and so I
just moved accordingly. And I also knew
that I didn't want to be like the token
black Booktuber. I don't want to be
the only one in any space I was in. I feel
like people are talking about struggling
to find other Black booktubers, and I
knew that I didn't want that to be me. I was
very intentional about the first
8 or so months that I was on
booktube that I was only following
Black booktubers, and I was really
looking for people with under 1,000
subscribers just because it's like
my peer group, you know. Those are people
I felt like who were gonna have similar
struggles to me and who would be
open to collabs and who would be
more so looking to support and
build with me as opposed to people who
have kind of been in the community longer.
Like their network is a little more set,
they have a huge following so they
just get inundated with comments and
don't necessarily have time to respond
to every one. And I feel like
since Onyx Pages put me on and like
that response I got was so
pivotal to me staying on booktube, that I
feel like I really do try to encourage
newbie Black booktubers  when I
see them and comment on their stuff.
And I feel like that has like come back
to me. I feel like people have been
very generous in shouting me out, in
lifting me up, in naming my influence... my
"influence" in the very few cases
where it applies. And after
I hit the 8 month mark, I
felt like I had that grounding
that I wanted, so I can spread out more
now. Given murders of
Black people by police that are being
protested via Black Lives Matter, I
initially said I was very cynical,
and I did feel very defeated. Because I
remember the first time that the hashtag
was created, and I felt like very
little came out of it. People were
charged, and then they got slaps on
the wrists, like very small sentences if
anything. And it also just
happens so frequently that I feel
kind of numb, like even ones that
don't make the news and don't get like a
national, global response. But this time
around, I want to thank the Black bookish
community on Twitter for making my
experience different. This time around,
I felt very galvanized when I was
looking at my feed. I found a lot of
resources, ways to plug in, places to
donate, petitions to sign, numbers to call,
stuff like that, and I want to thank you
for putting that out there. I want
to thank my Black bookish community for
calling out anti-Blackness and racism
in the texts that you read and the
sponsorships that you do or don't
receive, in your ability to collab with
others and in terms of how other
booktubers are interacting with you, in
your ability to get ARCs. Thank you to the
Black bookish community for using this
moment to educate, to protest, to build
infrastructure to make YouTube a more
hospitable place for Black creators,
finding ways to bolster Black bookish
community. Thank you. You've made
my experience so positive and so much
better than it was the first time around.
'What are your thoughts on book
consumerism? Do you feel pressured to buy
books?'
I just can't participate. My bookshelf is
very small, and I already have
50 some books that don't fit
on it that just stacked
around my room, so I'm really not trying
to add any
more. And also, it just wasn't how I
was raised. I grew up in a very
rural area, and we couldn't access a
library, so if I wanted to read something,
we had to buy the book. And it just got
really pricey really fast. Once we
moved to a more urban area, my mom
was just like, 'if you're using our money,
you can only buy a book if we can't get
it from the library.' And it's just stuck. And also I'm just
very cheap, and I don't
necessarily want really nice
editions or variant editions for
most books. Because again,
pricey. I'm someone who's very
rough on my possessions, and so the
nice things I have don't stay nice for
too long, so I try not to get them.
So I don't really feel pressured to in
that way. I've done
library hauls, and I feel like that
gets the point across fine. Just
because I read mostly Black authors.
sometimes I feel like I should. You know, thinking
about how pre-orders drive numbers,
and if they make art that I love, and if
I want them to be able to keep making
art that I love, they need to make money
off of it and be able to financially
support themselves. And so sometimes I
feel like I should buy more, but other
than that I don't feel pressured. 'Would
you consider yourself a critical reader
and reviewer?' Maybe this is
surprising given my little speech at the
beginning, but I don't really consider
myself a critical reader. 
When I read something, I wanna slip into this
experience, I just want to see this new
world. So I feel like I give a lot of the
benefit of the doubt. I think I am more
critical when it comes to nonfiction. But
I do know that I have trouble
being critical when I feel like the
author is so much smarter than me.
Like you probably will never see me
review a Toni Morrison book on my
channel; I just have too much hero
worship for her. And I kind of have that
issue with nonfiction too where if I just
feel like the person is so much
smarter than me and this so over my
head, I have trouble asking
questions and being critical. So I'm
trying to be more critical. One, I think
it makes me look unreliable. In terms of
my Goodreads rating being
4.5 stars. I have different
rating systems for books versus short
story anthologies or short stories
versus graphic novels versus comics, so
it's
a lot of wires crossing. But I think
that people expect it to be a lot
lower. I think people might think I'm
fake and that I'm just
making stuff up, and so maybe I
should be like more critical. And also I
want to be better at like... I'm gonna try
and read more theory so I can be better
at like naming like -isms and stuff,
harmful stereotypes and  character
representation. A thing I'm working on. 'Do
you take part in readathons and what
are your thoughts on them?'
I love readathons, but they're stressful
for me just because of the timeline.
You want to
get out two videos within a month: the
TBR video and your wrap-up, and that's a
little tight for me. And also I'm a
mid-range reader, so it takes me about a
week to get through a novel, so I prefer
the three to four week readathons.
So I would only do like
three a year in terms of participation,
just because I have so much other content I
want to make and more than six videos
devoted to readathons seems like too much
for me. Also if you're a newer
booktuber, I really recommend doing
readathons. It's a really good way to get
signal boosted when you're starting out.
Organizers might have a Goodreads group
or they might have a Twitter account, and
they'll be retweeting and boosting
the videos of people who are
participating. And also people who are
participating in the readathon are going to be 
looking for stuff to read, and so they'll
be referring to your TBR videos. Also
it's just like a quick sense of
community because there's usually other activities.
It's a fun way to interact with other
booktubers and make friends. I
love them. I don't know if I want to say
it because so far in advance, but I am planning
one in October.
October's Black Speculative Fiction
month, and it's gonna be a Black
speculative fiction read-a-thon, so
science fiction, fantasy, and horror, which
I'm organizing with Njeri of Onyx Pages,
Noria of Noria Reads,
Lucie of Lucie Reads, and Arlene (who is a
bookstagrammar) of Locpressedbooks.
And I want to do a Fifth Season
team-based read-a-thon sometime in
2021. 'Recommend a book with a topic or
issue that you are passionate about.' I
would recommend Farming While Black by
Leah Penniman. I'm into
gardening, and I'm also into... not really
as much as I used to be... I used to be
really into environmentalism. And it's a
book that I think is very
interdisciplinary and combines a lot of
things. It combines history, gardening
tips, ecology, and... I'm an atheist and
not a spiritual person, but it had a
section on how the author engages with
traditional African religions in their
farming and how that is a fulfilling
thing for them, and I found that very
interesting and beautiful. So that's it!
Thank you for watching! If you liked
the video, please hit the like button. If
you want to join the discussion, please
comment below. If you wanna stay up to date with
me and my bookish activities, please
subscribe. Thank you, have a good one. Take
care of yourself. Bye.
