if you want to map this psychogeographically I'm working on a scale from thylacine to ivory-billed woodpecker, with the ivory-bill as an "it's possible" somewhere adjacent to night parrot

the REALLY UNLIKELY ones especially. your moas, and such. i did find a bibliography of reported moa sightings since 1445 and desperately want it

He'll need it and all his courage

she's always like mutter mutter it's for editing at strange horizons not for me and i'm like. so are u an editor at strange horizons?? Well Then.

yes she forgot to tell him or something

would've been nice to hear something from consortium too. oh well. i guess i'm unemployed forever

actually. jobs please

goddd and even when they land IN a genre... like SURELY NOT every Black SFF author can be compared to Butler, either in comps or in copy. surely they have as diverse a range of inspirations as any other author, and their own voices. no??? okay then. great

i hate the entire enterprise lmao. thank god for community comps.

at least at big imprints, yes, they were grouped w romances! i can't speak for small outfits, but even without a rep pointing it out you'd still see the bisac and comps on a book... whether buyers have the interpretive or analytical chops to do anything w that is another matter entirely

there's plenty of clueless buyers, of course, but queer romance is absolutely marketed to us by reps *as romance* so this is probably on purpose. to clarify... i'm not defending that. lol. either it inexplicably works for them (big maybe; i MIGHT put fiction there, depending) or it's segregation

let me know the store, i'll find the buyers, and i'll stare em right down

god knows it confounds me, but that's more a fundamental mismatch between what i find narratively interesting and romance qua romance, not an inability to interpret stats; i relish buying manga, after all, and that's a section that baffles TONS of people.

sometimes they'll do better outside of romance. then again i think that's because there's very little effort to understand or cultivate the romance section, starting with buyers

i'm not about to excuse other booksellers especially since there's been a "what ARE genres??" panel at every conference i've ever been to, but at least most of us have data from our point of sale! sometimes (emphasis SOMETIMES)--

whoop think i fixed it and, yes, it was full of rocks

it is very zany. quite often comedic. but iam just saying,