Moddy Notes: Welcome, Comm Purpose, and Tags

[sanguinity]

Hey, look, a mod post!

First (again! still!), welcome to the newcomers! I hope that you find many great reads here. If you haven't had a look at the FAQ yet, please do so.

This comm has gotten rec'ced a lot recently, and I'd like to emphasize (in case there is any confusion) that this is a comm for books by people of color. That is a different focus than what one tends to see elsewhere (i.e., a focus on books that feature people of color, regardless of authorship). If you're looking for books that feature people of color, this comm will obviously have lots of recs for you -- welcome! However, we ask that you please restrict your posts to books by authors of color.

(And to clarify: it is acceptable to mention books by white authors here -- you might wish to compare one author's treatment of a subject to another's, or to ask for alternatives to a given white-authored book -- but please remember to keep the focus on books by authors of color.)

Edited to clarify more: No posts about books by white authors.

Another moddish note re authorship: please don't assume that an author is of color. It can be tempting to say, "Oh, Japanese name = author of color!" However, names can be acquired by marriage, adoption, or even personal choice (pseudonyms!), so please do check before posting. (If you need ideas on how to check, see the ideas posted here. Feel free to chip into that thread, too: I'll eventually synthesize the answers into an item for the FAQ.)

Thank you very much to those of you who have been tagging your posts -- yay! You make me all kinds of happy. :-) A couple of style notes about the tags themselves:

• Author names are tagged "a: familyname personalname" F'rex, "a: butler octavia". Please note that for Chinese-language authors and others, the family-name might be first on the book cover.
  
  
• We're in the process of regularizing tags. One particular change we're making is to use hyphens for ethnic/national identities: i.e., "filipino american" is now "filipino-american," etc. That's partly because the hodge-podge of hyphenization and non-hyphenization was making me crazy, and partly because "japanese japanese american japanese canadian" is harder to make sense of in the tag-list than "japanese japanese-american japanese-canadian." Some of you have been stellar about playing nicely with the weird vagaries in the existing tags; I hope that this change makes it easier for you in the future.

In other news, I'll be putting up a "request for recommendations" post in a few minutes, so you'll have something fun to play with. (See? I'm not always about the nagging. ;-) Just mostly.)

If you've got any questions or suggestions for the mods or the comm in general, feel free to drop them in the comments. Happy reading!

Comments

[teacupdiaries.livejournal.com]

This is a general suggestion: I just joined BookMooch, which is an online trading website for books. I thought it might be nice to remind members here that this could be a good way to a/ pick up books by POC authors, and b/ share them with others.

I know a lot of people are tightening the purse strings so this is potentially a good resource, and it would be neat if we could effect the number of books by POC authors on that website.

[sanguinity]

I know nothing about the site, but: absolutely. I've also heard people say good things about Paperback Swap. I have heard that getting POC-authored books through such sites can be frustrating, because the sites do a good job of mirroring what is popular/easily-available in the book culture in general. But if we can send more POC-authored books into those book-trading sites? That would rock.

[teacupdiaries.livejournal.com]

My thoughts exactly. :)

[littlebutfierce]

Yes on all counts... I've used both sites & found them useful. Tho' if folks in this comm start using book-trading sites en masse I'd make a plea for Bookmooch b/c Paperbackswap is US only. ;)