Since I’ve had to use YouTube to learn how to perform the various tasks associated with publishing a book, my YouTube feed has filled up with the various subjects that authors seem to get involved with. So, I’ve been bombarded with videos on every aspect of writing, editing and marketing books. But this week I seem to have arrived at the crazy outer reaches of the book publishing ecosystem; namely, sensitivity readers. Now I had heard of alpha readers and beta readers. These are the first people you give your book to in order to get feedback on the story from normal people. This all makes sense to me. But sensitivity readers are something entirely different. Apparently, these are people who go through your book looking for reasons to be offended by your story.
Sensitivity readers will read your book and then provide you with hundreds of notes on all of the ways that whatever you say can offend a multitude of easily “triggered” types of people. One video talked about how story lines and even characters can upset a whole host of fragile readers. Women, minorities, blind people, deaf people, paraplegics, quadriplegics, gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, queers, “non-binary,” all the various kinds of “trans” people, women wearing septum rings, antifa supporters, pacifists, the homeless, meth heads, heroin addicts, other drug addicts, women with blue hair, the lactose intolerant, the gluten intolerant, vegans, poor people, pedophiles, other sex offenders, dyslexics, the neurodivergent, ADHD individuals and many, many more. The only ones they left out were the red-green color blind. That really ticked me off.
I looked at this list and realized that many of the people on this list might be offended by my book. After all my protagonist unleashes a non-lethal chemical attack on an antifa riot that includes many blue-haired women with septum rings and several sex offenders in their ranks. Without even trying I had unknowingly transgressed against the boundaries meant to be protected by sensitivity readers.
This made me sad.
Then I found out how much these people charge for their service (0.5 to 2.0 cents per word). For my book that would come out to between $325 to $1300. So, that’s a lot of money! Plus, I read that they literally come up with hundreds of items that must be “fixed.” Hundreds. That would take weeks to edit. So, I would be paying someone many hundreds of dollars to make even more work for myself at the same time as she made my book much less enjoyable for my target audience; normal people.
Well, I decided not to hire a sensitivity reader. But I felt guilty. So, to assuage my grief I instead watched a bunch of videos about sensitivity readers. And it worked out great. These videos are hilarious. To hear the various absurdities that get brought up by sensitivity readers to these terrified writers is to experience comedic genius. The things these people worry about are stunningly stupid. They’re worried about elves and goblins in fantasy stories being mistaken as dog whistles for different races and ethnicities. They worry about people being cured of diseases in the story making readers who have those diseases upset. And the funniest thing of all, the readers and the writers look exactly how you would imagine people who worry about such things would look like. It’s a wonderful life.