Research Authors Before You Add Them to the Challenge
Unfortunately The Storygraph doesn’t have the option to take books out of the challenge. They only have the option to hide books, which makes them disappear for everyone else, but the people who have added them to the challenge will still have them and see them (and so in the end, these books would still count for them).
We have hidden many books in multiple categories already, so we wanted to give a brief recap of who fits and who doesn’t.
To start: only books written by nonwhite authors count. If the book has nonwhite main characters but it’s not written by a nonwhite author, then it doesn’t fit this challenge.
Abby Jimenez is not Latina. She is a white American author, who is married to a Latino man, and so has taken his surname.
S.A. Chakraborty/Shannon Chakraborty is a white woman. She converted to Islam and is married to an Arab man, and so had taken his surname.
Lisa See writes many books inspired by Chinese history and culture, but she is a white woman who is one-eighth Chinese (her paternal great-grandfather was Chinese).
Filipin* authors don’t count as Latine.
In the Indie category, we have found books published by big publishing houses, so please check the publisher online before adding books on a whim.
In many prompts there’s been an influx of white authors, like TJ Klune for the found family prompt; Olivia Dade for the prompt of a book with a fat main character; Margaret Owen for April’s prompt C; books by white Spanish authors mistaking them for Latine authors in the translated books prompt, etc…
Again, we’d like to remind you that the books need to be written by nonwhite and mixed race authors, as this challenge has been created to highlight authors of color and their stories.
Always research your books before you choose them for a prompt. The Storygraph challenge is a crowdfunded resource so it’s impossible for it to be perfect.
Check out the official website for the links to the Storygraph challenge, Goodreads group and graphics for instagram.
About the creators:
Brittany is a bookish content creator from the San Francisco Bay Area. She can be found on instagram and tiktok.
Margherita is a reader and indie author from Italy. Xe can be found on instagram, tiktok and medium.
In the Trans Rights Readathon challenge I saw someone put down a transracial adoptee as trans. I felt like I was going crazy because I had just read that book and researched the author and thought I missed something. 😅 Thanks for doing the extra work to weed out the authors that don’t fit. To me, doing the research of which authors and books fit which prompts is very much a part of the fun and the challenge but I’m sure you weren’t expecting to have to do that work for others.