From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv

Just when you think book banning cannot sink any lower, author Adam
Szetala, in That Book is Dangerous!, explains how major publishing houses pre-emptively deal with boycots organized on social media trying to force
books they would ban from being sold on Amazon and ebay.

Why would their be organized boycots? Because a character may have
racial or sexual/gender characteristics that don't conform to an ideal representation. How do the largest publishing houses determine this?
They hire a "sensitivity reader", a profession without training. All the
reader needs to be is of the same race/sex/gender of the fictional
character in question, then write a report as to whether the character
is conforming or not to whatever the reader's criteria are.

Gawd forbid this should be nonfiction literature...

This isn't trying to please the church lady. This is trying to censor
specific authors who may believe they are progressive but the power-mad
social media trippers would target because REASONS.

He said there have attempts to censor Mike Pence and Jordan Peterson,
but the assumption that the censorship is versus white male
conservatives writing nonfiction literature is wrong. It's against
progressive authors of fiction with progressive messages being torn
apart by the progressive circular firing squad.

He interviewed gay authors instructed by their editors to "gay it up",
but the author doesn't want to write romance. No gay author wants his
book stuck in the gay romance fiction section of a bookstore. They want
to be treated like authors of general fiction, or whatever the topic is.

Asian ethnic authors and black authors have been hurt by this crap too.

C-SPAN
Q&A
Adam Szetela on Self-Censorship in the Book Publishing Industry
recorded March 10, 2026
Interviewed by Peter Slen
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