So I went through this blog’s posts and recorded the ethnicity of all the authors I have read. (I included scheduled posts that aren’t live yet.) And the results are both sad and encouraging. Sad in that they HEAVILY skew white, but encouraging in that I can see the point where I began to try to fix that. It really brought home that it’s very very easy to NOT read diversely. It takes a little more effort to find good books in my preferred genres by diverse authors. But the catch is that it’s not because they don’t exist – it’s that they’re not marketed as heavily! The books are totally out there, I just have to make an effort to go find them myself.

The actual numbers:

63 white women
31 white men
1 white non-binary person
4 Black women
2 Black men
3 Middle-eastern men
1 Hispanic man
1 Greek man
1 Indian woman
1 Asian woman
1 Native American woman
1 Native American man
4 unknown ethnicities

Just looking at the numbers is pretty bad. However, 14 of my last 30 books have been by non-white cisgender authors! So once I started making an effort, it was fairly easy to find diverse reads. (I’m also amused that I read twice as many women as men.) So I am encouraged by the progress I have made, but saddened by how bad the numbers were. I will be making an effort to continue this trend in the future, and I’ll check in at the end of the year with my results.