I just want to push people to be more specific about: Which culture? Whose culture? Because that wasn’t my culture. 

You’re listening to Burnt Toast. This is the podcast where we talk about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.

Today I am chatting with Dominic Bradley.

Raised in the crunk-era "Dirty South," Dominic Cinnamon Bradley is a Brooklyn-based Black disabled queer visual artist, writer, and performer. In 2021 they were a RiseOut Activist-in-Residence fellow focusing on creating resources and conversation about mental health on behalf of BIPOC LGBTQIA+ New Yorkers.

Dominic is also a freelance sensitivity and authenticity reader who has worked with various publishing houses —and I was incredibly lucky to have Dominic as the sensitivity reader for Fat Talk. Sensitivity reads are a somewhat new, and very important, part of the book publishing process. So I thought it would be really interesting to have a conversation about what a sensitivity reader does and what it adds to the book—and also have you all get to know Dominic a little bit more, because they are amazing.

I’ll also take a minute to remind you to preorder Fat Talk if you haven’t already!

You can preorder your signed copy from my favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!1). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books.

And! You can now preorder the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible. (I’m recording this at the end of the month, so more on that process soon!)

I wrote last fall about why preorders are so crucial, but let’s review:

• Publishers use preorders to decide how much to invest in a book in terms of its marketing and publicity. 

• This directly corresponds to the amount of media buzz a book generates (think NPR interviews, TV appearances, and prestigious book reviews—all of which contribute in their own way to preorders and sales once the book is out). 

• Retailers use preorders (and that related media buzz) to gauge how many copies of the book to stock in stores, and whether or not to display the book prominently in the window, on the new arrivals table, etc. Amazon and other online retailers use preorders to decide how hard to push a book on their homepage or new release lists. All of this also drives future sales, because people who see the book while book shopping, are much more likely to buy it than people who cannot see it. 

• And: It’s pretty rare to make a bestseller list without strong preorders. That’s because preorders all count towards your first week of sales—and that’s when most authors make a list. 

Preorder FAT TALK!

I hope this conversation with Dominic makes you feel even better about supporting the book that Burnt Toast built. We are almost exactly three months away from pub date, so there is a lot more book talk to come (about events and giveaways and some great newsletter-only perks and behind-the-scenes access!). Thank you for being down for this piece of things. It means so so much to share this process with you all.

Episode 79 Transcript

Dominic

I am based in Brooklyn. I’m a visual artist, a writer, sometimes performer. And I also happen to do freelance work for publishing houses in regards to what’s known as sensitivity reads or authenticity reads.

Virginia

Do you have a preferred term, sensitivity or authenticity?

Dominic

I use them interchangeably.

Virginia

What got you into doing sensitivity reads in the first place? I’m curious to hear the backstory.

Dominic

Purely by accident. It was happenstance, really. There was an author who was not connected to a publishing house that I read for. Then there was an editorial firm that I read for and gradually I started to get deeper and deeper into it, until I ended up in a binder full of sensitivity readers. I was in several databases. That’s really how it happened.

Virginia

Which is so odd to think about, but yup, that makes sense. There are these binders full of people. Well, you really have a gift for it. Your notes were incredibly helpful on Fat Talk. 

You and I were connected by the folks at my publisher, Henry Holt. You just completed a sensitivity reading of Fat Talk. It was really important to me to have a sensitivity read on this book for a lot of reasons. I did have to nudge the publisher a little, but they were very open to it. It’s an increasingly standard part of their process. But I was like, “We’re doing this, right?” And they were like, “Yes, yes, we’ll do it.” So why don’t we start by having you explain what is the sensitivity or authenticity read and what’s the purpose?

Dominic

The purpose of a sensitivity read or an authenticity read is to have someone with fresh eyes look at an author’s manuscript. And we’re looking for specific things. Let’s say that the author has a main character, or even a secondary character, that they’ve written that is outside of their own lived experience. They want feedback on making sure that those characters are as three dimensional as possible and that’s where I come in as a reader.

Virginia

I can see for fiction this being so valuable to help flesh out characters and give the really true context of their lives in that way. And what about nonfiction?

Dominic

I think that nonfiction can be approached much the same way. But in nonfiction, you’re not really assessing a character per se. What you’re assessing is, are these facts full-bodied? Are you getting the entire picture? Are there other things to know about this event, this place, this person, that the author may not have been clued into, because the author, again, does not have the lived experience?

Virginia

What are some of the challenges of doing this work?

Dominic

One challenge of doing the work is you’re very likely to encounter something that’s going to upset you. I think the other challenge would be trying to give feedback that propels the author forward, rather than “I don’t like this,” or “you should take this out,” or “this is bad.”

Virginia

Yes. “This is bad” is always a hard note to receive.

Dominic

Yes. So, attempting to go beyond that. For example, there was one manuscript where darkness had become synonymous with evil. So, just pointing out, “I’ve seen you do this a lot and you’re falling into this trope which has already been widely discussed and you may want to rethink how you approach that.”

Virginia

Yes. Do you think it was a, for lack of a better term, a blind spot of that writer, that they hadn’t put that together? Is that what you often find, authors are just not aware that they need to be sensitive to this? Or are there times where their bias is leading, so to speak?

Dominic

You know, it’s hard to speculate about that sometimes. In most cases, I would say, it’s lack of awareness, rather than someone leading with their biases, just because all of these things are baked into our society. It is pretty much the path of