Over the past decade, the use of sensitivity readers has become increasingly common within the publishing industry. For some authors and conservative critics, they have become figures on which fears of censorship, and the spread of a “woke” cultural order, are projected. As Brouillette (2023) has recently argued, sensationalized media discourse obfuscates the precarious, low-paid working conditions under which many sensitivity readers labor. At the same time, their casual adoption within the publishing industry appropriates the emotional labor of marginal cultural workers while maintaining a racially and socially homogenous workforce. Given the growing prevalence of sensitivity reading within the editorial process, understanding the mechanics of what sensitivity readers do, in practice, is important. How then do sensitivity readers work, on the page? Does sensitivity reading qualitatively diverge from standard development editing, and how different is it to “established” editorial practice? Unlike sensitivity reading, which remains largely unstudied, standard editorial practices have become increasingly legible in recent years due to a range of texts analysing the function, poetics and art of editing, and their impact on literary production (see Foley 2023; Furuness and Layden 2023; Ginna 2017; Greenberg 2018; Groenland 2019; Hargrave 2022). After all, editors have always, as Grundy (2022) has argued, acted as “social barometers” who anticipate how literary and commercial markets will likely respond to an “author’s engagement with politically fraught subject matter” through attending to questions of context and language. Given this, what specific interventions do sensitivity readers make?

The following interview is a transcript of an extended Q&A conducted by D-M Withers with author and sensitivity reader Georgina Kamsika, which took place as part of the University of Exeter’s MA in Publishing program. Kamsika also responds to student questions in the closing parts of the conversation. The interview was transcribed and subsequently edited by Elio Smith Díaz-Andreu to add detail and clarification. The discussion gives space for an experienced sensitivity reader to reflect on, describe and communicate the specificities of their practice, so that such insights might better inform the understanding of sensitivity reading as a distinct editorial layer. It also presents an important resource for educators within Publishing Studies, who are integrating sensitivity reading within the teaching of editorial practice.

Conversation Georgina Kamsika with D-M Withers—Sensitivity Reading

Georgina: My background is as a speculative fiction writer. I was first published in 2011. In 2012, I went to the Clarion West writing workshop and I’ve been writing fiction ever since. At Clarion West, I met quite a large number of other writers, and through this network I met Justina Ireland who, in 2017, set up a database of sensitivity readers in response to the Own Voices movement. #OwnVoice is a term coined on X (Twitter) by author Corinne Duyvis in 2015, referring to books about characters from underrepresented/marginalized groups, in which the author shares the same identity.

Sensitivity reading was very new; nobody really knew what it was, but Justina set it up and she organized it to show who could read sensitively and tried to make sure that the readers were looked after well. She ran the database for a couple of years, but then unfortunately she became a little disillusioned about how badly the readers were being treated because authors who used the service often refused to pay. Some authors were not happy with being told that they might need to edit their work. They expected a rubber stamp sign off, basically, and they weren’t getting that. They were being informed of cultural insensitivities in their work and that could cause bruised feelings, which led to them not paying for the work. It was a new, and painful, process for both sides.

Since that time, I've taken further editing courses and courses on writing diverse fiction. I’ve continued to improve my editing skills and my knowledge of the subject. I’ve worked with most of the major publishers, and a number of their imprints, and many of the smaller independents, and a lot of individual authors. I have experienced working on a range of projects, from Own Voice novels, where the author of color writing about their own experiences wanted another set of eyes on their manuscript, to blacklisted novels, books that had been absolutely cancelled on social media. For the latter I had to structurally edit from the ground up to see what had gone wrong. I’ve also worked from initial ideas with some authors through to just-finished manuscripts where it was a final edit. At the time of this conversation, I’m now only listed on one sensitivity directory and my own website, which gives almost more work than I can do alongside my own fiction-writing projects. To give you an idea of my workload, I’ve read for 23 projects so far this year already [our conversation took place in late October 2023], and I’ve got two reads booked in for the upcoming month. Some are partial reads. Some were picture books, which are obviously a little bit faster as they’re short, though they do take effort because you have to consider the meaning in the pictures as well. There’s been a movie script and one was a computer game.

D-M: You’re reading across such a diverse range of genre and forms. Can you elaborate, in general terms, what a sensitivity reader does in practice?

Georgina: There are already many ways that a novel is reviewed and edited before publication. A beta reader might help with the overall plot and characters; a copy editor might help with line-by-line issues.

Then you have sensitivity reading, or authenticity reading, or cultural consulting. Those are some of the names for what is effectively the same thing. A review looking specifically, for me, at the South Asian culture and heritage within the work, usually from a British Indian perspective. The many titles mean the same thing, but it’s harder to “authenticity read” on race and racial identities in the fantasy genre, so that’s where calling it sensitivity reading works better.

It's just the content sensitivity readers are looking at. What I do is I will read through a novel, a game, whatever. I’ll read through once and make notes of my initial impressions. And then I’ll read through a second time and see how those impressions play out. Were people deliberately using stereotypes in order to subvert them later, or was it an accidental thing that then needs fixing? That kind of thing. It’s important that I point out the good as well as bad. Do people listen to my suggestions? Sometimes, but I have zero power whether they accept or reject feedback. Which is fine. It’s as it should be. What I’m doing isn’t looking at the morality of the story or if it’s scary or has elements that are offensive. I’m basically saying, “Is it authentic?” And I’m doing that from my personal lived experience, from my research and from any background research I might have to do for this particular project, if it’s a particular time period, let’s say. I’m basically checking a writer’s research. What that means is, if it’s authentic, I’ll give it a thumbs up and explain why and, if it’s not, I will give suggestions on how to make it more authentic. That might be in line text, or I might give links out to further resources that they can go and look up more information, depending on what it is. I’m a consultant and I’m trying to make sure that they're having the correct information for that particular issue.

Historical fiction has facts to check. There are a lot of reference books out there to see if the information is correct. Speculative fiction is usually quite different. Sometimes it can be not too far off, an analogue world modern India with magic or an Indian superhero, but it’s set in contemporary time. Other times it can be a completely new secondary world that is not our Earth at all. Those tend to be deeper reads, checking for stereotypes in the worldbuilding, looking at the internal social logic, the religion, the history, the science and technology, basically just ensuring that these feel like living, breathing people, not a giant block of real-world culture just air-lifted into a new setting.

With most fiction, that process means that I’ll read close to the end of when the novel is completed, maybe before or during copyedits. I’ll usually be given the full manuscript to review. Picture books used to be very similar, actually, where we’d get them at the very end. A few years ago, I recall a friend of mine who gave very valid feedback on the artwork of a book that was trying to be inclusive about gender, but it got pretty much everything wrong. And the art had to be completely redrawn. You can imagine that was very expensive. I've actually noticed since then most of them, especially the bigger publishers, ask for feedback at the very early script and work-in-progress art stage, and then will usually ask for a second review at the very end, which is part of one project, but it'll be two stage, just to make sure that nothing changed in between.

For example, one book gave a gay Indian male character a name that was traditionally used for women, so I suggested a very similar name that was a traditionally male. Another suggestion was that this character, the only character of color in the friend group, while lovely and well written, disappeared in the third act compared to all the white characters who got full arcs. Before this chat, I had a quick look at reviews to see if any changes had been made. I saw the name change was done—great! But I also saw a few reviews saying that the character lacked spotlight or wasn’t used enough, so obviously the harder change had been ignored. I didn’t take it personally. Maybe the author didn’t agree that the character needed more—it’s their book and their decision—or maybe there hadn’t been time to make a major change. I gave my feedback and I was done with the project. I very rarely check to see how that feedback is used, or if it’s used at all.

How do I provide feedback? The most common way is I’ll get a Word document or perhaps a PDF, I’ll track changes or add comments and use those notes to write up a report, usually three or four to five pages long, depending on how much feedback there is and how many comments and recommendations there are. The comments will nearly always be tied back to a page number or a reference, so the person knows exactly where the issue is. I stress in my emails that I am here if anything doesn’t make sense, or if they need more feedback. I don’t mind exchanging some emails—up to a point—to help them get on track.

If it is an overall issue, I'll make it clear why they need to change something that’s fundamental about the narrative. I will provide options and links. Explaining things like the unmarked state, and what conscious language is, and how to elevate the representation rather than just comment on what’s wrong. For example, the unmarked state is the undescribed point-of-view characters. Usually, when that ‘he’ at the beginning of a story is usually white, cis, het, non-disabled, often middle class. And that’s what the majority of readers will envision when you first see somebody on the page, even before they’re described. Once a description kicks in, it changes. But the fact that that is the default means that a lot of writers write to that as their default. For example, in my novel Goddess of the North, because my protagonist is an Indian woman, her unmarked state is actually Indian people. And she describes race for anyone outside of that. I tried to flip the unmarked narrator. And that’s the sort of thing I’ve tried to look for in most novels when somebody’s writing race outside of their own. Something as simple as checking that physical descriptions are equitably described across race.

D-M: One perception of sensitivity reading is that you’re checking for the representation to be accurate, but you were talking about making sure that the presentation is authentic. I wonder if you can talk more about capturing that authenticity, and how you interpret this concept.

Georgina: I think it’s things like anyone could say, “He’s Raj Khan,” and that’s like, “Great. I’ve got an Indian name.” But is that really an Indian name? Is that a name that you’d actually find? You’ve just put a first name and surname together. Is that a North Indian name? Is it South Indian? Is a Punjabi name? As with a lot of cultures, there’s quite a lot of detail in the name. It invokes where somebody might come from, where their family might come from, and class and caste, and it’s all tied up. You can’t just go, “Those two names are great.” They don’t really work. I’m trying to think what … It was a TV show, I think it was Master of None, and it had an Indian family mocking a film; they were joking about the Indian character’s name, and it was like, “Nobody would have that name. Nobody would exist who would ever … It’s nobody on the planet who would have that first name and surname.” It’s that kind of authenticity I try and help with. And that’s just for the name, and then you’ve got the background, the culture, the customs. It depends on the story, really. I tend to be given a lot of historical fiction set during the Raj. That seems to be a popular one, especially for romantic fiction. There are lots of subtle mistakes. It’s quite easy for people to do an overview of what that time period might be like. Which is fine; it’s romantic fiction. It’s okay. But you want to make sure that anything that might be rude, or problematic, is sanded off a little bit. Get rid of those subtle mistakes and make sure those aren’t there. They’re not hurtful; they’re just really inaccurate. I think the important thing is we have to tell an author in a way that they don’t get defensive, but they’ll accept the criticism. It can be a little bit uncomfortable to realize the writing has issues, and to make sure that I’m not being judgmental when I say, “Actually, this is a little bit inaccurate, rather than hurtful.” It’s that a balance when it’s connected to representation.

D-M: And it’s such a hard thing to do anyway, isn’t it? Giving author’s feedback on their own writing.

Georgina: It is.

D-M: You have to be, I suppose, a remarkably sensitive sensitivity reader. I can imagine there’s some real challenges there.

Georgina: Yes, I’ll be honest, when I first started in 2017, I didn’t always get it right. I wasn’t quite as polite or gentle. And I’ve learnt. It didn’t take too long to learn, but nobody wants to offend somebody, especially when they’re being paid; and sometimes people didn’t pay if they were really offended—let’s be honest about that. You don’t want that either. The writer is trying to do the right thing by asking for a sensitivity reader. When they’re asking for help, you don’t want to insult them. And as much I’m kind of joking that I want to be paid, it’s not that. It’s about making sure that you’re giving them a service that they’ve asked for.

D-M: Yes, absolutely. As you say, they’re conscious of it enough to be approaching you.

Georgina: Exactly.

D-M: When you’re working with the Big Five, or bigger independent publishers, is sensitivity now a part of the workflow for checking all texts, or is it just selected texts that they might approach you with? Or does the request generally come from the author?

Georgina: It’s probably a little bit of both. I do think it’s definitely part of the process for some of the bigger publishers. There are some publishers I know who it is 100 percent part of their process. There’s some that you’ll see that will do it for most of their novels. I think it’s getting there, and it will grow. I actually don’t know if it’s ever come via an author when it’s come by the publisher because usually it is the editor that I’m speaking to. That said, some authors do send their thanks though after a read, which is always nice to know that your work was useful.

D-M: This is such an interesting area of research in Publishing Studies now: to understand how the process of sensitivity reading is becoming integrated into wider editorial practices. But I thought what you were saying about unmarked states was absolutely fascinating. And you can see how these kind of interventions will make a huge difference to literary narratives in the near future, in terms of structures of representation, in challenging the unthought, unmarked state of characters. It’s a very powerful editorial intervention, isn’t it?

Georgina: Yes, actually, I can’t take credit for that. It’s the very excellent, and I would recommend to everyone reading the Writing the Other book written by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward (2011). It’s really, really helpful for when you write on another race, gender, etc.

D-M: The idea of sensitivity readers has, however, been contentious, hasn’t it? Particularly in recent years with “cancel culture” and various different authors reacting histrionically to the idea of sensitivity reading, claiming that it’s censorious, and so forth. What’s your response to these debates?

Georgina: Sensitivity reading has been controversial since I started reading in 2017. It’s always been in the news, whenever an author has bad feedback, or a book is delayed or withdrawn. It’s the sensitivity readers who are blamed. Now books have been recruited into the ongoing culture war that we’re seeing across our society, especially in the UK. The splashy headlines like you’ve mentioned, about Bond being forced to change, or Roald Dahl’s books. But the thing is, Netflix bought Dahl’s IP in 2021. This isn’t about an important cultural literary figure. This is about Netflix wanting to profit from his name. I think Philip Pullman suggested that we should let Dahl’s books go out of print rather than editing them, but there’s no way Netflix would do that because they’ve just spent a fortune on them. It's great headlines. It causes controversy.

Everyone's like, “Oh, we want the originals.” But that’s not true either. Because, as I'm sure you all know, books have been updated many times before. Probably some of the greatest examples of changes are Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, and Bowdlerized Shakespeare.

Back to Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Oompa-Loompas. They were originally African pygmies Willy Wonka imported from “the deepest and darkest part of the African jungle.” They were unpaid workers that had been kidnapped. The book was published in 1964, at a time of labor anxieties in the UK, when there were displacement fears due to the fall of the British Empire. Almost ten years later, Dahl changed them himself, updating them in the 1973 edition as having “golden-brown hair” and “rosy-white skin” and Africa became Loompa-land. Dahl was happy to edit his own work (Corbin 2012). But so did Dickens, another author still popular today. Oliver Twist is still read, despite the anti-Semitism of the Fagin character. And that is after Dickens went back and removed over two hundred references after criticism from a Jewish reader (Lampert 2022). It’s just that sensitivity reading is seen as something controversial and headline grabbing now. If we talk about changing something in a book, it’s presented as shocking, whereas it’s been happening for as long as books have been printed. I’ve had to explain this before to authors, that sensitivity readers are not some certification board. We don’t force anyone to have their work read before it’s allowed to be published. No sensitivity reader is going out to a publisher saying, “You must make these changes or else.” There are always numerous edits to any manuscript on the way to publication and this is just one more step. The ability to censor anything requires control and decision-making. And a sensitivity reader has no control. We’re freelancers who give some advice, and then we go away again and have no idea if that advice is enacted or not. It’s just easier to punch down and punching down is “Blame sensitivity readers, not the editors or the authors.” I got mentioned in The Daily Mail. Was it last year or maybe even the year before? I can’t remember. I’ve never spoken to them. They just decided that sensitivity readers were awful, so they quoted bits of my website for a terribly biased article about how we were all awful people. Every time there’s an issue, I get flooded with journalists’ requests wanting to speak to me, promising no bias; but when you look at their social media, you see that they’re are all super biased, so there’s not really any point. I’ve spoken to one journalist once, which was The Guardian. Even after approving the quotes, they were used just enough out of context that I wasn’t one-hundred-percent happy with how the meaning came across. Right now, I’m staying out of it. Every time there’s a request, I'll just leave it to other people to argue.

There are some positive stories in the media. Irvine Welsh, he talked about how he was using sensitivity readers because he’d written trans characters. And he thought he’d hate it, that it was censorship, and it was awful. But then he said, by the end of it, he realized that they were absolutely brilliant, and he had the wrong end of the stick, and his book was a lot better because it had been read by a sensitivity reader (Bedigan 2023). Then, on the other hand, you’ve got somebody like Ian McEwan this month, who has never worked with a sensitivity reader, saying it’s mass hysteria (Knight 2023b). Basically, you’ve got this ongoing discussion in the media and it’s very hard to see where it’s falling. I think a really good example that I like is a Chinese–American author R. F. Kuang, who wrote Babel and Yellowface. She said she used four sensitivity readers when writing Babel. Even though she’s Chinese, she said she wanted to make sure that she was giving the best experience she could. They weren’t policing her work. They were collaborators who brought in extra detail and complexity to capture that shared background (Knight 2023a).

You’ve got two sides of the coin. You’ve got people who either absolutely hate it, or the people who are saying, “It's making my book better.” When it’s the people who’ve worked with sensitivity readers who were the ones who were positive, versus the knee-jerk reaction saying, “This is all terrible.” It's really not hard to see where the headlines are just mass hysteria, as it were, versus actual facts.

D-M: We’re really lucky that you’re willing to talk to us today because I can imagine that must have been quite hard to deal with. Of course, congratulations for being hated by the Daily Mail. I think that’s a badge of honour.

Georgina: Absolutely.

D-M: But in a very, very niche corner of the world, for some people, you are public enemy number one. Is that difficult?

Georgina: Well, it isn’t very often that I do these kinds of things, it has to be said. If I go out in public, I’ll normally try and do the author side of it, rather than the sensitivity reader side of it. Some things, like The Bookseller Future Book conference in 2022, I do because I think it’s just the right audience, hopefully, where you understand where I’m coming from that I’m not trying to say, “No. Your books are all awful. I’d ban them. Go away.” I’m actually trying to provide a service to help. I think that’s the difference.

D-M: The distinction you made earlier in our conversation about stereotypes in texts—seeing whether or not an author is employing stereotypes knowingly, whether a stereotype is there to be debunked and subverted or knocked down later, or whether it just permeates through the text in an unknowing way—was very useful, especially in terms of understanding the practice of reading sensitively and why it isn’t censorious. The hysterical view of sensitivity readers is that they might say all stereotypes are harmful and should be removed from the text.

Georgina: Yeah. That’s not realistic at all because people exist who are stereotypes. You do have Indian people who are doctors. You do have these kinds of things. It’s just when they’re the only example and everything about them is also stereotypical. They’re called Raj with no surname. Please stop calling Indian characters Raj. This kind of thing. It’s how you look at it as a whole and break it down. I think a really good example, there was an author I read. Their prose was actually exquisite. They wrote middle-grade books. As you can imagine, that’s for eight to twelve year olds—younger people who don’t want to be absorbing stereotypes. And they’d accidentally made all the good and powerful characters really blond and blue-eyed and pale and thin, and all the evil characters were all fat and South Asian. The thing is, I was going back to the geographical logic of their own world, and it actually didn’t make sense. It was clear that it was subconscious. And I will say subconscious because when I talked to them about it, they were totally shocked. They changed everything. And I’ve worked with them on two more books since then. They’ve both been much more carefully thought out. They definitely realized what they had done wrong; that they’d subconsciously gone, “Thin good, fat and dark is bad,” and fixed it. The thing is, if they hadn’t had that read, they’d have passed that subconscious bias on to eight to twelve year olds, and that’s the sort of thing that you don’t want to happen.

D-M: These editorial practices are a rewiring of the subconscious in literary culture. Over time, it will make a big difference. In terms of the future of sensitivity reading, do you think it will become absorbed into general editing practices? Do you think an editor will necessarily need to acquire the kinds of very detailed skill sets that you’ve articulated? Or do you think it will be a separate part of the editorial process? Like, you have a copy editor, a development editor, a proofreader.

Georgina: I can’t see it going away anytime soon. I’m going to mention this—and I’m sorry, it’s a horrible statistic, but it's unfortunately true. Publishing is very white and middle class. The UK Publishers Association in 2022 published statistics that stated nearly a third of the people were raised in London or the South East, 82 percent were white and 85 percent were British. That means most of those publishers wouldn’t relate to a writer who had any kind of underrepresented background. As an editor within an actual role, they wouldn’t be able to do it. I think that it still needs to be a freelance role. Maybe you could have editors who are more experienced in what that means, working with sensitivity readers, and maybe that can be some kind of training on what to look for, whether a book needs sensitivity reading, because I don’t think they all necessarily do. It is, however, a tool. It’s a research checker. I personally think it’s most vital in books for kids, picture books and middle-grade books. When you have kids forming opinions, that’s when you want to make sure there’s no stereotypes as much as possible. I think for large publishers it should definitely become part of their process. I think in small independent ones, like I said, it should depend maybe on the novel or the books, and they can work out how it happens, I guess.

In 2017, sensitivity reading was definitely a rare thing, whereas now I'm almost turning people away or sending them to other readers because there’s that many requests, which I think is a good thing. It shows there’s a lot more publishers who want their books read. I do think there seems much less of the “I want a rubber stamp. This is fine” approach. These publishers do tend to actually want feedback. It depends on the publisher, but often they’ll give me a list of “This is what is in the novel, this is the background of the author,” so I’ll get a good idea of where they are coming from. “Okay, say they married into an Indian family, so they’ve got some experience, but they don’t necessarily know details,” versus, “This is an Indian writer and they just want second set of eyes.” That kind of thing. The publisher is getting more of an idea of what they need to do—their responsibility, in publishing the book.

You’re also seeing the work happening from the other side of the industry too. For example, Clarion West writing workshop continuously strive to diversify their processes, and that includes ensuring that the white, cis, het, unmarked state is interrogated rather than the norm. No student of color or LGBT + student etc. should feel misunderstood in their writing. I’m a part of their Evolving Workshop Culture committee, working to ensure these social changes propagate throughout the writing community (Cruz 2023).

D-M: In terms of the professionalization of sensitivity reading, you’ve talked about the informal networks that shaped your entry into this area of editorial practice. Do you think it’s going to become professionalized? Or are there examples of professionalization? Codes of conduct? There’re different professional organizations for editors, copy editors, agents, etc. Do you see that coming for sensitivity readers?

Georgina: I really like the idea of training, certification. I’m not really sure how it comes about. Codes of conduct sounds great. I really like that idea, but I think certification or something like that. There’s definitely a level of editing skill that could be trained across the board, but I personally know about India, colonialism, partition. That kind of thing. That would be completely different to, say, my friend who reads for gender and trans issues. While we both have similar editing experience, I don’t know how you’d relate those two specialisms to any kind of certification.

I was talking to the writing directory, the sensitivity readers’ directory that I'm part of. I was talking to a couple of them a few days ago; they want to set up courses. Things like, “A 101 on how to write pronouns, or a 101 on how to write autistic characters.” I suggested that maybe we should do a high-level course of what sensitivity reading is. Rather than charge for it, just have a free course so people can understand what it is and then maybe we could do another course which is training how to do the editing side of it. I think it could exist, but it would definitely, at least at this stage, be very informal, rather than certified.

D-M: In your view, are there any risks to reading sensitively, or are there any benefits?

Georgina: I’ve got to admit, I did like this question because I’d totally flip it to phrase it: are there any benefits or is it all risk? It is not very nice to see my life and my culture dismissed as culture-war fodder, to get articles in the Daily Mail that are complete lies. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme; you don’t get paid very well for the amount of work you do. I tend to ask for half upfront and half at the end, and some people would not so much now, it must be said, but definitely in the early years—skip out of paying the second half because they were a little bit offended that they didn’t just get that “rubber stamp.” As I say, my experience has got better at giving authors very polite feedback, so it’s not quite as bad. I do know it still happens to other colleagues of mine, however. It’s not nice when you have actually done work and you are trying to help, especially because it’s important to me to help publishing move forward. I mentor authors of color for the same reason. It’s about trying to improve representation as a whole.

It's not nice; it’s not fun. Sensitivity reading is really not great for your mental health either because some of the books that you’ve read. Okay, they’re not to my taste, but I don’t mind that. There’ll be some, however, that have got such deeply racist issues. And then, as I mentioned, I have to respond politely to not offend the author. And when it's an accidental one, even if it’s accidentally deeply racist, it’s still tough to be polite. I do understand that most of the time it’s an accident—it’s not deliberate. I don’t want to offend the author. I don’t want them to ignore the feedback. I want them to listen. That is definitely a big risk: how to deal with that kind of problem. I mentioned my name being dragged in the tabloid press and, as an author, that’s something I don’t want to happen too much either. So there’s a lot of risks. And I suppose the benefit is I am helping the publishing industry to improve. I do get paid for the work as well.

D-M: It’s very sobering to hear about that, and particularly as a freelance writer and editor: your name is effectively your “brand.” I can see there’s a lot to deal with and that it would have a substantial impact on your mental health as well. I hope you take breaks and good care of yourself as well. I wanted to return to video games. Is it rare for you to sensitivity read for video games, and is it any different to reading books?

Georgina: I don’t get them too often. Since I started, I’ve worked on three different video games. I also do tabletop role-playing games as well. But it’s very similar in that somebody might have written an Indian character, or they’ve used a setting—maybe the Raj or it’s an earlier setting—and they just basically want eyes on it. I think the very earliest one I did, it was just some artwork, which, quite honestly, was nothing to do with India, but they just got very scared. It was very quick and easy: “Nope. It’s fine. It’s lovely. It’s great. Don’t worry.” But one of the recent games was one of those games where they tend to set them in different countries. It’s just making sure that, whichever country and time period it’s set in, it’s realistic, the characters are realistic, the cultures, all that kind of thing. It's fun because you end up going through both the artwork and the script as well. It’s quite an interesting one.

D-M: With games, audiences inhabit characters and act out certain social roles. Perhaps they are even more impactful, culturally, than reading a book because you’re embodying a role, exploring a world.

Georgina: Yes, it’s true. That interactivity definitely does come across. That’s why I mentioned culture. I think making sure that you didn’t allow characters to do something that would instantly be like, “Oh. They don’t exist in that time period,” or “They wouldn’t pass in that culture.”

Shall we have some questions from our students now?

Catie Gilhooly, MA Publishing Student: You talked from the very beginning about how sometimes your process starts after a book has already been published and subsequently “cancelled.” What does that process look like when you’re starting from something that has already been published, and might have been reviewed? And how does that change compared to looking at a manuscript that hasn’t been published and doesn’t already have a bad reputation?

Georgina: The first time it happened to me; I'll be honest, the publisher absolutely blindsided me. They were like, “Oh, here’s a sensitivity read. Here you go. It’s a book. Thanks very much.” And once it arrived, I was like, “I recognize this title.” I looked it up and I was like, “Oh, okay. It's that book.” That one, I have to admit, it didn’t come to me with the greatest start, but I was fair to it. I read it through. While I knew of the book and had heard of it, I hadn’t really read any of the reviews or any of the things bashing it. I read it through neutrally and it did deserve a lot of the feedback. But it was a case of somebody who I think wanted to write a romance. They didn’t really care about the setting. They were like, “I’m going to pick a time period. I'm going to write a nice romance.” And it was a lovely romance, and it was great and it’s fantastic. It’s just it was a period of time where that romance was historically, let’s say, not just inaccurate, but offensive.

Luckily, I’ve only had it happen twice and the next time I was given fair warning. I was told, “This book’s been pulled for this reason. Do you want to read it?” And actually, because it’s a publisher I’ve worked with before, we actually talked quite a bit about why it had been pulled. They admitted their mistakes, that they hadn’t had it checked. It had just been bought and gone out. I didn’t come to that book with any negative preconceptions. I don’t think it really mattered, but I still tried to be measured, picked at what was wrong. Again, to be fair to that book, it was slightly less problematic but still deserved a big rewrite. If the problems had been picked up before it’d gone out to print, you could have probably done a lighter edit. While there were things that were problematic, they would have been easier to fix. But because it had gone out and been dragged so hard, you had to pick every single tiny point and make sure it was one hundred percent across the board, whereas normally you don’t necessarily have to do that if it’s a fantasy book, people don’t mind as much if you let slide minor inaccuracies, such as clothing, or food, or cultural practices. You know that, okay, a young British officer would never meet a princess out for a walk by herself, let’s say. It's like, “Okay. Fine. It’s fantasy. We’ll let them have it. They can have this meet-cute in these circumstances. Real-world logistics don’t matter.” So, it’s one of those where you have to be a lot deeper and a lot harder with the editorial suggestions because readers are going to fine-tooth comb it once it goes back out again. You now need to explain how and why that meet-cute could have happened. How, for example, this low-ranking English officer might have a reason to meet up with a high-ranking princess without any escort there.

Elio Smith Díaz-Andreu: In these books, is it worth it to have them come back out? If it’s so bad and it’s been dragged through the mud. What is the point of bringing them back out again?

Georgina: I would ask a publisher that because for me, personally, I wouldn’t have done. I would have said, “This book’s dead in the water.” Okay, that’s not really very fair. Once they fixed the problems, it was a fine, good book, but the thing is it had already got a negative perception. But the publisher then had, as far as I know, two or maybe three books after. It was a series because I definitely read the sequel, which they came straight to me before it went anywhere near being published, and it was much more carefully written. I think it was because the author probably had a three-book deal, or something like that. They couldn’t just cancel the book—that is my guess, but I don’t know.

Elio Smith Díaz-Andreu: That makes sense. Tough job for you, though.

Georgina: That was definitely not the most fun read. Creating characters that reflect the diversity of the world is important for all writers, but it can be hard to represent people whose aspects of identity are different from their own. People worry about getting it wrong; and yes, it can happen, which is why writers should work with editors and sensitivity readers to alleviate as many issues as possible.

Something to keep in mind as well, though, is however hard you try, your books are never going to be perfect, and they’re never going to be perfect forever. A famous example of that is in Sandman by Neil Gaiman. Gaiman wrote a character, Wanda, in Sandman: A Game of You, who is a trans woman. And she dies in the book and her dead name is used on the gravestone. But the thing is trans people read the comic in the '90s. The commentary was, “Well, that’s just fantastic. It was great. It’s really well written,” as no one even wrote trans characters, never mind so sympathetically. But now it’s not viewed in this way. It’s more likely to be perceived as transphobic due to the “burying your gays” trope. But Neil did everything right at the time. He spoke to the trans community. He showed them the work. He got the feedback, and he changed it to the feedback. But it’s a snapshot of time, the life of a transwoman in the '90s and what was correct then is obviously not correct now. And because it’s a comic, it’s very hard to go, “Okay. We’ll get a sensitivity reader and change it around a bit.” It’s a comic. The art is set in time. But I did see recently that Neil said that he can’t change it, so what he’s doing is, in the TV adaptation, he’s getting trans writers into the writers’ room to make sure that they write Wanda’s character (Fisher Center 2020). That’s an example of how cultural attitudes change over time. Neil Gaiman could have ignored the critics and said, “This is how she was written. Leave it at that,” similar to the way people are talking about Roald Dahl or Bond, but he didn’t.

Authors are going to get it wrong, sometimes. Or the world will move on twenty, thirty, sixty years later. The only thing writers can do is write the best, most complex, rounded characters they can. They need to work with their publishers to get the best guidance and support they can. And they need to be open to feedback if change is necessary in the future.

Conclusion

Given sensitivity reading’s recent emergence in the publishing chain and the controversy surrounding it, it is easy to feel confused or hesitant regarding the practice. It is through listening to professional readers, like Georgina Kamsika, that editors, publishing educators and students can come to understand sensitivity readers as useful collaborators in the effort to both increase the quality and verisimilitude of a text, and to enable publishers to produce content for diverse audiences. In an industry currently working towards inclusivity in terms of what is published, and its understanding of audiences (Coe 2022; Publishers Association 2022; Saha and van Lente 2020; The Bookseller 2023a; The Bookseller 2023b), the editorial insights of sensitivity readers should be recognized for the valuable contribution they can make. At the same time, there are clear issues with the precarious, low-wage conditions sensitivity readers work under, as well as with the industry’s outsourcing of emotional labor to marginalized groups given its homogenous workforce. As Kamsika explained, sensitivity reading is appropriate as a freelance role in view of the context-specific expertise needed for each project. Thus, alongside further professionalization and coordination between sensitivity readers, the publishing industry must arguably be proactive in developing transparent standard industry practices with fair pay, respect and acknowledgement of the role as a significant editorial layer within the publishing chain. Overall, this conversation has aimed to create a space in which an experienced sensitivity reader can reflect on and articulate her practice. In sharing this conversation, we hope to contribute to the growing body of practice-based knowledge emerging from Publishing Studies, while, at the same time, affirming the value and professional skill of sensitivity readers.