I have steam coming out of my ears, folks.

Fellow Bluestocking Belle Mari Christie, who writes as Mariana Gabrielle, is in the final stages of preparing her novel La Déesse Noire for publication in June. So she was looking at the ‘multicultural and interracial romance’ novel list in Amazon, since her heroine is the daughter of an Englishman and an Indian tawaif (great story idea, and I get to read it before you do – but more about that another time).

Mari found the list was dominated by books about werewolves, werebears, vampires, and other fantasy creatures.

I hate to break it to you, but werepeople are not real. Okay? When publishers of paranormal books tag them as ‘multicultural’, they risk trampling on the efforts of writers to bring real diversity – with people from all the world’s ethnicities and cultures’ – within the reach of readers who have a right and a need to read stories about people like them.

If you believe that people have a right and a need to read books with protagonists whose experience reflects their own, please contact Amazon and ask them to consider filtering such books into the paranormal lists, leaving the multicultural and interracial lists for books that reflect real diversity.