plagiarism
taking someone else's work, writing, or ideas, and passing it off as your own without giving them proper credit
MFA
a Master of Fine Arts is a degree that writers often pursue in order to advance their creative writing skills; in the United States, an MFA is one avenue that writers take in order to increase their chances of getting published or noticed by literary agents
exploitation
taking advantage of something—a person, idea, group of people, or other resource—in order to unfairly benefit from it
yellow fever
a fetishization of East Asian culture, people, or history, often associated with white individuals' romantic or sexual attraction towards a person of East Asian ethnicity
yellowface
historically, the practice of wearing makeup in order to mimic East Asian features; the term's use has since broadened to mean any practice of assuming East Asian identity, as June subtly does when publishing The Last Front under the name "June Song"
sensitivity reader
a reader hired by a publishing house to proofread a manuscript for any potential red flags or misrepresentations of a certain culture, ethnicity, identity group, or history
auction
in the publishing industry, an auction for a novel is a step in the publishing process where different publishing houses bid on the rights to a novel
awards bait
a phrase used to describe a work of art that is able to garner many awards, which increases its sales and status in the literary marketplace
Goodreads
a popular book-reviewing website where anybody can publicly upload their review of a book; Goodreads ratings are often important for a book's success and sales performance
DM, direct message
a message sent over a social media platform such as Instagram or Twitter
white savior
a trope commonly found in media portraying a white character who "rescues" or "saves" people of color and is depicted as liberating or freeing them; the trope reinforces racist attitudes that cast white people as superior or in some way more capable, powerful, or enlightened than the people of color they are in contact with
missionary
a person sent to a foreign location outside of their home in order to convert the people living there to a certain religion, such as Christianity
microaggression
an action or statement that subtly discriminates against a certain marginalized identity group
authenticity
genuine, original, true to facts
vitriol
extremely cruel or hateful criticism
hegemony
the dominance of an idea or social group; a hegemonic idea may, for example, be the one that dominates others and is the most widely influential
literary agent
a literary agent represents a writer, acting as a liaison between the writer and publishers, film directors or studios, and translators, as well as helping with auction and sales of their work
"the Big Five"
"The Big Five" is a term used to refer to the five major publishing houses within the United States: Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster
subversive
a comment or statement that attempts to disrupt a norm
postcolonialism
the study of how colonialism affected cultures and societies, specifically concerned with the exploitation of colonized people under European imperial control and the legacy it left upon these geographies; postcolonialism has largely branched out into a set of ideas that manifest in both academic study and creative work, such as "postcolonial novels" or poetry
