Should I have had a sensitivity reader review my book?
Reason magazine reported last summer on the rise of sensitivity readers, and publishers have made headlines for their plans to release sanitized versions of Roald Dahl's and Ian Fleming's works. I’m not sure what’s more depressing: the fact that publishers are hiring sensitivity readers to purify these books, or the fact that I probably should have had one review my books before they were published. In an ideal world, sensitivity readers would be in as much demand as Betamax repairpersons. But we do not live in an ideal world. We live in a world full of hypersensitive Twitter users who relish finding offense in the unlikeliest of places. Hence the proliferation of sensitivity readers, or "authenticity readers" as they’re sometimes called.
