Entry tags:

in ur novel eatin ur book, linktasm, publishing

bad behavior in the book field
Is this a branch of Racefail, or is it just outright race & gender failure?


Justine Larbalestier wrote a YA book called Liar, about a mixed-race, dark-skinned, short-haired character--a book where the character's race and appearance factor heavily into the storyline. Publisher Bloomsbury Press decided the best cover to put on this book was a shot of a long-haired white girl.

Now, plenty of covers fuck up character descriptions--but when official people from the publishing house defend their choices with things like this:

“The entire premise of this book is about a compulsive liar,” said Melanie Cecka, publishing director of Bloomsbury Children’s Books USA and Walker Books for Young Readers, who worked on Liar. “Of all the things you’re going to choose to believe of her, you’re going to choose to believe she was telling the truth about race?”

And tell the author things like this:

Since I've told publishing friends how upset I am with my Liar cover, I have been hearing anecdotes from every single house about how hard it is to push through covers with people of colour on them. Editors have told me that their sales departments say black covers don't sell. Sales reps have told me that many of their accounts won't take books with black covers. Booksellers have told me that they can't give away YAs with black covers. Authors have told me that their books with black covers are frequently not shelved in the same part of the library as other YA-they're exiled to the Urban Fiction section-and many bookshops simply don't stock them at all.

Yeah, not cool. Seems it's too strange a thing to have people of color on book covers, and no one wants to try to acclimate the general public to the novel idea of integration.

At least, not if a potential monetary loss is involved.

~~

And while we're at it . . . An anthology is coming out entitled The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing Sci-Fi. People checking out the book noticed that the list of included "mind-blowing" authors contains no women or people of color.

Not only has at least one of the authors come charging out of the woodwork to make an ass of himself:

Every single commenter here seems to me to be committing a logical fallacy of tremendous dimension, one so big it distorts entire worldviews:

DEMANDING THAT EVERY SINGLE INSTANCE OF EVERYTHING COMPOSITE SHOULD BE ABSOLUTELY STATISTICALLY REPRESENTATIVE OF THE COMPOSITION OF THE ENTIRE COSMOS

You know what: a potato field is not likely to contain corn plants. A pine forest might feature an oak or three, but be 99% pine trees. The Beatles were 4 white guys. Sonic Youth has no people of color! My ream of copy paper is all white, with no sheets of lettuce included!

(...)

But I have to say that when ANY WRITER (not just female writers or writers of color) complains about being excluded from a venue and cites issues of platonic principle and idealism, I always first posit underlying jealousy and a desire for status underneath all the lofty hypothetical talk.

(To which I said, "What the hell?")

Then the editor, Mike Ashley, came in to help make things worse.

That probably has something to do with my concept of "mind-blowing". Women are every bit as capable of writing mindblowing sf as men are, but with women the stories concentrate far more on people, life, society and not the hard-scientific concepts I was looking for.

Mike Ashley also notes that he did ask for stories from women, too. Two of them. Even though all we're capable of writing about is people and society, not science.

(Also, as an editor I want to bite him.)

Fires need set. I think The Angry Black Woman just set that fire for me. I like her. :D

Eta: Another bit of WTF has come to my attention: that of a male author with a feminine name, who wrote a story from a male's POV and had it rejected--brutally--because the editor says he, as a woman writer, doesn't know how to write a convincing male character.