New Year's Resolution #7: Stop buying YA from Bloomsbury.
I've been looking forward to the debut YA novel Magic Under Glass for months. I ordered it before the first of the year! it came! The author, fabulousfrock, sent me a bookplate! I was excited!
And then I wasn't.
This is the description of the main character of Magic Under Glass from the review of the book by The Book Smugglers:
And then I wasn't.
This is the description of the main character of Magic Under Glass from the review of the book by The Book Smugglers:
- Nimira is a performer, dancing
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This is exactly the sort of thing that needs to be brought to light. Though the racial issue is huge and socially paramount, I'd also like to point out that far too many book covers inaccurately portray the contents (not even subject matter...as with this example, physical appearance of a main character).
Publishers in general need to learn the hard way that readers support authors, not houses (generally), and covers need to stop becoming the last detail added on at crunch-time.
The publisher and editors do not always know best. Hopefully with the onslaught of new media, this may change.
But if situations like this indicate anything, it's that...we just have to keep making NOISE. LOUDER AND LOUDER.
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have you read Liar, by the way? it is. SO. GOOD. So good, and Micah's identity is such a crucial part of the storyline that it's enraging to me that anyone who'd read that book could turn around and try to give hir a white face. It seriously breaks my heart.
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To the Marketing staff of Bloomsbury,
Despite the fact that I am now an adult, I still very much enjoy Young Adult novels and have read and purchased a good number from your publishing house. However, after not one, but TWO racist mishaps, I can no longer support your company in good conscience.
The first mistake was when the novel, Liar came out this past summer. The main character was a young black woman, yet the originally intended cover for US release was of a white woman. It was only after an outcry from readers across the country and the author herself on her blog that it was later changed to properly depict a black woman on the cover.
The second mistake was with the novel Magic Under Glass, this time being a novel about a woman from the Far East and described as brown. Yet again, the cover depicted a white woman instead of a woman of color on the cover.
It seems you did not learn your lesson the first time with Liar and as such, I ( ... )
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While I am strongly in favor of fighting stuff like this, as an aspiring author (who will in theory not sell stuff to Bloomsbury), I about had a heart attack. I really don't think boycotting books is the way to go. The people we'll be hurting are authors, not the corporation. If some books suffer a sales slump, Bloomsbury will blame the authors and drop them or at least put their career at risk. (Having a bad record with any publisher, even a racist one, follows you.)
Write letters, absolutely, but if you like a book... please support the author and buy it. :(
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While I realize this is a valid point (and am encouraging people to buy Magic Under Glass and then break up with the publisher, not the author), if we send a message to the publisher that they can continue to get away with whitewashing covers, then they will continue to do it. Bloomsbury has just proven that.
Knowing what we now know about Bloomsbury, I have a really hard time understanding why an author would trust their chromatic characters with them as a publisher. You may be saying "but it's so hard to get published, we don't have a lot of options," and I'm thinking, "....but I don't want to read the writing of someone who cares more about getting published than they do about the integrity of the story they want to tell ( ... )
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It's a catch 22. The way around it is not not buy the books AND to state to said publisher that you did not buy the book BECAUSE of what they did. Meaning if they stopped doing that, you would buy the book. You get enough of these and hopefully they will change. If not, they are stupid and deserve to close down due to bad business practices.
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Not unless Bloomsbury is not just clueless but evil.
Because the author has (I presume!) already received her advance. So she's been paid for her work. Yes, it'd be lovely to earn out that advance and get royalties too, but that's always a gamble anyway.
So if no-one buys the book, then the only people losing money are the publishers.
Now the publishers *could* conclude that it must be because no-one liked the book. That's why, when you boycott the book, you should also write to the publisher and tell them why you're doing so. That way, when they're trying to work out why the sales slump, they've got the answer right there.
If they then decide to ditch the author despite the evidence in front of their faces, then they're actively evil and *really* don't deserve the money.
So go ahead and boycott the book. If you still feel guilty wrt the author, send her a couple of bucks. That's about all she'd get even if she earned out her royalties anyway.
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Again, I'm in no way agreeing with Bloomsbury's cover decisions, but there must be something else we can do besides boycotting those books and destroying the pawns while trying to reach the king, so to speak. (Excuse the bad metaphor.)
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Yeah, like i said to a previous commenter, I definitely understand that books released over the next 6 months are going to be within that gray period where the contents have been out of the author's hands for some time. And I don't want to punish any of them anymore than I do Jaclyn Dolamore.
I think that ideally the best thing to do is to really look at publishers like Verb Noire and Tu Publishing as alternatives to this kind of thing, promote them and talk about them within our communities, and let aspiring writers know that they exist as alternatives.
And also keep emphatically telling Bloomsbury essentially that this is wrong and we will find different ways to support the authors whose books are affected.
In general, honestly, I think boycotting is universally ineffective against marketing decisions unless it happens on a GIANT scale and goes hand-in-hand with extremely bad press. And even then, as we just saw with Liar, that doesn't automatically come with a guarantee that anything will actually change.I also know that I, ( ... )
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