New Year's Resolution #7: Stop buying YA from Bloomsbury.

[bookshop]

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:

Nimira is a performer, dancing

Comments

[bookshop]

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."

I also understand that we may be seeing more debuts from Bloomsbury authors in the next coming months whose covers have been in the works for a while. I won't punish those authors, necessarily, but I will talk about it and I will continue to boycott Bloomsbury. In the reverse, if Bloomsbury puts chromatic models on the cover of their books, I'll say 'excellent work' and we can talk about that too.

But I'm not going to just keep buying from a company with a racist business model. Bloomsbury is the one hurting the authors. Not me.