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]

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, personally, don't feel comfortable giving Bloomsbury my money. I mean, I've been boycotting Amazon since #amazonfail, with no expectation that it will cause sweeping change either, but I just can't buy books from them anymore for a number of reasons. It's the same here, in essence.

What other options are there for protesting the publisher while supporting the authors, do you think?