Cover Controversies

The story about the controversy over Justine Larbalestier's new book, Liar. In PW. 

And Justine's excellent blog post on the subject, here.

I'll add my two cents and say that when I started reading Liar (I've only just started it -- maybe 20 pages in), I was immediately struck by the disjunction between the character's appearance in the book and the appearance of the model on the cover. 

There is a lot of pressure from the big chain bookshops right now to put characters' faces on the cover of YA books. I have heard it over and over, and experienced it in the redesign of Disreputable History.

For Fly on the Wall, which also had a redesign recently, a number of covers were tried with a Chinese American girl on the cover. My publisher did not seem to have any fear of Gretchen's race putting off potential buyers (she is mixed race: caucasian/Jewish on one side, Chinese American on the other) -- but in the end, a face shot didn't convey the spirit of the book well, and they went another direction. The girl on the new cover could be Gretchen, but she's really more a fantasy imagination of Gretchen as a superhero, rather than Gretchen herself.  

I love this new cover for FLY, but I do think it's possible to imagine the girl is completely caucasian if that's your default imagination setting. And that's a pity, because Asian American kids looking to find themselves in fiction won't easily find themselves here. They'll have to pick up the book and read the flap copy and infer G's race and cultural background from her name: Gretchen Kaufman Yee.  

Same goes for Dramarama, which is about a friendship between a white girl and a black boy.  White girl is on the cover. Boy is absent. The cover is gorgeous, I think, and conveys the feeling of the book and the appearance of the narrator beautifully.  (By the way, I asked that they cover the model's nose, because Sadye's nose in the book is BIG -- like Streisand big -- and this model had the bittiest nose ever. If you can't see her nose, she could indeed by Sadye.)

Still -- African American teens looking for books in which they can find themselves will never pick up Dramarama  unless a smart librarian puts it in their hands, or unless they look past the cover long enough to read the book's description. And that makes me sad, because representation is so important to teenagers reading stories. Finding people like myself in fiction (as well as people UNLIKE myself), was very, very important to me as a young person.

Some of you know I write picture books under another name. It is in this realm of my writing life that I've come across the most disturbing ingrained and invisible censorship of faces other than white ones. I have requested or suggested artists who draw primarily African American  or Asian American characters for certain books of mine, because the stories were about multi-ethnic neighborhoods, or because the stories were universal and I think that readers proved with The Snowy Day in 1962 that if a story is good enough, and touches people's hearts, the whole world can embrace a child protagonist of any race.

And yet -- there are still not very many protagonists of color in American picture books, especially not in books where the kid is supposed to be "everykid."  The way Peter is in The Snowy Day. 

I loved these artists and wanted to see what they'd bring to these stories.And when I talked with editors about these artists who drew mainly people of color, I was told that those artists were probably "too urban" for my stories. Or thatusing  those artists would limit sales. And in other words, No. (One of these artists went on to win multiple awards from the ALA, by the way.)  

The editors could have just told me: that artist is too expensive. Or, that artist isn't to our taste. Or, that artist only works for another publishing house. But the editors actually felt comfy saying to me: too urban. Fewer sales in the middle of the country. As if that wasn't a deeply horrible thing to say, when if publishers are not going to be BRAVE, how are we going to have literature that changes people's lives and touches them deeply?

So I think the difficult time the picture book market is having is causing editors and publishing houses to shy away from a bravery and inclusiveness that existed forty years ago.  Yes, they publish books with characters of color, but usually in stories that are about famous people in history, or specifically about a foreign culture, or specifically about a particular  culture within America. I know this from serving three years on the Ezra Jack Keats Award committee, which looks at picture books by relatively new picture book creators, with an eye to books that celebrate and appreciate the multicultural nature of our world. I have read a large percentage of the picture books featuring protagonists of color that were published in the past three years. 

Publishers need to be braver. The Snowy Day is still selling. As Justine points out, Americans will buy albums with people of color on the cover, no problem. They will buy books, too. If we stop being so scared. 

All right. Enough soap box. 

I will emphasize that I love my publishers and this is a tough time to be a publisher and the pressure in these situations is enormous and more than I can probably comprehend. But I am grateful to Justine for speaking out about this issue, so I wanted to as well, in the small way that I can.

E

 

Comments

[Lauren]

Excellent Post, E. Perhaps it does take a bit of bravery for publishers to break out of their comfy presumptions about race and reading. But truthfully I think they're dead wrong in these presumptions anyway. I think they're relying on false conventional wisdom of the sort that keeps marketing "experts" and focus group people employed. Good stories sell well. Good stories with support from their publishers sell even better. All these attempts to divvy up the marketplace by race or gender or what have you is probably ineffective in the end. But it still has the power to alienate, hurt, and marginalize.

[AudryT]

>>>Finding people like myself in fiction (as well as people UNLIKE myself), was very, very important to me as a young person.

Me, too. What's interesting is that when I did, "like myself" did not turn out to be "white like myself." As a child, the subculture I grew up in expected me to gravitate toward "white like us" in entertainment and books, but when I identified with characters, they were everything from red unicorns to blue aliens to dark-skinned elves. I also crossed lines with my crushes, falling in love with everything from Native American characters to real-world "half-breeds" like Alexadre Dumas, to the original Aladdin.

The idea of restricting myself to one superficial skin color or cultural background is mind-boggling. I think I'd rather live in Hell than in a world so bland.

[Shveta]

Excellent post. Just one suggestion: "people of color" is preferable to "non-whites," because that's implying that "white" is the default. :)

Thanks for standing up on this issue!

[E. Lockhart]

Shveta,
THank you for the linguistic suggestion! I will fix.

E

[Amber]

Wait - so they are scared about dropped sales in the middle of the country? Too urban? What? This does not make sense to me. Part of the reason I read books is to experience different cultures and situations vicariously. And what about it being urban? Do they not publish books about people in rural areas because it's too rural?

Anyways, I think they should just go ahead and do it and be surprised by their sales.

[E. Lockhart]

Urban is a code word meaning African American, basically. The "urban fiction" section of a bookstore does not include police thrillers about white protagonists, and it might well include How Stella Got Her Groove Back, bonkers as that might be.

It's a crappy and misleading euphemism, in my opinion, and some of Justine's respondents have wonderfully articulated what it means and what the cost is to have books with African American protagonists separated from the rest of a bookstore or library.

So what the editors meant was that in parts of the country less diverse than NYC, the book-buying public might be resistant to identifying with a child of color.

[Amber]

Thanks for the reply, E. Lockhart! That clears some things up. But I still think they are wrong.

[Brittany]

I am not going to lie to you E. As much as I like the new cover of Frankie, I did like the other one better. But the new one is cute too. that is def my favorite book by you, so maybe this cover will attract a different audience than your other one.

[Doret]

When you mentioned characters of color in picture books as the everyday kid, two books came to mind. Not Norman by Kelly Bennett and Dance with me by Charles R Smith,
both illus. by Noah Z Jones.
Norman just a kid who wants a dog but gets a fish. I show this book to parents and teachers a lot and it goes over well. The two little kids in dance with me, simply want to share their love of dancing with their neighbors. I love both of these titles. The characters being Black have nothing to do with the stories. Both books are published by Candlewick press.

[Folklore Fanatic]

Thank you for growing this discussion, for standing up for people of color on such an important issue that may seem trivial to white readers, and for being open-minded. Those of us who follow discussions of -isms and intersectionality in the blogging world see this problem over and over again. The S & M people have no valid data to back up their sales claims because they have never thrown full industry support behind books featuring PoC on the covers. A poorly advertised book will usually do poorly, regardless of cover art.

And if race reduces sales by 5 or 10 percent, then maybe publishers should start flooding the market with stories and covers featuring PoC *even more* instead of wringing their hands and crying crocodile tears, so that it becomes normal to portray races beyond white as 'default' as well. White children can relate to Dora and the Avatar characters (unfortunate whitewashing of the live-action movie notwithstanding). It's adults who have already grown up in a racist world who need to understand that children of color need to read and see people like them so that they can love themselves and not wish they were white.

[Austyn]

This whole thing is ridiculous to me. I don't know anybody that would care what race the protagonist is. While i think the cover of Liar is absolutely gorgeous, i understand its misleading. Also, i like the older covers of your books much, much more. I really wanted to buy Fly On The Wall, so now i'm going to have to find the older version online.