I think one of my reservations in this situation is that the one author could be bearing the brunt of all the frustation and questions about how The Industry currently is run.

Yes, you have good questions and I personally would rather debate it in person (Kidlitcon10!!!) than online.

So to me, it's not One Author versus Readers. It's One Industry versus Readers.

I've been throwing various ideas around in my head about What To Do. The YALSA lists and awards are key to institutional buying; how often do we (and I include me) nominate the POC books? A librarian doesn't know someone looks for a book, doesn't find it, and leaves unless someone asks them. What can we do about that -- to make clear to publishers there is a need, is an audience, it is the right thing to do?

Kinda funny to think that bloggers are "the industry" now - my how far we have come! ha!

The thing is, I think publishers know that there is a huge reading audience out there. The numbers of plenty of books with POC as protags have done well (Millicent Min, Part Time Indian, pretty much everything Walter Dean Myers writes, etc.) and yet it is almost like they just think they might LOSE some potential readers.

It's not about who they can get perhaps, but who they might lose. Does that make sense?

I'm writing an article on all of this right now, (for Bookslut) and thinking about it and soliciting many email comments on it. Change is on the mind of many.

viz loosing buyers--I'd be curious to know how Liar ended up doing after its cover change...

To offer my marketing opinion it's always about who you might lose when it comes to sales. You have an audience that you've targeted, grown and established a marketing and buying pattern about. Once you've picked up a slice of your product's potential customer segment, to get your product bought by other segments takes more research, more money and more people power, because you need to establish what makes people in the new segment buy, where they will buy, how much they will pay etc etc. So instead of reaching outside you try to grow your share of the segment you've already established will buy your/similar products by getting your competitor's customers. If you start doing new things to capture people outside your segment you can't know if they'll work with your existing segment without spending money, time, people, you may lose the customers you already have because, as you've etsablished, they like to be sold to in a certain way. You know this because this is how you currently sell to them and they buy. You have no guarentees that your marketing strategy will work with the new segment you're trying to capture because it's untested and setting all that new stff up is expensive. It's much easier and less costly to keep your old customers by doing what you've always done and using strategies that have always been proven to work.

I think this kind of customer marketing sucks and is unambitious by the way but it's written deep into marketing theory and I'm not the head of a company, playing with the finances. I'm not in favour of the majority of segmented marketing either, because it reduces customers to stereotypes and creates things like those crazy ' what covers sell' superstitions you've been talking about. It's statistics that can help us all now. If companies were willing to share their marketing data around and those statistics suggested different things than the ideas ingrained in the minds of those in publishing (very possible because marketing is not always integrated within the business and even marketers are encouraged not to believe the data they bring in)then new, positive campaigns that reflect the society we live in/want to live in might be born and we might start seeing diverse covers and publishing enterprise.

And I feel I have hijacked your comments, so I'll just finish by saying I agree with you that there does seem to be this feeling at her livejournal that the author is being attacked, but she's not. Bloggers have gone out of their way to support her and keep it civil. Someone suggest that the one commenter who disagreed should take their comments to another time, another place - where exactly would be better?

The debate wasn't about one author and one book. I'm with Colleen, Dolamar like the blogger who cried, "Am I bad person" seems more concern with herself than the issues or others.

Overwhelmingly comments have been about the cover, not the content and not the author.

And with a cover change and the warm fuzzy, the author is likely to benefit from the controversy.

Ari and the rest of us, will still have to hunt and fight for greater representation.

I'm with Susan. The "Magic Under Glass" author and the Story Siren (of "Am I A Bad Person?" fame) are deflecting attention away from the real issues at hand--the whitewashing of covers, the harm it does, and the fact that it must stop--and are making the discussion about what they, as individuals, have the right to do or not do about whitewashing.

As a writer, I'm furious about deflections like these. Yes, we all want our books to do well. Yes, we all have to eat. But I will die unpublished and hungry before I achieve success at the expense of others' well-being.

Colleen, I totally agree that we are cutting authors too much slack. The author should be outraged about the original cover, and voicing that outrage. Period.

Thanks for addressing this topic so thoughtfully, Colleen.

Although I certainly agree with Jessica that injustice ought to be addressed. I think I'd address any concerns I had about a cover privately to my editor.

Ultimately the jacket is the editor's decision. I think most of them make an honest effort to do right by their authors. Sometimes a jacket is rushed. Sometimes the budget is too tight to do more than a few drafts of a cover before the final is chosen. Some editors do not have enough clout in their organization to make their concerns heard. Protest though we may, from the outside, we have little power to influence these realities of the larger publishing houses.

Here is what we can fix. In fact, here is what we are ideally suited to fix. We can Grow The Market for POC books. Calling attention to them in blog reviews is an excellent remedy.

As it happens my next book is a friendship/road trip story with 2 white and 1 black characters. It's not in cover meetings yet but when it is they'll probably choose either to just show the viewpoint character (white) or the 3 girls together (in which case I'm sure they'll make the tall one black), or they will have a cover with no characters on it. It's my editors call, and I trust him to make a sound decision.

Here's what I can do. I can make sure that about half of the schools I visit that year are majority black schools. In my opinion, the real long-term answer is to develop readership in minority communities. It's not such a feel-good, immediate solution as launching a blog protest of a few days. Fortunately, I have several decades and minority readership is a battle I intend to win.

Hi, first time commenter here. I just wanted to throw in my two cents as someone who works in "The Industry."

The issue of race representation in literature and on covers is not only one within the publishing industry, but is a symptomatic reflection of institutionalized racism as a whole. Case in point: I am a PoC working in sales at a major house. My workplace is very diverse from entry-level to senior management, and we are very good in including representation across the board for all our imprints: both in our books and in our marketing.

In a conversation yesterday with some of my co-workers about the MUG controversy, one of them pointed out that its more than sales who has a say over book covers: the major buyers wield the ax for us. And these major buyers can be counted on one hand: Wal-Mart, wholesalers, B&N. And, to be frank, if any of those buyers say no to a cover for any reason, we have to listen to them or else our books don't get in.

Thus, anyone who points fingers at publishers and editors and authors should also consider the fact that we are not the only ones at fault. True, we can and should be held accountable when our actions promote racist ideas, but readers should also be aware that the problem is greater than a few people in high places. And, in order to fight for diversity in literature, you'll have to look at an even bigger picture than the one you're looking at now.