Miracle Jones, Fiction Circus, July 24, 2009
Justine Larbalestier’s new “young adult” fiction book “Liar” is about a little black girl named Micah who likes to tell lies but who desperately wants to stop.
Bloomsbury liked her book so much they decided to buy it. They didn’t want her to change the concept at all. Little black girl who tells lies. Fine.
They decided they know just how to sell a book about a little black girl who tells lies.
Turn her into a little white girl:
According to Larbalestier, Bloomsbury’s marketing department wanted a photo of a girl on the front because that’s what sells, and they showed Larbalestier many different prototypes, some white, some black. She said she didn’t like any of them and strongly objected to the entire concept. But since cover decisions are not up to writers, she lost, and Bloomsbury went with the present disingenuous monstrosity.
From Larbalestier’s website:
“Since I’ve told publishing friends how upset I am with my Liar cover, I have been hearing anecdotes from every single house about how hard it is to push through covers with people of colour on them. Editors have told me that their sales departments say black covers don’t sell. Sales reps have told me that many of their accounts won’t take books with black covers. Booksellers have told me that they can’t give away YAs with black covers. Authors have told me that their books with black covers are frequently not shelved in the same part of the library as other YA—they’re exiled to the Urban Fiction section—and many bookshops simply don’t stock them at all. How welcome is a black teen going to feel in the YA section when all the covers are white? Why would she pick up Liar when it has a cover that so explicitly excludes her?”
1. Since when do black covers not sell? Doesn’t a stamp from Oprah Winfrey basically guarantee a bestseller in this country? And what about all of popular music? What about nearly every style magazine?
{snip}
3. If a black cover is an absolute deal-breaker, THEN USE SOME OTHER IMAGE. Like, the word “Liar” up in flames. Or a central image from the text. A broken mirror. ANYTHING. Don’t put a little white girl on the front of your book about a little black girl. It’s going to change people’s ideas about the narrative, which is primarily a story about identity in the first place.
In Larbalestier’s own words:
“Liar is a book about a compulsive (possibly pathological) liar who is determined to stop lying but finds it much harder than she supposed. I worked very hard to make sure that the fundamentals of who Micah is were believable: that she’s a girl, that she’s a teenager, that she’s black, that she’s USian. One of the most upsetting impacts of the cover is that it’s led readers to question everything about Micah: If she doesn’t look anything like the girl on the cover maybe nothing she says is true. At which point the entire book, and all my hard work, crumbles.”
Remember how Biden didn’t get to come on stage during Obama’s acceptance speech until Obama was damn good and done talking? There’s a reason for that. Image control.
This is an utterly stupid move for Bloomsbury and utterly hateful. I look forward to the print-on-demand future, when readers will be able to choose any cover they like for their books, including ones they design themselves. You want a black Harry Potter? You GET a black Harry Potter.
Maybe at this point it’s time for Larbalestier to think “lawsuit.”
NOTE: Not that it matters, but Justine Larbalestier is white and from Australia. If she were black and American, I doubt Bloomsbury would have had the balls to do this. Then again, they probably wouldn’t have bought her book in the first place. If Bloomsbury was my publisher, I’d be outraged right now.
She’ll sell the book.
Original article
(Posted on July 28, 2009)
Comments
I think this author is quite lucky. Had the cover depicted a black girl and people found out the author was white……well, you can imagine the outrage.
Interesting. I work parttime at a bookstore and in my experience whites will generally not buy a book with a black face on the cover because whites assume(almost always correctly) that a book with a black on the cover will be targeted to an exclusively black audience.
On the subject of ‘Urban Fiction’, the audience is generally black women, the authors are mostly female, and the works have a gangsta-romance theme! I have noticed a few undesirable white girls buying these books. In the store I work at, the ‘Urban Fiction’ selection is kept in the back of the store to prevent shop-lifting.
I am in the book business and can vouch for everything in the story about marketing books with black covers. I used to buy books by the ton at the post office auction. Books by and about blacks would generally sell on Amazon for 1 cent. It’s just a simple fact: Blacks don’t buy books.
“Book industry: Books with non-whites on the cover do not sell.”
And the reason is that people instinctively know that blacks aren’t bright enough to make for very interesting reading.
And if an author writes about a black girl that really has an all-white personality and intellect, they KNOW the book is disingenuous and they require that the character be a believable one, even though the book might be fiction.
The one great obstacle to publishing companies substituting blacks for whites is the market place. They could try to market the novel in the black community but not many of them read.
How terrible for the multicults. They so want to warp reality but racist whites won’t allow them to do it.
i have seen books written by blacks and it is the same story in all of them: Sex. Sex is always the motivator.
How many times and in how many ways can this theme be told?
After about five minutes, it is very boring. After all, focus on physical bodies is not as interesting as character development.
Also, the reactions of the characters are not really those of White people.
Boring, boring, boring.
Even that Fantastic Four movie directed by that black director—the reactions of the characters were absurd, even for a science-fiction cartoon movie.
Remember the black and white Barbie controversy several years back, where they concluded that even black girls wanted white dolls to play with?
This is much the same; only on an adult level. Besides, it makes no sense to pander specifically to a racial demographic that makes up a mere 13% of the population. Not to mention, this demographic tends to have a much higher rate of illiteracy and reading isn’t exactly a huge part of most blacks’ hobbies.
“Doesn’t a stamp from Oprah Winfrey basically guarantee a bestseller in this country?”
Yea, a stamp saying it’s on the Book Club list will sell it; not a picture of Orca’s face.
Why decry whites for - presumably - not wanting to buy a book about a black child, when blacks wouldn’t want to either?
Wow, more moralizing and hand-wringing than you can shake a stick at…all over a silly book cover.
We’re told the decision was not just wrong, it was “hateful!” But, as has been pointed out already, if a black girl were pictured on the cover, with a title and theme of “Liar,” the book would no doubt be branded as “racist.” Rather than being grateful as she should be, the author is outraged. As it is, she comes across as a self-righteous prig.
Doesn’t a stamp from Oprah Winfrey basically guarantee a bestseller in this country?
And what race is the primary buyers of such books?
Yet another shocker! Non-whites on book covers inhibit sales!
Given that the rate of literacy among black Africans is lower than that of all other races, and that those who can read generally restrict their reading to wine and liquor sales advertising this is hardly a remarkable finding.
“Books with non-whites on the cover do not sell.”
True. My reason for not buying such books is that there’s a 99% certainty that it will be yet another ‘evil whitie done me wrong’ story and I’m sick to death of hearing, reading and watching the unending tales of noble blacks triumphing over ‘racist ‘whites.
Australia has been inundated with them for several years, only in our case it’s downtrodden Aboriginals.
If I see a black face on a book I assume it was written to target that specific audience and wouldn’t give it a second glance. I assume most other Whites think along the same lines. The problem is black people don’t generally read books.
I’m a book store habitue and find the black fiction to be fantastically stereotypical. Usually the theme is something like:
“Ty’Kwan is fresh out the joint, trying to stay straight and get back on top of the rap game, but will his drug kingpin past pull him back to the streets and tear him and Khna’sheia apart forever?”
If, as a white person, you said “here is what would sell to blacks” and then outlined the average thug love novel, you would be hanging from the PC lanyard in milliseconds.
There is a quote, I forget who said it, but the gist is, “when I speak I wear a mask, when I act I take it off.” When America’s 30 million blacks buy their combined 50 or 60 books a year, that is the absurd ghettoish, drug-soaked, prison-chic garbage they buy.
Blacks don’t buy books.
—————-
No they do I ride the train with them every day, they (we’ll the women anyway) all read “romance” (using that term very losely) novels about” gansta love” or “playin’ the game”, that they buy from vendors in the sidewalk which for some strange reason all come in cellophane packaging.
It seems to me to be somewhat similar to the pulp white housewives buy in the supermarket but instead of say a fair maiden being seduced by a handsome, brave sir Lancelot in a fantastical ancient kingdom, their books are about say a girl with a stripper sounding name, like “Honey” or “Candy”, getting knocked up by a gangsta or a rapper or something like that who then dies in a tragic rap feud or gang war. Instead of flowery Victorian language you use “dialog” like “Baby Girl you be workin dat body, like me see that booty shake!!” very riveting stuff.
Oh and black males nahh they don’t read. Too busy listening to impossibly loud music on their I-pods which is often unpleasantly loud for bystanders even though the sound is emanating from headphones embedded within their ears, which is quite disturbing since for them the volume must be somewhere around the level of a space shuttle launch or nuclear blast but sustained for hours on end. Can’t imagine what effect that must have on one’s cognitive functioning not to mention the ability to hear. Reading however is certainly not on the agenda though. Ok fine maybe comic books.
“How welcome is a black teen going to feel in the YA section when all the covers are white?”
I think the first question should be “how many black teens shop at bookstores if not out of necessity for school work?” Answer this question and you’ve have the reason why black books don’t sell.
This sounds pretty racist to me. A white woman writing a book about a black with personal shortcomings? Somebody get Gates, Sharpton and Jackson on the case!
Now just watch…all over TV , gratuitous scenes will be shot in bookstores showing tons of blacks browsing through books, when I never see blacks in even the largest bookstores in spite of their inclusive, multicultural selections. The unspoken argument will be: “See? Blacks go to bookstores all the time — they want to see black faces on the covers of books!”
Except we know it’s nonsense. And so is this line from the ludicrous author:
How welcome is a black teen going to feel in the YA section when all the covers are white?
Black teens are going to avoid bookstores like kryptonite, unless they’re looking to roll someone for their change. And if you don’t believe me, watch the Chris Rock video on Youtube about black people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7b2oCYgfik&feature=fvst
My guess is that blacks don’t read as much as whites.
“…that she’s a girl, that she’s a teenager, that she’s Black, that she’s USian.”
I don’t buy books based on their cover, I buy them based on their content. I own about 2000 books on all sorts of subjects. Most were written by white people. Nearly all the remainder were written by Asians. Only a few were written by blacks. Why? Because whites write about everything under the sun — exploring Antarctica, number theory, electronics, time machines, field guides to wild flowers, espionage, the Bolshevik revolution — name any subject and some white person has written a book about it. When a black person writes a book it’s almost always some variation on the same theme — how difficult it is to be an oppressed black person in our institutionally racist society. That gets old real fast.
I always marvel at the large and ostentatious “African-American” book sections at evey book store in my area(Northeast US). Who reads these books? Even Blacks themselves openly joke about Blacks not reading books for Heaven’s sake! One wonders how much money the book stores lose on this savish, “PC” foolishness.
Some times you can tell a book by its cover, Instincts tell us to reach for the light* Not the darkness! Yet this does not substantiate putting one person down or exhaulting another which is magnifying natures revelation to excessive proportion. All said, I’m not one for fiction and the fact that a white author writes one of a supposed black liar has something ficticious about it..Pun Intended! Peace
The discovery that Blacks on book covers “don’t sell”, has to be an earthshaking one, I’m sure.
We’ve stopped patronizing the theaters… because we can’t stand that Hollywood propaganda implying you’re out of touch if your White family doesn’t have a Black family as your very best, closest friends.
Freedom of speech allows Hollywood to grind out propaganda films. Freedom of choice means I don’t have to watch them, much less support Hollywood with MY dollars. Freedom of choice allows me to avoid unwanted friendship with non-Whites!
What was it Chris Rock said about blacks, books and kryptonite?
The girl that was used doesn’t look all that white. I think she could easily pass as a mulatto in people’s minds. Readers are hardly likely to be completely thrown way off course about the girl’s identity based on that picture.
This author must be incredibly naive. Did she really think she, a white person, could write a book about an imperfect black person and then have a photo of a black on the cover with the word “Liar” underneath in big letters? I think that’s the real reason they changed the cover photo to a white person. If the title of the book had been “Smart” or “Beautiful” or something else positive, they’d have had no trouble putting a black person on the cover. But since “Liar” is negative, they changed it to a white.
You make a fresh and highly relevant observation.
While blacks demand that they’re capable of doing anything the white man can do, what constitutes the majority of their writing and scholarship? Oppression and racism. Even when they venture outside these topics, you’re likely to find that slipped into the work is some reference to blacks not having pursued this line of inquiry because of oppression and racism.
Black scholars and black writers can be described as Johnny-One-Notes.
As for blacks take on why blacks don’t read, here’s how blacks see the problem. While watching this video, remember, this was done by blacks for blacks. Had this been produced by whites, it would have been vilified and pure racism and hate:
http://tinyurl.com/4v6le4
This is exactly what happened to the white Canadian author W.P. Kinsella (he wrote the baseball novel Field of Dreams , on which Kevin Costner’s hit movie was based) some years back, when Kinsella tried to write — sincerely and empathetically — about Native Americans.
Canadian and American Indians went on the warpath against Kinsella — and they didn’t stop at merely accusing the author of not getting the Indian perspective right; they insisted that a “paleface” had no right to be writing about Indians AT ALL!
This doesn’t prevent advertisers of TV comercials from putting Blacks in their ads, especially Black males with White females and making what are are basically anti-White commercials. But, unlike the book publishers, they are not interested in selling a product. They just want to push their anti-White ideological agenda.
What was it Chris Rock said about blacks, books and kryptonite?
Grew up in the ghetto, more or less. I’ve told this story here before, I think, but since we’re on the subject…
Both my parents’ cars were broken into several times. All manner of things were stolen. Eventually they learned not to leave anything of “value” in their vehicles. I use scare quotes around value because one time my mother left some overdue library books in her car for months, often unlocked, and they went unmolested. Probably could have closed her bank account and kept her money stored in those books, lol.
There are some decent black writers but they tend to write too much like white writers or do not dwell on their blackness enough. Publishers tend to ignore these authors and go for ghetto writers who obsess over their blackness or stick to the standard formulas of black fiction. I personally believe Iceberg Slim and Ralph Ellison were both great writers but they exhausted the material of their respective genres themselves, there is just not enough there to justify niche industry.
Black’s do not buy many books and those who do tend to stick to the “urban section”, books with titles like “Boody” and “Big Daddy’s House”. Some buy Best seller’s and classics but this is reference material to be overly quoted and cited in conversation to show off that they do in fact read.
I worked at this book store in Hollywood and this black celebrity came in once. She walked up to the counter and just blurted out “I need some books”. I asked her what she had in mind and she told me that she didn’t care, that she had company coming over and wanted books to have out, “you know, something with some art in it” was her only specification.
Bloomsbury Says “Black Doesn’t Sell”
Perhaps if the book had a gold cover and chains on it and called the book ‘bling’ it would sell. Not many blacks I have had to deal with (quite a lot unfortunately) have been able to read, write or spell beyond 2nd or 3rd grade level, and THEN they often do so in what is best described as literal ebonics!! dismal.
Kind of interesting… the mentality of Blacks that tend to eschew reading/buying books. Maybe the trick would be to put a particularly prurient cover on the books… letting Blacks think the book is particularly salacious… then they might at least STEAL the book.
It is pretty rare, to see a Black actually engrossed in a book, any book. Other than required reading during the school years. I’ve worked with many people, Black and White over the years. Often recall seeing a White co-worker engrossed in reading during lunch. But I cannot recall ever seeing a Black reading a book during lunch. Must be a Black thing, I guess… We Whites just wouldn’t understand it!
This is actually encouraging. I would have thought the self-styled artsy bookish types would scarf down books about blacks like there was no tomorrow.
Saying “USian” has become a fad among the radical left. Not saying “American” is like a secret handshake among them now so that is a strong indication this woman is a typical literary moonbat.
Being a white Australian woman allows her to indulge the myth of the American black without all that contradictory feedback from reality that might get in the way of her story.
She should write illustrated children’s books. It almost seems like it’s illegal to even portray any white children in books anymoe - even though it is almost all white parents buying them.
Even PBS kids during the day is ridiculous. Mostly non-white children portrayed or if the central character is white, all of the secondary characters are white. And I bet the audience is 98% children of white PBS liberals.
kgb: Black teens are going to avoid bookstores like kryptonite, unless they’re looking to roll someone for their change. And if you don’t believe me, watch the Chris Rock video on Youtube about black people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7b2oCYgfik&feature=fvst
Oh my, if I did a routine like that the SPLC would get me jailed for a hate crime! What Chris Rock said about books being like kryptonite to n****rs must be true because my house hasn’t been robbed. (Classical music CDs are also good kryptonite.)
WR the Elder:
Country music works, too. There are a couple of white taverns in parts of south St. Louis City that are “diversifying” that play non-stop pre-1998 country music as a form of diversity repellent. How much longer they’ll be able to do that is beyond me, after all the Civil Rights division of the DOJ, the SPLC, ADL and NAACP will say that country music is a vast conspiracy to sterilize black men, and South St. Louis taverns will have to clear their music play list with the DOJ, a la the Voting Rights Act and certain states.
33 Civilized: USian is like a secret handshake for leftists. That’s handy to know. Well, they’re not really Americans anymore, are they? Kind of like how the Reds in the 1980s used to always try out a Mexican accent when they said “Nicaragua”. “NEEkarAHRRGwah”.
wow. I’m amazed that this tempsest-in-a-teapot controversy du jour finds its focus in a cover photo.
I might have imagined that the deal-breaker would have been “racist” insinuations that any “little black girl” is even capable of telling an untruth.
Only white children lie, right?
Take this simple test..take a serious book on a serious subject
Country music works, too. There are a couple of white taverns in parts of south St. Louis City that are “diversifying” that play non-stop pre-1998 country music as a form of diversity repellent.
# 35
So true, given that blacks are huge fans of post-1998 country music.
Anonymous: The reason I mark 1998 as a turning point is that most country music after then sounds like warmed over pop that just happens to be recorded in Nashville. Pre-1998, it still is country enough to serve the “purpose.” Pre-1980 works the best. Post-1998 country is so un-country that a few of the newer artists have blacks in their choruses.
I’ve been in a couple of online discussion about “USian.” It should be pointed out that from Hudson Bay to Tierra del Fuego, there isn’t another nation in the western hemisphere with “America” in its name.
Using the word liar and black girl in the same breath would bring up uncomfortable associations with Tawanna Brawley’s hoax:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tawana_Brawley_rape_allegations
She’ll sell the book.