Ain’t That a Shame
By Guest Contributor Justine Larbalestier, originally published at justinelarbalestier.com
In the last few weeks as people have started reading the US ARC of Liar they have also started asking why there is such a mismatch between how Micah describes herself and the cover image. Micah is black with nappy hair which she wears natural and short. As you can see that description does not match the US cover.
Many people have been asking me how I feel about the US cover, why I allowed such a cover to appear on a book of mine, and why I haven’t been speaking out about it.
Authors do not get final say on covers. Often they get no say at all.
As it happens I was consulted by Bloomsbury and let them know that I wanted a cover like the Australian cover, which I think is very true to the book.* I was lucky that my Australian publisher, Allen & Unwin, agreed with my vision and that the wonderful Bruno Herfst came up with such a perfect cover image.
I never wanted a girl’s face on the cover. Micah’s identity is unstable. She spends the book telling different version of herself. I wanted readers to be free to imagine her as they wanted. I have always imagined her looking quite a bit like Alana Beard,** which is why I was a bit offended by the reviewer, who in an otherwise lovely review, described Micah as ugly. She’s not!***
The US Liar cover went through many different versions. An early one, which I loved, had the word Liar written in human hair. Sales & Marketing did not think it would sell. Bloomsbury has had a lot of success with photos of girls on their covers and that’s what they wanted. Although not all of the early girl face covers were white, none showed girls who looked remotely like Micah.
I strongly objected to all of them. I lost.
I haven’t been speaking out publicly because to be the first person to do so would have been unprofessional. I have privately been campaigning for a different cover for the paperback. The response to the cover by those who haven’t read Liar has been overwhelmingly positive and I would have looked churlish if I started bagging it at every opportunity. I hoped that once people read Liar they would be as upset as I am with the cover. It would not have helped get the paperback changed if I was seen to be orchestrating that response. But now that this controversy has arisen I am much more optimistic about getting the cover changed. I am also starting to rethink what I want that cover to look like. I did want Bloomsbury to use the Australian cover, but I’m increasingly thinking that it’s important to have someone who looks like Micah on the front.
I want to make it clear that while I disagree with Bloomsbury about this cover I am otherwise very happy to be with them. They’ve given me space to write the books I want to write. My first book for them was a comic fairy book that crossed over into middle grade (How To Ditch Your Fairy). I followed that up with Liar, a dark psychological thriller that crosses over into adult. There are publishers who would freak. No one at Bloomsbury batted an eye. I have artistic freedom there, which is extraordinarily important to me. They are solidly behind my work and have promoted it at every level in ways I have never been promoted before.
Covers change how people read books
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.
No one in Australia has written to ask me if Micah is really black.
No one in Australia has said that they will not be buying Liar because “my teens would find the cover insulting.”
Both responses are heart breaking.
This cover did not happen in isolation.
Every year at every publishing house, intentionally and unintentionally, there are white-washed covers. 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?
The notion that “black books” don’t sell is pervasive at every level of publishing. Yet I have found few examples of books with a person of colour on the cover that have had the full weight of a publishing house behind them.**** Until that happens more often we can’t know if it’s true that white people won’t buy books about people of colour. All we can say is that poorly publicised books with “black covers” don’t sell. The same is usually true of poorly publicised books with “white covers.”
Are the big publishing houses really only in the business of selling books to white people? That’s not a very sustainable model if true. Certainly the music industry has found that to be the case. Walk into a music store, online or offline, and compare the number of black faces you see on the covers there as opposed to what you see in most book stores. Doesn’t seem to affect white people buying music. The music industry stopped insisting on white washing decades ago. Talented artists like Fats Domino no longer needs Pat Boone to cover genius songs like “Ain’t That a Shame” in order to break into the white hit parade. (And ain’t that song title ironic?)
There is, in fact, a large audience for “black books” but they weren’t discovered until African American authors started self-publishing and selling their books on the subway and on the street and directly into schools. And, yet, the publishing industry still doesn’t seem to get it. Perhaps the whole “black books don’t sell” thing is a self-fulfilling prophecy?
I hope that the debate that’s arisen because of this cover will widen to encompass the whole industry. I hope it gets every publishing house thinking about how incredibly important representation is and that they are in a position to break down these assumptions. Publishing companies can make change. I really hope that the outrage the US cover of Liar has generated will go a long way to bringing an end to white washing covers. Maybe even to publishing and promoting more writers of color.
But never forget that publishers are in the business of making money. Consumers need to do what they can. When was the last time you bought a book with a person of colour on the front cover or asked your library to order one for you? If you were upset by the US cover of Liar go buy one right now. I’d like to recommend Coe Booth’s Kendra which is one of the best books I’ve read this year. Waiting on my to be read pile is Shine, Coconut Moon by Neesha Meminger, which has been strongly recommended to me by many people.
Clearly we do not live in a post-racist society. But I’d like to think that the publishing world is better than those many anecdotes I’ve been hearing. But for that to happen, all of us—writers, editors, designers, sales reps, booksellers, reviewers, readers, and parents of readers—will have to do better.
__
* I didn’t see the Australian cover until after the US cover was finalised.
** Yes, another protag of mine who looks like a WNBA player. What can I say? I’m a fan.
*** If you’re interested, I imagine another character in the book, Sarah, as looking like a younger Rutina Wesley, who’s not a WNBA player.
**** And most of those were written by white people.
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of 
Deaf Indian Muslim Anarchist wrote:
You said it so yourself: money. It’s all about money and marketing.
I wasn’t surprised (but I was mad) when I heard this.
At least, look on the bright side– this controversy has caused a lot of splash around the Internet and you’re getting a lot of publicity. Hopefully, the publishers will back off and change the cover for your novel.
Posted 29 Jul 2009 at 10:20 am ¶
NancyP wrote:
The no-photo Oz cover is more eye-catching, anyway, although I can’t speak for the teen market.
Posted 29 Jul 2009 at 2:36 pm ¶
Rob Schmidt wrote:
Re “I haven’t been speaking out publicly because to be the first person to do so would have been unprofessional”: I don’t buy this. It may have hurt Larbalestier professionally, but that’s not the same as saying it would’ve been unprofessional. As a “professional” myself, *I* define when my behavior is acceptable, not someone else.
Besides, she’s speaking out publicly about it now. Has something happened to change this action from “unprofessional” to “professional”? I don’t think so.
Anyway, good analysis by Larbalestier. I applaud it. But please don’t tell us it’s ever wrong to challenge society’s racism.
Posted 29 Jul 2009 at 5:28 pm ¶
Erika wrote:
Rob — I don’t think she really had a choice when it came to speaking out or not; perhaps it would not have been “unprofessional”, like she said, but it might potentially have caused a rift to form between her and the publisher.
Posted 29 Jul 2009 at 7:08 pm ¶
Rob Schmidt wrote:
She’s spoken out now. Again, what’s changed? The US edition is out so she can start biting the hand that fed her? I don’t get it.
Posted 29 Jul 2009 at 7:55 pm ¶
uu wrote:
Maybe the whole concept of U.S currancy involved in outlets of media is just racist.
Posted 29 Jul 2009 at 9:22 pm ¶
al oof wrote:
no, rob. what changed is that someone else brought it up first.
Posted 30 Jul 2009 at 1:42 am ¶
material world wrote:
I’m in Australia so I got Liar with the unwhitewash cover, for my teen niece who loves reading.
She’s not white, not girly, and I find it hard to find books that don’t insult her appearance or her intelligence, even with the post Twilight rise in YA fantasy books aimed at teen girls.
If I’d seen that cover I wouldn’t have gotten Liar.
How do you explain to a teenage girl “No honey, your looks aren’t OK for a cover, not even when we’re talking fiction and the protaganist is someone who looks like you”?
This kind of thing drives me nuts, it’s telling girls that even in *imaginary worlds* they will never be worth looking at or being the subject.
Posted 30 Jul 2009 at 9:00 am ¶
pm wrote:
Things like this make me realise how naive I am. Not just about racism but about the publishing industry. I would have imagined a publishing house (especially one with a name like Bloomsbury) to be run by erudite literary types who would listen to and understand an author’s views on this sort of thing.
Not that literary types can’t be racist, but I just would have assumed that anyone not actively and consciously racist, would be perfectly capable of understanding the absurdity of having an unrelated, random white woman’s face on a book about a black woman. In this case it this seems almost like changing the text itself.
Clearly however, not having anything to do with it, I have no idea what the industry is really like. I guess its more like TV or Hollywood than I naively imagined. Its run by marketing people, I guess.
Posted 30 Jul 2009 at 10:16 am ¶
Julie wrote:
For Rob Schmidt: I know Justine, and I was there when she first received the proofs of the US cover, before the ARC was ever released. (The book *isn’t* out yet, by the way — only the Advanced Reader Copy that gets sent out for review and sales purposes. If Bloomsbury does the right thing here, which would frankly be the least they could do at this point, this cover will never officially be released, because they will change it.) Literally from the day she saw this cover she was fighting it, long before there was any public outcry to support her in her fight. The idea that’s she’s afraid to stand up against racism would be laughable if you knew her, but it’s a pernicious accusation when you don’t. Her post outlined very clearly why she waited. Read it again.
And if you don’t see the professionalism in respecting your readers and reviewers enough to give them the space to draw — and then voice — their own conclusions about the cover, I can’t imagine what would pass your professionalism test. She talks about that in her post also. Seriously, read it again. Carefully this time, how about?
Posted 30 Jul 2009 at 9:44 pm ¶
Afro-chan wrote:
Wow…An author cannot have a say on her own cover. That is just sad in and of itself. I am shocked. I had no idea.
Posted 30 Jul 2009 at 11:56 pm ¶
Rob Schmidt wrote:
One person says Larbalestier didn’t protest until someone else brought it up. Another says she was protesting quietly from the beginning. You two may want to get your stories straight before you address my comments.
I read Larbalestier’s brief justification for not protesting the cover vociferously:
“The response to the cover by those who haven’t read Liar has been overwhelmingly positive and I would have looked churlish if I started bagging it at every opportunity. I hoped that once people read Liar they would be as upset as I am with the cover. It would not have helped get the paperback changed if I was seen to be orchestrating that response.”
So she was concerned about how she looked. She “hoped” that a protest wouldn’t be necessary. And she imagined that a protest wouldn’t have worked. These aren’t very good reasons for not protesting openly from the beginning, if you ask me. The time to protest is when the cover is being formulated, not after it’s a fait accompli.
Movie directors sometimes take their names off their work when the studios muck it up. Even at the risk of hurting their careers and income. Why didn’t Larbalestier do something similar if the cover really bothered her?
Posted 31 Jul 2009 at 6:00 am ¶
al oof wrote:
rob: when she first saw the cover, she fought her publisher about it.
when someone else brought it up publicly, she started to speak publicly about it. it’s not that complicated.
i’m not saying that means she wasn’t wrong to not speak publicly before anyone else did. but your insistence that she’s lying isn’t really working out.
as for the directors who remove their names from things, find a single author who has been able to do that. i mean, if she can’t get them to change the cover, they aren’t going to take her name off. i’m sure she was already paid and advance, so they have nothing to keep from her. and she still stands behind her contribution to the book. movies have a hundred more people involved in making them than a book does. and when studios muck it up, and directors take their names off, it is rarely if ever because of racism, it is -because- it is bad for their career to be associated with a shitty film.
Posted 01 Aug 2009 at 1:45 am ¶
Ruby wrote:
In the other article about this cover, there’s a reference to a Mediabistro piece that quotes one of the author’s blog posts saying that she was really happy with her cover in the beginning. So someone is lying somewhere. Whether it’s the author, or Mediabistro. And why would Mediabistro put up a fake quote? So why was the author so happy about her cover at first, and now so upset with it?
Posted 01 Aug 2009 at 11:36 am ¶
Julie wrote:
Rob, let’s go over this again:
I KNOW Justine. I WAS THERE the day she first saw the proofs of the cover. While I can’t help but admire your ingenuity in creating a conspiracy between me and the other commenter (I think you mean Erika, whom I’ve never met), there is no “story to get straight” here, there is simply fact.
I think if you read carefully you’ll see that you’re cherrypicking things to create a distorted version of the truth that matches what you have already decided you believe, and then judging someone using that distorted truth as your guide. Funny — there’s a word for that.
Posted 01 Aug 2009 at 12:56 pm ¶
Julie wrote:
And to Ruby: I promise you, no one’s lying here. Read this excellent post for a really good analysis. http://www.courtneymilan.com/ramblings/2009/07/26/read-between-the-lines/
Posted 01 Aug 2009 at 4:22 pm ¶
al oof wrote:
honestly, ruby, in context, this: “This cover was so well received by sales and marketing at Bloomsbury that for the first time in my career a cover for one of my books became the image used for the front of the catalogue,” she blogged. “Apparently all the big booksellers went crazy for it. My agent says it was a huge hit in Bologna. And at TLA many librarians and teenagers told me they adore this cover.”
doesn’t strike me as being happy with the cover so much as excited people were noticing her book, which you can get excited about even if you are unhappy with it, the way a band gets excited if their performance was well received, even if they think they played shit-terrible.
what i think is extra weird about anyone arguing that this cover would sell better than -anything- else, is that it is super extra boring, and in fact looks not unlike the covers of justine’s husband’s uglies series, which were at least about appearance (and they are awesome). i can think of 6 better ideas for a cover for a book about a cumpulsive liar off the top of my head.
Posted 01 Aug 2009 at 9:13 pm ¶
Julie wrote:
And Ruby, I promise no one’s lying here. For an excellent analysis of the rhetorical difference between descriptions of the US cover and the Australian cover, go here:
http://www.courtneymilan.com/ramblings/2009/07/26/read-between-the-lines/
Posted 02 Aug 2009 at 2:55 am ¶
another constellation wrote:
Rob, you’re putting the blame on the wrong group here. The author didn’t create or publish the photograph. Putting all the blame on her lets the publishing company, which has far more power than one author, off the hook. She explains “I haven’t been speaking out publicly because to be the first person to do so would have been unprofessional. I have privately been campaigning for a different cover for the paperback” and “I hoped that once people read Liar they would be as upset as I am with the cover. It would not have helped get the paperback changed if I was seen to be orchestrating that response. “ Sometimes people have more than one motivation for their cause of action. Larbalestier explained hers, and the cover decision was out of her hands. We now need to hold the proper people accountable.
Getting back to the actual topic, I appreciate Larbalestier setting the record straight. I’m really impressed with the transparency offered here and I’m adding this book to my to-read list. I’ve seen the discussion about it over the past couple weeks, but this explanation of what went on behind the scenes makes me want to support the author, in addition to the story.
Posted 02 Aug 2009 at 4:40 am ¶
Julie wrote:
Sorry for the duplicate post, kids — technical error.
Posted 02 Aug 2009 at 11:10 am ¶
Rob Schmidt wrote:
Good news, everybody. Bloomsbury plans to change the cover.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6675065.html?nid=2788&source=title&rid=92424404
Bloomsbury publishing director Melanie Cecka, who edited Liar, made the decision with the full support of the company, said Deb Shapiro, Bloomsbury’s publicity director. “As a group, we stepped back from reading all the comments in the blogosphere and said, ‘What is in the best interest of this book?’ We’re very proud to be publishing this book.”
Posted 06 Aug 2009 at 9:26 pm ¶
Rob Schmidt wrote:
Summing it up:
Larbalestier’s private, “professional” protests had no effect on Bloomsbury whatsoever.
Larbalestier’s public, “unprofessional” protests generated a controversy that caused Bloomsbury to change the cover.
Moral of the story: It’s not only correct to publicly protest racism, it’s effective. Larbalestier finally got the outcome she wanted with no apparent harm to her or her career.
Posted 06 Aug 2009 at 9:31 pm ¶