Why The Pretty White Girl YA Book Cover Trend Needs To End

I’ve never heard of “Roundeye Noodle Shop” before.  That’s atrocious.  No one would think to open a place ironically called “White Boy’s Soul Food.  Actually they probably would.  

More to the subject, “The Mighty Miss Malone” looks like a good book and one I will look for for my daughter.  It’s not just the whiteness that is off putting about YA covers, but also the vacuous, doe-eyed protagonists as well. 

Great post. I get a bit ticked off by the justification that white girls on covers is what sells. If you never put a person of color on the cover, how would you ever know? It’s self-fulfilling prophesy.

Eye-catching covers do sell. If they all look the same (white girls in pretty prom dresses), how will any of them catch a reader’s eye?

American YA covers are interesting to me since they are very different to the YA covers in my home country. On American YA covers girls are almost always White, and almost always passive and almost never look directly at the camera. Annoying. Actually many women’s books also only show the bare back of a woman. This “demure thing/dowanward glance ” frustrates me as well, in addition to the White-White-Whitey-White. 

 With enough research it’s possible to get it right, there are forums you can visit to pick peoples brains about their cultures, start a facebook group and invite people to give you their perspectives on their particular cultures, no offense, but the middle aged white woman experience is what I find a lot of YA authors using as their reasoning for not writing characters of colour, and I don’t really buy it. One look at Melissa Conway and one would be convinced that she fits that particular experience, except that she has four self published excellently written novels on Amazon, all of which feature prominent non stereotypical minority characters, she just kinda lets them be people. In fact a two part series features a group of minority only super powered kids, one of whom is a Latino guy, and the other two are a Chinese-American guy and a biracial African American girl that are crushing on each other. Of her other two books, one features a nineteen year old Pakistani girl, an undercover Latino cop and an African American man as integral parts of the storyline, and the other has a mostly Native cast, with three Caucasians, two of which play only a supporting role. She’s a graphic artist as well so she designs her own covers that they reflect the storyline accurately.

Praise be!  One girl tried to argue with me and say “Because all of those books are about pretty white girls…
duh, if you want YA books with pretty not-white girls on the covers go write
those books yourselves.” Umm wow ignorant much (clearly this person has never been a victim of racism like me). There are tons of books with pretty white girls as the protagonist and they don’t use a pretty white girl on the cover. Instead they use an original and non-generic cover…not the same formulaic cover that follows a certain equation like the majority of books these days. I’ll admit, if I look at one of those covers I’ll think “Oh, pretty.” But after seeing 50 in a row at a bookstore or a library it gets tiresome.

Wow! I’ve never heard of this situation. I have, however, noticed that in some books where the female protagonist is of a white appearance, but is part black, for example, the publishers actually place a brown-skinned woman on the cover. I recall seeing a book like this about a New Orleans quadroon woman who looked white and decided not to follow in her mother’s footsteps in the system of placage. Someone once gave their spin on the reason why this was done. He said that it was to “placate racist whites and ignorant blacks.” He went on to say that if white people were to pick up this book, they would read the novel and be shocked by what the find – that they are more related to black people than they realize. However, blacks would complain that the publishers were trying to make black people feel inferior by puttin ga white woman on the cover. The solution – put a brown-skinned, European featured woman on the cover. See, all sides are happy.” Will POC have to start self-publishing with their own material and own artists to hire?

There’s a British writer I particularly like called Malorie Blackman, who is black and mainly writes about black children or teenagers. I find it interesting that her Middle Grade books often feature pictures of black children on the cover while her YA books don’t, usually not showing any characters on the cover or making it so you can’t see their skin. Definitely backs up what you’re saying here.

I also think it should be noted that most white people ( and I have to include myself here although I’m trying to correct this) will assume the protagonist of a novel is white until stated otherwise, unless there is a POC on the cover.

I’m in the process of self-publishing now because I would not want some publisher to butcher and whitewash my novel!

I agree with this post, especially the fact that the “pretty white girl” has become the norm in what publishers consider pretty. I also got pretty enraged about the kindergartner and what kind of a home that child goes back to every day. Racism exists everywhere because people in general like/need to find ways to “one up” or become better than their neighbor. I think only in societies where everyone has a common goal or enemy is the concept of beauty truly in the “eye of the beholder”. The less we have to worry about, the more we try to fill that need to worry about crap. Thus racism and general idiocy. 

Also The Hunger Games doesn’t have a pretty white girl on the cover, but I know what you mean. 

I agree that middle-grade fiction oftentimes has a lot more substances than YA books. After reading a large number of YA books in a row recently, I picked up a middle-grade book and found myself wishing for the old days. Many of my favorite middle-grade books I consider classics while I rarely return to a YA book after reading it once. One of my favorites was Maniac Magee; another is Star Girl. I also love the Bayern Books. I still return to these every now and then.

Hi,  I write multi-cultural picture books with six big publishers, and I hear the same thing over an d over regarding the cover art – it’s what the marketing department wants.  The editors  don’t have 100% control over the cover.  The marketing guys are probably mostly white.  The key is to get a racially diverse team in the marketing department. Old habits die hard in the big houses. Some of the younger editors are trying to change the all-white approach to buying and marketing manuscripts, but there are plenty of editors/agents who still think only white people buy books and so white protagonists (cover art) are what sells.  In order to change the system, we need to get into the system and change it from within.  I am a white woman selling books with Spanish in it for nearly 20 years.  Progress has been made, but it’s a very slow process.   Not much will change unless people refuse to buy the books.  Vote with your wallet.  If a book comes out with a racially diverse cover, buy it!  Then the publishing houses will figure out that it’s okay to break out of their mold and publish stories that represent everyone.

Susan Middleton Elya

The names in the book (like Nino, Beppo, Nicola, Gigi) and other details created a bit of an Italian setting… but the beauty of textual ambiguity of it is that you can imagine her to look anything you like, or not make up your mind at all if you prefer (it’s not uncommon for the hero or heroine to become “you” anyway as you identify with them).