I’ve been really looking forward to showing this to people. It’s the cover of the US bindup of the Hex trilogy which will be published by Simon and Schuster later this year. It’ll be called VOID (a new overtitle for the series).
Doesn’t it look amazing? I’m really pleased with this and can’t wait until it comes out.
Snow in my garden
Happy new year to everyone! This post is 19 days late because I began the new year with a stinking cold and I didn’t even go out and play in the snow which has been 8 inches deep or more across Oxford. Here’s a view of my garden from my window. I only went out to put out the compost: those are the tracks you can see on the right.
Since then I’ve been trying to get caught up with work. I am having cover discussions for Ghost of a Chance with OUP and also working on the revisions. Ghost of a Chance will be out in 2011.
I’ve also been working on a redesign of my website. For the first time I’m outsourcing the majority of the work – although I have briefed the designer about the layout I want and collated much of the code. The design will be based on a template created by Matthew James Taylor whose css layouts are well-worth checking out. The site is being constructed by Mo Holkar of Freeform Games in his alter-ego as web designer. It’s a real relief to be able to pass on some of the work of putting the site together to a friend I trust. Mo also runs the sites I designed for Celia Rees and Frances Hardinge so he’s familiar with the way I create sites and write html and css.
I’m also a judge for the 2009 Clarke award so I’m reading my way through the submission list. (I’ve been looking for a link to this but I think it’s not online yet.) I’ll check with the committee to find out where and when the full longlist can be seen.
Shadow gazing up at me
I’ve various other projects on the go which I’ll write about in separate entries. The current great joy of my life is that my little black cat, Shadow, has been driven by the cold to sit on my lap. This is something she has rarely deigned to do in the past so I feel very honoured. Here’s a picture of her eyes beaming up at me.
So here I am in 2010! It’s the future: 2010 is a really science-fiction sounding year. I hope it’s been good to everyone so far and here’s wishing you all the best for the year ahead.
Bad Blood is to be published in the Czech Republic (by Mlada Fronta) and in Japan (by Shogakukan). Both editions have new covers – as different from each other as they are from the UK edition.
Liar
So, who’s been following the recent debacle about a Bloomsbury book with the cover image of a white girl to illustrate the story of a black girl? Liar by Justine Larbalestier was due to hit shelves in November with the cover image of a white teenage girl (left). One problem: the protagonist is black.
The news appeared in July on industry blog Editorial Anonymous where commenters were outraged by the decision. One commenter pointed out that this sort of whitewash is nothing new: “Reminds me of the old-school sci-fi covers I’ve seen. On Octavia Butler’s (whose protagonist’s are always black women) book ‘Dawn’, the original cover was a pale woman with long, blond hair. They corrected it in the next edition (or printing), but still. Completely incongruous with the actual story.”
Larbalestier made a post on her blog and told her readers the sad truth already known to those of us in the trade: “Authors do not get final say on covers. Often they get no say at all.”
Publishers Weekly picked up the story on the same day (Justine Larbalestier’s Cover Girl) where Melanie Cecka, publishing director of Bloomsbury Children’s Books USA and Walker Books for Young Readers did not cover herself in glory with the following comment: “The entire premise of this book is about a compulsive liar. Of all the things you’re going to choose to believe of her, you’re going to choose to believe she was telling the truth about race?” The suggestion that this decision was made deliberately is even more alarming than the idea it was unintentional.
Boing Boing also posted an article about the story. Cory Doctorow wrote Race and book covers: why is there a white girl on the cover of this book about a black girl? pointing out that this cover choice was not made in isolation and that all over the publishing industry authors are protesting against the same thing happening to their own books. White children are mainstream. Black children are urban fiction.
There’s supposedly a happy ending to this modern fairytale. Bloomsbury have decided to postpone publication until October and create a new cover. (Reported in Publishers Weekly: A New Look for ‘Liar’.) But the statement the company has issued is not exactly an apology:
“We regret that our original creative direction for Liar—which was intended to symbolically reflect the narrator’s complex psychological makeup—has been interpreted by some as a calculated decision to mask the character’s ethnicity. In response to this concern, and in support of the author’s vision for the novel, Bloomsbury has decided to re-jacket the hardcover edition with a new look in time for its publication in October. It is our hope that the important discussions about race and its representation in teen literature continue…”
Does anyone believe the part about the whitewash being a symbolic reflection of the character’s psychology? Well done to whatever marketing bod thought that up but it sounds profoundly unlikely doesn’t it? Can you envisage a cover meeting where someone said: “You know, I think it would be a really good idea to show this child as white even though she’s black, that would really convey the psychological aspect of her being a liar.” Surely any modern children’s publishing person would respond with cries of “dear lord no!” or at the very least “that could be problematic”.
So while there is cause for celebration in this cover change, those who should be celebrated are the internet bloggers (amateur and professional) who didn’t allow this story to go away, who demanded a response from the publishing company and who stated publicly that this is not okay. I’d like to be able to praise Bloomsbury too but I don’t think you get cookies for backing off from a racist act, not unless you issue a full and heartfelt apology and a promise to do better.
And we can do better. We owe it to ourselves. We owe it to a vision of the future in which white people are not the default, the mainstream and the uncontested image of everyman. We can ‘be the change’. The only thing stopping us is not seeing it as important.
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