Last July I wrote a post about the book “Liar” by Justine Larbalestier.  Her young adult novel was the story of a young African American teenager named Micah, yet the book cover featured a white girl.  If you read my previous post you’ll understand more fully why the marketing ‘geniuses’ at Bloomsbury felt it was necessary to put a white girl on the cover.

The point of my previous post was to question whether we were cultivating racism in young readers by not accurately representing a multi-cultural book and instead white washing covers so they sell.  After multiple outcries across the blogosphere Bloomsbury was shamed into changing the cover to more accurately represent  the protagonist Micah. The dust settled, the smoke cleared and publishing went on to sell more books.  Until last week when a similar controversy reared its head – and it came from none other than the publisher that perpetrated the first slur – Bloomsbury.  In their latest publication,”Magic Under Glass” by Jaclyn Dolamore  the protagonist, Nimira is described as having brown skin and considered by others to have ‘exotic’ features – yet the cover portrays a white girl.  Had the publisher learned nothing from the last debacle?  This time, the public outcry was louder and moved swiftly across the internet forcing Bloomsbury to issue the following announcement:

Bloomsbury is ceasing to supply copies of the US edition of “Magic Under Glass”. The jacket design has caused offense and we apologize for our mistake. Copies of the book with a new jacket design will be available shortly.

I am well aware that there are people living in the U S of A who are racist, but does Bloomsbury, a publisher who markets and sells to children and young adults need to support this viewpoint?  What they’re telling children is that it’s okay to write a story about people of color, but it’s not okay to show them on book covers because no one buys non-white entertainment.  Shame on you Bloomsbury.

This blog post is meant as an editorial.  It is my opinion.  But I am curious about what you think?

If you’re registered on any social networking site you can and will be found by someone who wants to find you.  In this case that someone could be a ‘journalist’ trying  to corroborate or enhance their story.

For example, when Tiger Woods’ infidelity scandal was front page news, everyone weighed in on it including The Huffington Post.  The headline of their article, Susie Ogren: Tiger Woods Took Ecstasy, Hoped To ‘Get Me Into Bed‘  was enough to make anyone click and read – I did.  Once reading I discovered there wasn’t much fact to this supposed fiction.  In fact, the article was written by The National Enquirer.  In fact, Susie Ogren and Tiger Woods didn’t have sex.  In fact, the reporter searched Facebook to find a photo of Susie Ogren and posted the photo in the article.  In fact, they weren’t even sure it was Susie’s Facebook photo they posted.

After posting the photo, they were careful not to ‘mislead’ the reader by saying:

A Facebook search for Susie Ogren, meanwhile, produces a profile that may belong to the woman who says she took ecstasy with Tiger Woods in 1999. According to a Google search, the profile belongs to someone claiming to be in Las Vegas. In addition to sharing the same name and city, the profile picture appears to resemble the photo from the Enquirer, given that the two pictures were presumably taken approximately a decade apart. Again, though, it is not a certainty that the Facebook profile below belongs to the same woman who claims to share a history with Woods.

This is journalism?  We all know NOTHING gets erased from the web ever, ever, never, ever.  So if this photo is really a photo of another woman – it doesn’t matter, because from now until eternity on the indelible web, her photo will be linked to Susie Ogren.

Am I the only one who is shaking my head, and tsk, tsking?  Am I the only one just a tad outraged?

By the way, I purposely didn’t link to the article, because I would be one more person spreading a photo around that was in question.

There’s a controversy brewing over a new Young Adult book about to be released in the US entitled “Liar.” The book, written by Australian author Justine Larbalestier is about a black teenager named Micah. However, the cover art, beautiful as it is, is of a white girl with long straight hair. The cover art bears no resemblance to the story at all. While ‘investigating’ this controversy – I wondered if we’re cultivating racism in the way we sell and market books?

The author states in her blog, 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.

But the art department at Bloomsbury obviously felt differently when they created the US cover. The author explains their reasoning:
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.

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 book’s Australian cover just contains words. No misrepresentation there.

Certainly the YA genre has exploded – and there’s no doubt there are many, many more books for a young teenager to read then when I was in school. But I put forth the question – are we teaching to segregate from an early age? While people of color read books that feature ‘white’ characters all the time, do ‘white people’ read books that feature multi-cultural characters? It would seem to me, that the publishers don’t think so, why else categorize them so specifically? While publishers are improving in their selections of what they offer African American and Latino young readers, why make the distinction. To me, it’s blatant racism. It’s saying we’re writing books that only represent you and these are the books only ‘your kind’ will read. As a Latina – I read them all, and I am transported by a book regardless of the color of the characters in them.

In ““Myths of Teenage Readers” written in 2000 Marc Aronson he states:
Not very long ago, I would come to the editorial meetings in which new book acquisitions were approved by the higherups and marketing management. There I would hear: “blacks don’t buy books.” This was astonishing. Important people running large companies were living in a myth-suffused haze in which prejudice defined perception. Hearing something like that stops you in your tracks. It is so far from reality, yet it is expressed with complete authority. And these beliefs matter”

It would appear that Bloomsbury hasn’t really changed their views in the 9 years since Mr. Aronson’s book was published.

In a 2008 PW article, Andrea Pinkney, v-p and executive editor at Scholastic was quoted as saying: “We want teens to look at the jacket and say, ‘Yes, that is me,’

Yes, people want to know they’re represented in the world. But when I buy a book, it’s based on the story – does the story speak to me, is there something in this story that I want to know more about, will the story transport me to a place I want to go, or never dreamed of. When I choose a book I want to learn something new, or be inspired, or think about the world or people in a way I hadn’t thought of before. And sometimes I buy a book because an author’s language and pacing is so remarkable, I’m in awe. Do I buy a book because the characters represent me? Hardly ever. In looking over the list of books I’ve read in the last year, not one of them represented me, and yet I enjoyed many of them.

So I ask, are we teaching racism at an early age? Why do we segregate books? Why don’t white readers cross over as often as multi-cultural readers? And why do publishers and booksellers still insist that a black face or a Latino face or an Asian face or any face that isn’t white won’t appeal to white readers? Why not say, this year, there will be no differentiation, we’re just selling books, and they’ll be on the shelf alphabetically by author and in the sub-genre of YA, or romance, or mystery or whatever. In my opinion, let’s start early – no lines, just young adults, who want to read stories about being a teenager and about finding out how other teenagers live – their struggles, their triumphs, their hopes and their dreams.

Don’t have time to read Shakespeare? To busy to get through Ulysses? Schedule too tight to get through Dante? No worries, you can get the hyper cliff notes version from Twitterature.

What is Twitterature? Well it’s from the root word Twitter – a micro-blogging site that allows you to speak your mind, discuss your views and give your opinions in 140 characters or less. With such a small window, you’ve got to be brief, to the point, and it helps if you’re clever with the written word. There are thousands of people who are becoming experts at the art of the tweet. But nowhere has the twitter concept been taken to the reductio ad absurdum as when two University of Chicago college freshmen sold their book idea Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books, Now Presented in Twenty Tweets or Less to Penguin. The book, scheduled for release this fall is part of project created by Emmet Rensin and Alex Aciman. According to reports from the LA Times and Galley Cat, the Twitterature website (which now seems to be under construction) stated that it is “a humorous retelling of works of great literature in Twitter format.” Wait did you hear that sound? That was my head hitting the floor as I passed out in total disbelief.

Rensin and Aciman came up with the idea while sitting in their college dorm. They claim it was an ‘epiphany’. It rather sounds more like a brain fart to me. They created this ‘novel’ idea by first asking themselves ‘what was the grandest venture of our or any generation?’ They came up with two things; literature and Twitter. Literature is an obvious one to me. Twitter, they reason, ‘More than any other social networking tool, Twitter has refined to its purest form the instant-publishing, short-attention-span, all-digital-all-the-time, self-important age of info-deluge that is the essence of our contemporary world. As such, it demands our attention – and gotten it. So what could be better than to combine the two? After all, as great as the classics are, who has time to read those big, long books anymore?

Well, Messers Rensin and Aciman – you had my attention for 140 characters, ‘had’ being the operative word. Who has time to read those big, long books anymore? Do I really need to comment on this? Come the fall, I’ll be sitting in my chair, by a nice cozy fire, reading a big long book –

California’s Governor is leading the way in the digital textbook evolution. Whether you’re in college and have to purchase your textbooks, or you’re in middle and high school and the state pays for them – textbooks aren’t cheap. According to the California Governor’s website, “The average textbook costs about $75 to $100 per student.  For a school district with about 10,000 high school students, the use of free digital textbooks in just science and math classes could save up to $2 million dollars.”

While the switch from paper to digital is a money saver – what gets me excited is the ability to keep students current in a world that changes minute to minute.  Providing students digital information allows them to have the most current information in science, math, history, and the arts.  Typically textbooks are purchased and expected to last six years. That might have been acceptable in the 50’s when the internet didn’t exist, and what happened 5000 miles away really didn’t affect your life.  But in today’s world, the speed of change is faster than a thought.   Imagine learning from a science or math book that is six years old?  Really, it’s unthinkable.  I applaud Schwarzenegger’s initiative.  At last, a state that is providing the tools that will help create tomorrow’s leaders

Some Girls Bite by Chloe Neill
Publisher: Penguin
4 Stars

There’s a fresh new voice in paranormal and that voice belongs to author Chloe Neill. She’s penned the first of her Chicagoland Vampire Novels entitled Some Girls Bite.

I’d been in a reading ‘slump’ so I was very happy to pick up a book that made me want to turn the pages. The author has created an interesting vampire mythology and a heroine who has spunk and daring, she’s kick ass without the hard edges.

Set in contemporary Chicago, vampires who have been around for a very long time have finally ‘come out’ presenting a face of wealth, sophistication, power and civility making a very vocal statement that they are here and plan to live side by side with humans. Most of the human population is both fascinated and drawn to them. Everyone except Merit, a graduate student who has no time for anything but getting her degree, until one night she is savagely attacked by a ‘rogue’ vampire. On the brink of meeting her maker she is saved by Ethan, a master vampire whose only way to save her is to make her one of them. Merit wakes from her attack to discover she is now an immortal night creature and she’s pissed. She didn’t ask to be one of them and she’s not sure how she feels about it. Dealing with the obvious changes of drinking blood, sleeping during the day, and fangs she must also confront how she’ll become part of their world. Merit must follow the vampire ways which means submitting to the Master of her house Ethan, or live the life of a rouge and that of an outcast to both the vampires and the humans. I really thought the author was going to have Merit submit, in which case I would have thrown the book across the room. It really would have ticked me off. However, the author masterfully creates a plot point I didn’t see coming allowing each of the main characters to retain their integrity and develop their individual desires to be themselves as well as being part of the group.

This book is much more than a paranormal story of good versus evil. It deals with issues such as power of choice, submission, and prejudices and questions what really defines family. In addition, there is also a mystery, and that plot point nicely introduces all the characters and advances the mythology.

The author writes wonderful dialogue with great wit and a reality that defines each character. The story moves along at a lively pace and she’s created secondary characters you want to know more about. I will warn you, this book does not have your traditional HEA, and I’m not sure that the author intends for the next in the series to have a HEA. HOWEVER, it is well worth the read, I recommend it.

The Book Expo of America’s CEO roundtable discussion hosted by Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Beast Tina Brown was held to a standing room only crowd wanting some answers from a panel consisting of who’s who in publishing. The panel included Brian Murray of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, Carolyn Reidy of Simon & Schuster, John Sargent of Macmillan, and David Steinberger of Perseus Books Group. Ms. Brown’s opening remarks likened the current digital explosion to the industrial revolution. She stated, “The publishing industry is experiencing volcanic changes calling for major re-thinking and restructuring. Publishers today must reinvent the wheel while still publishing great books. They are faced with fewer and fewer places to talk about and promote books because of the collapse of newspapers.” How’s that for a cataclysmic view?

The opening salvo in this digital discussion was aimed at Amazon and their strong arm tactics regarding e-book pricing. Amazon consumers can generally download an e-book for roughly $9.95, but the cost to produce an e-book is the same as manufacturing a hardcover version.  As the largest book retailer on-line, off-line or anywhere, publishers feel they have been backed into a corner and going against their biggest sales outlet could affect their bottom line.

“The danger is having a monopoly,” said Perseus’ Steinberger. However, Brian Murray didn’t see this as a huge concern because e-books comprise only 1-2% of their revenue, “we’ll take a closer once the numbers hit 10-20%,” he offered.

Statistically Amazon owns the market for e-readers and therefore has the biggest e-book revenue share.  My problem with Amazon’s e-reader, The Kindle, is its inability to accept all formats. Once you buy a Kindle at $359.00 you can only download books from Amazon. And legally you can’t share that book with anyone else. At some point e-readers are going to have to be universal, wireless and affordable. I agreed with John Sargent when he said, “The true explosion will happen when you can download all books on any wireless device.”

The panel’s address on the issue of marketing and promotion in the digital environment left me scratching my head and questioning what I’d heard. Carolyn Reidy acknowledged they now incorporate their digital departments in all current promotion and marketing efforts where before they were considered a separate department. In an effort to combine traditional marketing with digital marketing, Simon & Schuster will email promo to their database of retailers and consumers as well as using the author’s data base.  In addition, the author’s create videos for YouTube, set up social media accounts and send advance reader copies to niche book bloggers. Based on Ms. Reidy’s description, it seems no different than what most authors have been doing for many years, the burden is on the author to promote, create a ‘buzz’, and ultimately sell their book.  Unless you’re an A List author with several best sellers under your belt, it doesn’t appear there will be a car waiting for you at the airport to take you to the next book signing. There won’t be a publicity director booking you on the Today Show. And there’s isn’t an assistant creating your Facebook page, setting up your Twitter account, or producing a video for your new release. Sorry authors, over to you.

John Sargent emphatically stated that viral marketing doesn’t sell more books, citing an example based on a book trailer they produced, “We had the #1 video on You Tube and only sold an additional 200 books from the video. The key to selling books is through word of mouth or Oprah.” This panel of movers and shakers all agree that national publicity and front store displays is the only route to a best seller.

In the end, this panel of publishing giants didn’t feel that the digital push would really change how they sell and market books. But the moderator, Tina Brown insisted that the publishing industry was in danger of becoming like the music industry. We all know what happened when Napster and iTunes came along – the music industry most definitely had to reinvent themselves – and they did. And music is still selling, for the same reason books will continue to sell. The artist reaches out to people and takes them to places they’ve never been. When we turn the last page on the digital age, writers will still be writing because they have a story to tell, and readers will still be reading, in whatever format, because they want to be told a story.

So is it evolution or revolution?  Publishing consultant Seth Gershel put it simply, “Revolution is what happens overnight with one big change. This is a digital evolution, where things change and continue to grow and evolve. Technology doesn’t drive the content; the content drives the use of technology. Publishers will benefit from the tools.”

Reviewed by Maria Lokken
3.5 stars
Publisher: Mira
Pub Date Feb 1, 2009

Kimberly Van Dorn is a mess. She’s flying coach, dressed in a sequin evening gown, wearing four inch strapless heels and accompanied by only one piece of ‘luggage’ a Judith Leiber handbag. Where is she going and what is she running from? We know this much, she’s just left the eternal sunshine of LA for the frigid winter of Willow Lake in upstate New York.

A media agent for superstar sports figures, Kimberly has traded in her job for what she believes will be the comfort her mother’s arms and the pace of small town life. But small town doesn’t mean small problems, because this story is filled with quirky characters that have issues. Particularly Bo Crutcher, minor league baseball player with big league dreams. On the precipice of realizing his life long goal he’s thrown into a relationship with AJ, the son he’s never met. The circumstances are rough and AJ has to deal with a father he thinks abandoned him.

Fireside is about dreams and second chances. The author has created vivid characters that jump off the page, each with their own back story and baggage. As the characters meet, they form relationships that help cast off the shadows of the past and create hopes for the future.

Susan Wiggs has become a favorite of mine. Her ability to envelop the reader into the story and the characters is what got me hooked. You care what happens. I found myself waiting to get back to the book in between work and errands.

My only quibble is that I felt rushed at the end. She spends quite a bit of time developing the characters and revealing their stories, so I was surprised when a few pages from the end she wrapped everything up. I felt the resolution deserved a bit more time. However, I strongly recommend this story – it will captivate you.

Reviewed by Maria Lokken
Publisher: Berkley
5 stars
Publication date 4/7/09

I picked up Jodi Thomas’ latest novel not knowing what to expect. The only thing I knew was that I was in for a good read, and once again, Ms. Thomas did not disappoint. She paints beautiful pictures with her words, creates characters that are so real you feel as though they’re standing next to you, and she has a deliciously wry sense of humor.  Rewriting Monday is no exception.

Pepper Malone, an ex-reporter from the Windy City, is on the run and traveling light. With just the bare essentials (her car, computer and Manolo Blanicks) she ends up in Bailee, Texas – a town without a traffic light. In an effort to stave off starvation and get some money in her pockets she takes gets a job doing the only thing she knows how, as a reporter for the town newspaper the Bailee Bugle. Owner Mike McCulloch doesn’t know why she’d want a job in a town that rolls up its street at 9pm – but he doesn’t really have time to find out. No sooner does Pepper arrive when the story becomes a mystery. Someone is trying to close down the newspaper and kill Mike or Pepper or both.

What begins as a contemporary romance quickly turns into a romantic mystery suspense. I didn’t see it coming, and I didn’t guess who the antagonist was until the very end.

Rewriting Monday has lively, animated, tender secondary characters you want to know more about and the author is obliging. Each one weaves into the action seamlessly creating a robust story that pulls you right in.

I enjoyed this book from page one until the end – and thoroughly recommend it.

Straight from HaperStudio press release:

“HarperStudio announced its experiment in e-book pricing and “bundling” of formats. In response to such proponents of “free” as Chris Anderson and Seth Godin, HarperStudio’s e-books will be free to anyone who agrees to review the book on Twitter. These short reviews, which must be 140 characters or less (known as “tweets” in Twitter-lingo), must be sent within two weeks of receiving the free e-book. Furthermore, if a consumer sends more than ten “tweets” about a HarperStudio e-book, that person will receive a free copy of the hardcover, signed by the author. Finally, if the consumer tweets more than fifty times about a HarperStudio book, that person will be taken to lunch by either Seth Godin or Chris Anderson (Seth if the person is on the east coast; Chris if the person is on the west coast).

According to Debbie Stier, SVP and Associate Publisher of HarperStudio, “we’ve been wanting to experiment with free for some time, and having Seth and Chris on board for the free lunch aspect really adds an element of excitement for us.”