Waiting for the Goods

An It's Complicated! — Marketing & Sales guest post by the Supervising Librarian for Children’s Services at the Oakland Public Library in CA, Nina Lindsay.

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I have little patience for: “brown people on covers don’t sell books.” My library’s community is hungry for brown people on the covers of their books.

Picture a Saturday afternoon at a library in Oakland CA. An 11-year-old and parent come in together to choose some reading. The librarian tries to find out what the child’s interests are, and what the parent’s secret agenda is, and provide a selection to choose from with a few books that speak to each. Often, if the family is not white, the parent’s very good secret agenda is for their child to read a book with a protagonist like them. If you are the 11-year-old, and your selection ends up looking like this:  

Or this:

What would you pick?

Take Three! A New "It's Complicated!" Conversation

Here we go again! As part of CBC Diversity's ongoing effort, we're pleased to present the third  dialogue in the "It's Complicated!" blog series starting later today, this time addressing the sales and marketing of multicultural books.

The following voices inside and outside the publishing industry will each contribute one blog post to the series over the week, addressing how to market multicultural books to teachers, librarians and, ultimately, kids. The guest bloggers will also be participating in the open dialogue in the comments section of the site:

• Nina Lindsay, Supervising Librarian for Children’s Services at the Oakland Public Library in CA
• Victoria Stapleton, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers School & Library Marketing Director
• Shelley Diaz, Assistant Editor at School Library Journal's Book Reviews
• Corinne Hatcher, Librarian/Media Specialist at Champaign Central High School
• Amy Bowllan, Coordinator of Media Resources and Research at the Hewitt School in New York City

Our first "It's Complicated!" blog dialogue in May 2012 addressed a topic that has arisen frequently at the Diversity table — the concept of responsibility and authenticity when writing about diverse characters and how authors, editors, and agents can choose/write stories that reflect the diverse nature of our society.

Our second "It's Complicated!" blog dialogue in September 2012 addressed a topic that had been bubbling up for quite some time — book covers and the faces and aesthetic choices we see and/or do not see on the front of picture, middle grade, and YA books.

Review both conversations by clicking here and scrolling down!

As always, we urge everyone to participate in what we hope will be an informative and insightful conversation. We really appreciate hearing from you, our readers, through the comments section of the posts about the parts of the discussion that you feel are most important and want to talk further about.