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?

Who Will Create the New Normal?

An It's Complicated! — Book Covers guest post by Elizabeth Bluemle, a children's book author, blogger for Publishers Weekly, and owner of The Flying Pig Bookstore in Shelburne, Vermont.

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Elizabeth Bluemle

 For sixteen years, I’ve been a bookseller in small-town, semi-rural Vermont, in a region that is progressive but fairly homogenous. I spend a lot of time introducing people to new books I think they might love, and over the years, I’ve encountered the usual range of responses from white customers to books with brown faces on the covers. Many of these responses are positive; some are reluctant or downright resistant, and represent mistaken assumptions about these books, that they are limited in focus and applicable only to a narrow, nonwhite audience.

I’ve got a toolbox full of tactics I use with hesitant customers, from subtle to overt, depending on how the situation reads. By emphasizing plot and character, by getting them to “forget” about race, I can get the adult excited about the story. I say adult deliberately, because out of the thousands of kids I’ve recommended books to, only a handful have ever shown even an awareness of the race of the cover character, much less a resistance to difference.

But the resistance is not entirely the reader’s fault. The extreme lack of diversity in children’s books (if it were hunger, it would count as starvation) — both featuring people of color as main characters and books published by writers of color — has led readers to some justified perceptions. For a long time, brown faces on covers by and large signaled certain kinds of stories: slavery, Civil Rights, gritty urban plight, outsiderness. The problem wasn’t with the stories themselves, of course; these were powerful, enriching, worthy books. But they were funneling nonwhite experience into particular tubes, and if readers were in the mood for something else—adventure or fantasy or mysteries, say—they looked elsewhere. They had to; there were few other choices. And that is still largely the case, with a few noteworthy, marvelous exceptions.

A New "It's Complicated!" Conversation

As part of CBC Diversity's ongoing effort, we're pleased to present the second dialogue in the "It's Complicated!" blog series starting Sept. 3rd, this time addressing book covers.

The following voices in the industry will each contribute one blog post to the series over the week, addressing challenges they've faced and successes they've had in selling/designing/writing books portraying diverse characters on the cover, and participating in the open dialogue in the comments section of the site: 

• Coe Booth, Author
• Laurent Linn, Art Director at Simon & Schuster Children's
• Felicia Frazier, Senior VP and Director of Sales at Penguin Young Readers Group
• Elizabeth Bluemle, Owner of Flying Pig Bookstore
• Joseph Monti, Agent at Barry Goldblatt Literary - don't miss reading his recent post about his entry into publishing

Our first "It's Complicated!" blog dialogue in May 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. Review that conversation!

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.