Tag: racefail

Links for the cover issue

- Stacy 1 Comment

Via the Brown Bookshelf, John Green discusses the cover issue for Justine Larbalestier’s book in a thorough way, taking into account all the changes our industry is going through.

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Also, I’ve added several books to my POC booklist thanks to all the people who have been suggesting books. There are a number of fantasy books by or about people of color that I’ve never seen before, including new books just coming out this year. One that just came out last month, Libyrinth, features a black girl right there on the cover (which we have found in the recent discussions is really rare in YA and children’s, especially in fantasy) and sounds like a really good read, so perhaps for those of you looking to read and review books for Color Online’s Color Me Brown book review challenge, you might want to check it out.

I’ll be looking for it myself. I tend not to read new books when they’re new, so here’s me trying to catch up yet again! I am in the middle of reading Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit and need to get back to Where the Mountain Meets the Moon so I think I’ll be meeting that challenge myself. I’ve got plenty of other books on my TBR list now with the booklist to reach the needed more than three reviews. The only question is whether I’ll have enough time to finish these in the month of August, given all the other things on my plate right now. Even if I don’t meet the challenge for prizes (and yes, there are prizes, so you guys should try for it!), I definitely will try to meet it to get myself to review books on a more regular basis.

Questions I have about our industry in general

- Stacy 3 Comments

I added these to my last post, because some readers pointed out that it sounded like I was defending Bloomsbury’s choice of cover, which wasn’t my intent at all. In fact, I was trying to point out that despite pressures from sales and marketing, the fact remains that it is very important to be aware that if you’ve got a person of color main character in the book and you want a person on the cover of the book (as opposed to a striking symbol, which is a current cover trend), you really have to make sure that the character represented on the cover actually matches the character described in the book. Heck, it’s important all around, no matter whether the character is a person of color or not. If the character in the book is a white blonde girl, don’t make her a redheaded Asian man on the cover, any more than vice versa. But it’s especially important to think about, given our industry’s history of whitewashing covers, when the character is a person of color.

So here are some questions that arose in my mind as I’ve been reading over the articles and discussion of the Liar cover:

Questions I’d love to hear addressed from the publishing end of things:

1. I’ve had authors tell me that their houses (houses I have not worked with) have asked them to change their characters from black to white because of this very myth that “black books don’t sell” or that it forces a book into a niche for only black readers (a myth that I personally think is bunk). Why do marketing departments say this, and therefore why does this pressure on editors, especially in fantasy, exist?

I never got that kind of pressure at Mirrorstone. Our marketing department was completely excited about Star Sisterz — a series that featured several different girls of various ethnic backgrounds as the rotating main characters, including a Jewish girl, an Indian-American, a black girl, and a Latina — and Hallowmere, which featured a white main character to start with in the first three books, but then split up to the French girl, the Hungarian girl, the Irish girl, the black girl who was formerly a slave (remember, this is post-Civil War Virginia), and a Hopi girl was going to be introduced in book 8, a character Mara (the former slave) was going to meet on her journeys.

I was excited about this series, and never really got any kind of pushback from the market on either Star Sisterz or Hallowmere from library shows or IRA–in fact, the librarians we talked to snapped up those books, knowing their readers would *love* them. Why is there this pressure in (at least certain) NY houses over a myth that simply isn’t true? And how do those environments differ from houses where they seem to welcome diversity in both covers and content (books edited by Alvina Ling and Cheryl Klein come to mind)?

2. (Somehow, this question disappeared from my previous post. Argh!!) Even with this pressure from sales and marketing, why do others give in to the pressure, rather than focusing on re-educating the marketing people? I could probably answer this one: because the marketing and sales people are worried that the biggest buyers will shelve the books in the wrong place in the bookstore (a complaint that is lodged multiple times in the comments to Justine’s post about her cover). Again, I don’t know what conversations went on behind the scenes at Bloomsbury, or why this cover would be decided on despite how they must have known it would have been received. I can believe that they thought that making the cover a “lie” — i.e., as if the character had put a picture of someone else on the cover, not herself — might have been part of the discussion, but it obviously doesn’t work for readers in the intended way, if so.

I’ve also had local booksellers here in Utah tell me that “my customers are as white as you are, and they’re not interested in multicultural literature” when I would mention that I was in the process of starting a small press focusing on multicultural fantasy and SF for YA/children. But I don’t believe that’s true regarding the readers themselves, and it ends up being a self-perpetuating cycle that leaves out a huge proportion of the population that probably avoid that store because they can never find books that either 1) they can identify with themselves or 2) in which they can read about other people not like themselves, if they’re white-bread Utahns. Honestly, the proportion of Latinos, black people, Asians, and Polynesians in Utah is pretty strong and steadily growing, so I think it’s ignorant of historically white communities to ignore the growing diversity right in front of them.

So how can we show the whole chain, from booksellers on back to publishing houses, that the readers are there if they’d just acknowledge them?

3. This relates to the questions raised last week about letting our boys be book bigots, but in this case, I think it’s more decisions made on the parts of adults prior to the books getting into the hands of young readers. Have we ever done any kind of market research (even if it’s just a survey to librarians) about what readers like to read about? (Actually — we did such a survey at some point at Wizards.) I’m pretty sure that most middle grade and YA readers across a wide range of communities would count action, adventure, mystery, romance, fantastic magic, and other story elements way above the race of the character, except that they’d probably like to see more diversity, because exploring the world of the character is a fun thing for most readers. I’d love to see PW or some other independent body publish something on this–or to see an academic study on readership.

A little more info, but not much

- Stacy 4 Comments

If you’re my friend on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter, you will know that I’ve revealed the big secret I’ve been keeping: That I’m starting a small press with a friend. I don’t feel ready to give many details about it yet because I’m still working on the website and a variety of details related to the business side of things, but I did want to give you a little more information, so as not to be all teasing about it. I just don’t want to count any chickens, etc. — so I can only give you the bare bones until I have something I can point people to.

I’ve been considering this possibility for years — it’s actually been a dream of mine since perhaps college or a few years after I graduated. When I was laid off from Mirrorstone, I looked for a job in New York City publishing, but I was laid off right before all the layoffs were starting there, which meant that what few job openings were still around were hard to come by, and most other places were either in a hiring freeze or preparing for possible layoffs. I moved to Utah to freelance while I figured out what my next step was. I considered becoming an agent, which is a common path for editors in my position, but that didn’t feel right either.

In the mean time, as you know if you read this blog, I’ve been critiquing manuscripts directly for authors, teaching the occasional community writing seminar (remember: worldbuilding seminar at the end of this month!), and providing freelance editorial services to a variety of publishers — mostly copyediting and proofreading. But even the freelancing is drying up these days — as publishers cut back, they pull all their freelance services in-house, piling more work on the editors they still have left. I enjoy helping new writers, but I like seeing the whole process, having the end result of a printed book to share with readers. I love being an in-house editor.

I’m still sending submissions to Tor — and am still looking for agented submissions for that, and for books by authors with whom I’ve worked in the past (including requesting a full manuscript or revisions) — but that isn’t a full-time thing.

One of the issues in fantasy publishing in the last six months or so have been about how fantasy is typically white, and it’s gotten me thinking (and plotting) about doing something more specific within that particular segment of the market. Racefail, especially, got me thinking about how children’s and YA fantasy and science fiction, while we’re working on becoming more representative of the readers, still don’t always reach the kids from various multicultural backgrounds. (Don’t even get me started on the all-white casting of the Avatar: The Last Airbender movie.) Most of the kids I know who love fantasy are white/of a European Caucasian descent, and no wonder, because they are the kids most likely to identify with the characters in children’s and YA fantasy. But how can we reach Latino kids? Do Asian-American kids identify with most of the fantasy that’s out there? Don’t kids of all kinds of backgrounds read many non-Western stories, and can’t those stories be told in a way that reaches a wide range of modern American kids? There are some great books out there that do this–and I want to contribute to making more of them possible.

I love all sorts of fantasy, including fantasy with white characters, whether or not it’s inclusive of multiculturalism. But there’s so much already out there, and I got to wondering how we might be able to bring what is currently a niche market (most multicultural books are nonfiction or realism) and combine it with the adventure, romance, magic, forward-thinking, and all the other awesome things that fantasy and science fiction provide to readers, bringing out more stories with characters of all sorts of cultural backgrounds.

So that’s the thinking behind the small press — publishing multicultural fantasy and science fiction. I’ve been working on a business plan, with all the intricacies involved in that, with a business partner (who is also a good friend) who cares about these things as well. We’ve got a site reserved and are working on submission guidelines, and we’re working on a number of processes necessary to starting the business. In addition to the publishing part of the business, we’ve also got a lot of ideas about how to get involved in the community, locally and throughout the country. We want to be a force for good not only in awareness of the issues, but in just bringing good books out to all sorts of readers no matter what their cultural inspiration. Once we have those things in place, I’ll be able to tell you more details like what kinds of stories we’re looking for and how to submit, and where to submit to, and all those things that you’ll want to know. I will continue to critique individual authors’ work and freelancing until we make an official announcement about what we’re looking for.

It takes a lot of money to start a publishing company, even a small press, no matter how important the cause. With that in mind, I’ve added a button on the sidebar for anyone who believes in what we’re doing and would like to donate to the effort. It’s not by any means something I’ll push–this will be my last mention of it in the blog — I just thought that if anyone was interested and wanted to, I’d make the option available. If you also believe in expanding fantasy and science fiction to be more inclusive, please consider helping out. All donations will go into the capital fund for the small press.

Hope that answers at least a few questions about what we’re hoping to do, at least until we have an official company presence on the web to direct you to.

Portraying people of color in children’s/YA fantasy–are we anywhere near “there” yet?

- Stacy 7 Comments

3/21/2012, ETA: Because this post has been linked a lot over the course of the last several months, I just wanted to point out that this was posted when I was in the process of starting the small press that became Tu Books, an imprint of Lee & Low Books, where we publish middle grade and young adult science fiction, fantasy, and mystery starring main characters of color. We’ve published five books so far, and I think you’ll love them. If you believe, as I do, that more stories like these are important—awesome fantastic adventures in which people of color are the stars—please check them out and share them with your friends.

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When I was in the fourth grade, I always wondered why I wasn’t born Japanese. You see, back then (mid-80s), the news was always saying that the Japanese had the best education system in the world, and that Americans were falling behind. Given that my life goal at the time was to be the smartest kid in the world, I really, really wished that I had been born Japanese.

Nothing I could do about that, but I could do my geography project on Japan. (I was in the accelerated group, and we did countries of the world instead of state history in the fourth grade. I also did Australia and India.) But the only resources I could find in our relatively small school library were a decade-old encyclopedia and several books from the 50s. I ended up making a small English-Japanese dictionary with about five words (which I still have around here somewhere) for my project to go along with the report.

I can’t recall having read one single book from the time I was able to read until the time I graduated high school about any character who was from an Asian country or about an American whose family background was Asian, however. There just wasn’t anything like that available to me in small-town farm country in Illinois. I’m sure this is as much to do with librarian/teacher selection as it had to do with publishing availability, but that’s just the way things were.

Looking at the CCBC’s report from last year of books published in 2008, however, I’m not sure we’ve come very far from that. We’ve come a long way, yet how far is there to go?

Ever since Race Fail 09 (which I didn’t follow much of, but even reading a part of which was very thought-provoking), I’ve become even more aware of this issue as it relates to fantasy than I have before (even though before that, as an editor, I always tried to acquire books that were as diverse as possible, whether that meant magic-wielding kender or girls from all over the world battling vampiric fairies). I’ve pondered on it for several months, and it’s been great to see so many authors pondering on it in their blogs, too. Just in the last few days, I’ve found a couple great posts on it by authors R.J. Anderson and Mitali Perkins (Mitali has a lot of great insights into this, as you can see from her blog).

The biggest thing I’ve been pondering is that it seems to me that in children’s and YA fantasy, we’re probably at a smaller percentage of multicultural themes and characters than realistic books (note that I’m conflating race and culture here on purpose—I’m using race and culture in an and/or way). Note how in the CCBC report, they say that “A significant number—well over half—of the books about each broad racial/ethnic grouping are formulaic books offering profiles of various countries around the world.” Of the rest—and I’m just mostly guessing, because they didn’t break it down into realism and fantasy in the multicultural books—but of the rest, I would assume that a large portion of the multicultural books were either nonfiction or realistic fiction, rather than fantasy. I’m not even sure how they broke down “fantasy” and “multicultural”—fantasy with multicultural characters may or may not have been included in the “multicultural” count, for all I know.

My point is that in genre fiction, even more than in realistic fiction, I find (anecdotally—I haven’t actually counted) a significant lack of multicultural characters compared to the portion of the population that is actually multicultural. Given that such a large percentage of authors are white, are we perpetuating a culture of predominantly white fantasy readers because so many books are written from that point of view? Consider Mitali Perkins’ quote from Ursula Le Guin:

“Even when [my characters] aren’t white in the text, they are white on the cover. I know, you don’t have to tell me about sales! I have fought many cover departments on this issue, and mostly lost. But please consider that ‘what sells’ or ‘doesn’t sell’ can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If black kids, Hispanics, Indians both Eastern and Western, don’t buy fantasy—which they mostly don’t—could it be because they never see themselves on the cover?” [my emphasis]

As Ursula Le Guin pointed out many years ago and reinforced when Earthsea was submarined by SciFi, in fantasy worlds not based in our world, our characters can be any shade we like them to be–and the default doesn’t have to be white. (This is not for lack of trying on some authors’ parts—anecdotally, some authors have told me they’ve been asked to change the race of their characters because a white author writing from a black character’s point of view, for example, might be seen as offensive. So there is some ground to cover there.)

So where do we go? How do we become more inclusive in genre fiction for children and young adults? One answer, of course, is to champion the great genre books that are coming out right now with multicultural themes and/or characters—to all readers who might have an interest in them, not just in readers we assume might want to read them because they might have a cultural affinity with them (also something Mitali has covered more in depth; seriously, go read her blog). But it’s much more nuanced than that. What about those white writers who want to include interesting characters from interesting cultures not their own? There’s some great discussion of that in an old thread over at The Enchanted Inkpot that I’d recommend browsing (they’ve also discussed variations of that question since then, and some really interesting things completely unrelated to that, so check it out). Mitali also has a handy checklist of things to consider when writing race.

I think that the more we become aware of this issue as gatekeepers (publishing people, writers, librarians, teachers, parents—in general, the adults in a child’s life that recommend/create books), the more we’ll be in a position to remedy the problem. I’m pretty sure that there isn’t an intrinsic lack of interest in fantasy on the whole, among young people of color (obviously, individual tastes vary!)—but we might be able to interest and engage those readers more fully if fantasy grew to encompass the many and varied cultures and backgrounds this world has to offer. I’d love to see a revival of fairy tale retellings, for example, from Gullah or Creole cultures, or the incorporation of those tales into a modern urban fantasy. I’m excited to read Cindy Pon‘s Silver Phoenix and to see how she incorporates ancient Chinese culture. I just had a great time editing a book for an author of a fantasy based in ancient Korean roots. Shannon Hale’s Book of a Thousand Days, a retelling of a Grimm tale but set in a fantasy country inspired by Mongolia, is my favorite of her books (with Goose Girl running a close second). And where is the Latino fantasy? South America had a great magical realism movement, but what about fantasy that connects with a modern young Latino audience and others who are interested in reading about that culture? (Here is where I falter—I can’t think of a single example from that culture. Someone please point me in the right direction.)

ETA: Oo! Oo! I thought of one in a Latino tradition (but well-adapted to a completely original fantasy world): Flora Segunda! Which is one of my favorites of the last few years!

There’s so many rich cultural traditions to draw from, not just the medieval Western European trope we see so often, and I’m excited to see how many authors are engaging in that challenge, no matter their own culture.

As an editor, it’s made me even more aware of this issue in the stories I’m reading for both acquiring and editing purposes. As a writer (which I do occasionally, though often when I have enough work as an editor I find I go months between writing spurts) it’s made me look at my work in progress and find solutions for something that’s been nagging at me for a while: my protagonist has a friend who she wants to be more than just a friend. He’s kind of been this nebulous guy for whom I didn’t have a mental picture, but over the course of the last few months, I’ve really felt more and more that this guy needs to be Asian-American. Well, at least, the people in town think he’s Asian-American (heh, we come to find out he’s actually not even from this world, but you didn’t hear that from me; if I ever actually finish this book, erase that from your mind). Even before I read Mitali’s SLJ article, I wondered the same thing as she did: “When was the last time, on an American TV show or movie, you saw an Asian-American man as the object of attraction?” I hope that I can make this character live as the attractive, hot, intelligent, awesome good friend and love interest that he is in the life of my main character.

I’ve rambled on long enough—I just wanted to get my thoughts on this subject down somewhere and organize them. Well, at least get them down somewhere, I suppose—I’m not so sure on the organization part. But feel free to share your thoughts on this subject in the comments.