Melville House Books

Bloomsbury's cover for Liar

Justine Larbalestier‘s new YA book, Liar, is about young girl named Micah who is “black with nappy hair which she wears natural and short.” So how come the girl pictured on the cover of her book is, well, a white girl with long straight hair?”

Larbalestier has the same question, and has gone public on her blog to complain about how her publisher, Bloomsbury, overruled her objections, and about what she calls a “white-wash.”

However, as she notes, covers aren’t exactly designed in isolation: “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?”

Yet, she says, “I have found few examples of books with a person of colour on the cover that have had the full weight of a publishing house behind them. Until that happens more often we can’t know if it’s true that white people won’t buy books about people of colour.”

In the meantime, she asks, “Are the big publishing houses really only in the business of selling books to white people?”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.