Remember the hooha over Bloomsbury’s decision to whitewash Jaclyn Dolamore’s book, Magic Under Glass? Well they’ve released the new cover:

This was the old cover – Yep, nothing “dark-skinned” about that lady, even with the bad lighting.

This is the new cover. A definite touch of ethnicity there at least.

What do you guys think?

Via Angela over at Save Black Romance.

I got the link to the following open letter via Twitter from Angela at Reading While Black. The letter is by best-selling African American author, Virginia DeBerry.

Here are some excerpts from Virginia’s letter for those who can’t be arsed to follow the link:

Dear Oprah:

We don’t sing karaoke or dance with the stars. We have been contributing to the cultural landscape long before Jon & Kate, Britney,Rhianna and Chris or Stephanie Meyer and most of America, including you have probably never even heard of us….

We are writers and we are in trouble. Big trouble.

(more…)

I was mightily impressed by a blog post that author, Justine Larbalestier wrote a few days ago. The post was entitled, The Advantages of Being White.

First a disclaimer from Justine:

Disclaimer: I am writing about YA publishing in the USA. Although I’m Australian I know much more about the publishing industry in the US than I do about Australia. Or anywhere else for that matter.

She continues with the most refreshingingly honest post that I’ve read from a white author with regards to the Racism in Publishing issue, ever:
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I blogged about the whitewashing of the cover for Liar a couple of weeks back.

It went from this:

To this:

Larbalestier writes:

As you’ve probably heard by now Liar is getting a new cover for its publication in October.1 First Bloomsbury considered going with the Australian jacket of Liar and specifically with the black and red version you can see here because that would be the easiest thing to do. The design already exists after all and the window to make the change was very narrow.

However, given the paucity of black faces on YA covers, and the intensity of the debate around the original Liar cover, Bloomsbury felt really strongly that a more representative approach was needed. Rather than using a stock photo, Bloomsbury went the whole hog and did a photo shoot.

Well, it just shows that shitstorms and public outcries sometimes do work.