There’s been a lot of discussion about Justine Larbalestier’s Liar. For those of you who don’t know, the cover of her book depicts a big-eyed white (some think Asian) girl with long hair, when the main character of her book is black with short hair. Naturally, she was upset. But I’ve seen several people say that if Larbalestier was so upset about the cover of Liar, she shouldn’t have said she liked it first.

I’m a teacher, so I’ve written letters of recommendation.  For some students, I have no difficulty writing good things.  But 66% of the people who have asked me for letters of recommendation have been in the bottom half of the class I’ve taught.  Some never came to office hours or asked a question in class.  “I’ll write you a letter,” I would say dubiously, “but is there anyone who could write you a more enthusiastic letter?” (sidenote: Every single one of those people said, “No, there isn’t. I need you to do it.” That sound you hear is my heart breaking.)

I have also read literally hundreds, if not thousands, of letters of recommendations. I have read only one letter that ever contained bad things about a student.  (“John,” this extremely famous person wrote, “is a whiny baby. He makes appointments and never shows up to them. I told him I wouldn’t recommend him, but he listed me on a form and now career services keeps badgering me. I wish him ill.”)

The rest of them, though, are not necessarily helpful to the student. I know this, because I have written those letters. I am entirely positive.  I am also entirely truthful. I tell people in advance that if they have other options, they should use them, and I will do my best… The letter may say good things, but when the good things it highlights are trivial (“I love Lisa’s hair ribbons! They brighten my class!”), it doesn’t do much to recommend the person’s intellectual capacity.

Authors, talking publicly about their covers, are the same way.  An author cannot honestly say, “I hate my cover” in part because she doesn’t want to hurt sales and marketing’s feelings, and also in part because even if she hates her cover, she doesn’t want to point out the flaws in it to anyone who might otherwise buy the book. Saying “hate my cover” is akin to saying “Don’t buy my book.”  So what an author does instead of voicing her discontent, if she is honest, is praise the hair ribbons. And that’s a significant tell.

Here is an enthusiastic recommendation of a cover: Justine Larbalestier talking about her Australian cover. Here is what Justine says about her Australian cover for Liar:

I love it more than I can say. It captures the book so perfectly. I asked for something spare, iconic, cool and dark. Possibly a typographical treatment. Bruno exceeded my expectations by miles. I keep staring at it cause it makes me so very happy.

Notice how three of those six sentences start with “I.”  “I love it more than I can say.”  “I keep staring at it cause it makes me so very happy.”  The rest all talk about her feelings about the cover as well: “It captures the book so perfectly.”  “Bruno exceeded my expectations.”  This is a real, positive recommendation from an author.  She loves it.  She keeps staring at it.

Now let’s take Justine’s post on the U.S. cover. It’s a little longer, and needs a little more decoding, but notice what Justine never mentions:

This cover was so well received by sales and marketing at Bloomsbury that for the first time in my career a cover for one of my books became the image used for the front of the catalogue. Front of the catalogue! One of my books! Pretty cool, huh?

Translation: Sales likes it.

Apparently all the big booksellers went crazy for it. My agent says it was a huge hit in Bologna. And at TLA many librarians and teenagers told me they adore this cover. In fact one girl said she thinks the US cover of Liar is the best cover she’s ever seen! Wasn’t that sweet of her?

Translation: Other people besides sales like it.

It was designed by Danielle Delaney the genius responsible for the paperback cover of How To Ditch Your Fairy. Have I mentioned that’s my fave cover I’ve ever had?

Translation: I’ve liked other covers that this artist has done.

Here’s hoping this cover helps Liar fly off the shelves in North America!

Translation: I at least hope we get hair ribbons, because if this cover doesn’t sell books, it’s doing nothing for me.

Nowhere in this post does Justine say she likes the cover.  What she says is very careful weasel-wording, disguised as an endorsement, when in fact she very carefully doesn’t say a word in support of the cover.  Not one sentence begins with “I.” Instead, she mentions a lot of other people who like it.  Next time an author talks about her cover, pay attention to what she doesn’t say.  If she doesn’t say “I love it!” she probably doesn’t love it.

For the record: I love the covers for both my novella and my debut novel. This is not intended as self-referential in the slightest. I love my covers. When my publisher sent my cover for Proof, I printed it off and wrapped it around another book just to see what it would look like (Elizabeth Hoyt’s To Beguile A Beast, by the way, for good luck.) And it looked fabulous. I wanted to buy it right then and there.

Apropos this lovely wordpress plugin, which generates multiple purchase links for blogs in a pop-up format, I am reminded that I came up with a somewhat similar implementation for my website.  You can see it in action on my bookshelf page, right under the heading for “This Wicked Gift.”

Goal: Have links to a number of different websites so that users can purchase books from the vendor of their choice, instead of funneling them into one or two options.

Here’s how you can use the same thing on your website.  Caveats: You need a website that runs PHP.  (If your website can run wordpress, it can run PHP.  These days, almost everything can.)

Here’s what you need to do (after the jump).

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This last weekend, Amazon removed sales rankings from a number of products, namely erotic romances and basically anything that had to do with gay people, and made many of those books damn near impossible to search for, too.

What the rationale was for this, I can’t say.  But it makes me sad and angry.

Thing that makes me angry #1: The books that have been censored by Amazon include Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, and Alex Beecroft’s False Colors–none of which could be considered even remotely pornographic or obscene.  These are books about gay people, not books about gay sex, and censoring these books contributes to, and is indicative of, one of the worst and most invidious forms of discrimination against gays: the sexualization of gays, treating everything that has to do with gay people as if it has to do with sex.  It doesn’t, and this makes me so angry that I could spit.

Thing that makes me angry #2: Censoring books just because they happen to be about sex.  The books I write would not fall under Amazon’s censorship ban–today–but if I fall silent about it now, might they one day?  Perhaps.  But even if nothing will ever happen to me, things are happening now to people I consider friends.  My good friend Jackie Barbosa–who writes lovely, sensual, emotional romances which happen to also be erotic–whose first print book, Behind the Red Door, is scheduled for release on June 1–used to show up on Amazon when you searched for her name, “Jackie Barbosa.”  Now she doesn’t.  Do a search for her name, and you get “product not found.”  And she’s not alone.  Hundreds of books have lost their sales rankings and have simply ceased to exist when you do an Amazon search.

It’s as if these people don’t exist, as if they are no longer persons or authors to Amazon.  You wouldn’t type in the name “Jackie Barbosa” if you weren’t looking for Jackie Barbosa–who or what is this censorship trying to serve?  If you know who Jackie is, it’s not “family friendly” for Amazon to pretend she doesn’t exist.  And I’ve seen Jackie work so hard for her print release, and I know that this book is good–so what is it going to mean if people can’t find it?  Its sales, for her, are crucial in determining what happens for her future career.

This is barbaric.  It’s dehumanizing.  It makes me feel sick to my stomach.  Amazon, WTF?

EDITED SOMEWHAT LATER TO ADD:

Lady Chatterley’s Lover has been deranked.  Fanny Hill has been deranked.  Books about lesbian parenting have been deranked.  Mein Kampf has not been deranked.  Books about training dogs to fight have not been deranked.

I do not think that Mein Kampf should be deranked, or that books about dog-fighting should be either.  I think this demonstrates the dangers of going down the dark path of censorship.  Even if you don’t care about erotic romance or GLBT books, this should make you feel sick.  What if Amazon had decided that they didn’t want to offend Jews by offering them books about Christianity, and they deranked the King James Version of the Holy Bible, or Pope John Paul II’s In My Own Words?  What if they didn’t want to offend Obama supporters and deranked Bill O’Reilly?  What if they deranked the Koran so as not to make children think about terrorism, and deranked all holocaust books because some people think it didn’t happen, and deranked The Origin of Species because people don’t agree on evolution?

Part of being a free society means that we are sometimes going to see things we do not agree with.  It is a blessing, not a weakness.  And it’s not okay just because it happens to someone else.

I am strongly, firmly, against all content-based restrictions imposed on book browsing, purchasing, and buying.