1) I think readers like people covers better for romance.

I know I do. I really like it when the images resemble the character(s) I’m reading about.

2) It helps readers identify the subgenre and content of the book.

I underestimated how important it is.  I did as some of my cohorts have done, wanting artistic or nonpeopled covers to broaden the market for my work.  This is so majority readers are more likely to pick up the books, read them, and possibly discover a new author they like.

This is a mistake. I’ve discovered it is a big mistake.  I hope I’m big enough to admit I was wrong. Yes, the big legacy publishers had it right on the AA niche all along.

What an author needs is for their readers to be able to easily identify and discover their books.  My core readers want to find and identify my books quickly and it behooves me to help them do so.

Those other folks?  Not my core readers.  It is far more likely that readers new to my sub genre will become upset when they read something other than what they might expect.

I want my readers to find and read my books!  So to make it easier for my readers to find me, and those who aren’t my readers to avoid me–I’m putting people on my covers!

People that become upset when they find something other than they expect from my sub genre usually will never, ever buy a romance with a different sort of person on the cover.  It’s win-win, really.

I was sick of my bland and simple new site, so made another new site to showcase my new peopled covers.

(party over here, party over there, I can party all by myself, yep, I can)

For all its bravura, Mr. Fairfax’s seafaring almost pales beside his earlier ventures. Footloose and handsome, he was a flesh-and-blood character out of Graham Greene, with more than a dash of Hemingway and Ian Fleming shaken in.

At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.  At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar.  When the planned confrontation ensued, however, reason prevailed — as did the gun he had with him.  Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé. In recent years, Mr. Fairfax made his living playing baccarat, the card game also favored by James Bond.  Baccarat is equal parts skill and chance. It lets the player wield consummate mastery while consigning him simultaneously to the caprices of fate.

A stunning life, just stunning.

You can see the baby-boomer wave crest into their late fifties and sixties with the near-hysteria going on about Alzheimer’s, a terrible disease I wouldn’t wish on anybody. But the disease isn’t new. I’m on the tail-end end of the baby-boomer wave and I don’t want it either, so I guess that’s why I notice the articles.

My grandfather’s side gets senile dementia, but not until their eighties and it is a more pleasant benign, non-diaper-wearing type, depending on how deeply one has worn the habit grooves in the brain. So far, my mother’s side, all baby-boomers on the other side of the crest, hasn’t lived long enough to tell the dementia patterns, but that time is coming.

Staying in one place and doing the same thing year after year wears those habit grooves more deeply. I saw my grandfather going through the motions of his habits even when he couldn’t understand why and he recognized few people. He’d do his morning bathroom routine, put on his coffee in the old fashioned percolator, eat cereal and milk, go get the paper, and then sit in his chair with the coffee and paper. I’d see him holding the newspaper upside down sometimes, staring at it as if he were reading it, because that is what he did every morning for decades. Those habits were worn deep in his brain. If he couldn’t find his clothes laid out for him to put on in the morning as my grandmother did, he’d take a bath. Whenever she wanted him to bathe, she’d hide his clothes. So he stayed out of a nursing home for a long time because he could take care of himself far past most people with so few neurons firing because of his strong habit grooves. Habits rule.

RIP Grandpa.

What’s wrong with The Help is illustrated in this post over at Dear Author where Jaili wrote that she thought Cajuns were part black, and liked the stories because they were written as if the Cajun characters were real people, not minority tags and stereotypes.

It was almost all about sex where mixed race characters were concerned. Authors did used this to their Cajun characters as well. Such as describing Cajun characters – especially heroes – as tall, dark, exotic, and black-haired. Oh, and let’s not forget sensuality.

They however went further than with the usual mixed race crowd. While they occasionally referenced a history of discrimination and bigotry against Cajun people, they treated Cajun characters as everyday people with ordinary problems and needs. It had the kind of balance I liked. An acknowledgement of what those characters had to deal with while still leading ordinary lives.

That was how I came to believe Cajun people had black and white heritage. The moment I understood my understanding of ‘Cajun’ was wrong, my mind was so blown. It had also completely destroyed my almost only line of defence.

That’s it exactly. Stockett writes a bit about the black main characters in The Help’s past and tosses off a few words about their lives, but it is sparse in comparison to how she fills out the lives of Skeeter, her mother, and her friends. The colors are reserved for the white character’s inner lives. The black characters, while noble and sympathetic, exist mostly to support the white characters. and even the villain Hilly is a far richer character than the heroic Abilene as far as her interior life.

Real characters have fully drawn inner lives and interact with the people within their lives in an intimate way. Props only interact with the main characters. Real characters have complex motivations. Props are motivated by the real character’s needs and desires. Props rarely have color to their lives, romance, intimacy, excitement, inward confusion or other qualities of humanity that makes a real character. Props serve a few or one function as a foil for the real characters.

Apparently, Cajun people were real characters in romance. That should have been the dead giveaway to Jaili that Cajuns weren’t black if several American majority authors were writing Cajuns as real characters and real people having real romance.

This is one of the reasons why black readers want to read in the niche. They want to read about real characters who are black, not black people as props for the other real people.

The Help presents black people as props for white people’s lives, and it doesn’t draw the black characters as real people in their own right with intimacy and inner lives that have nothing to do with whites. The black actresses were very good props and emoted well in relation to their relationships with white people. We have little idea of their inner lives though. It’s as of they depended on the white characters for their reality.

Yeah, that’s what irritates me.

LINK

Ayn Rand’s writings expose her psyche as Nazi-level evil. It’s interesting how she defines love. She despised the tenets of Christianity. She rejected anything that didn’t smack of self-fulfilling superiority over others and the Do What Thou Wilt philosophy Crowley and other prominent Satanists espoused.

You asked me to explain the meaning of my sentence in The Fountainhead: “To say ‘I love you’ one must first know how to say the ‘I.”

The meaning of that sentence is contained in the whole of The Fountainhead. And it is stated right in the speech on page 400 from which you took the sentence. The meaning of the “I” is an independent, self-sufficient entity that does not exist for the sake of any other person.

A person who exists only for the sake of his loved one is not an independent entity, but a spiritual parasite. The love of a parasite is worth nothing.

The usual (and very vicious) nonsense preached on the subject of love claims that love is self-sacrifice. A man’s self is his spirit. If one sacrifices his spirit, who or what is left to feel the love? True love is profoundly selfish, in the noblest meaning of the word — it is an expression of one’s highest values. When a person is in love, he seeks his own happiness — and not his sacrifice to the loved one. And the loved one would be a monster if she wanted or expected such sacrifice.

Any person who wants to live for others — for one sweetheart or for the whole of mankind — is a selfless nonentity. An independent “I” is a person who exists for his own sake. Such a person does not make any vicious pretense of self-sacrifice and does not demand it from the person he loves. Which is the only way to be in love and the only form of a self-respecting relationship between two people. ~ Ayn Rand.

I realize you have to put the oxygen mask on yourself before you can take care of others, but Ayn Rand goes beyond that. She is intellectual and logical on the surface, couching her meaning in misleading sentiments that most can superficially agree upon, such as damning-self sacrifice. No, love is not solely about self-sacrifice, but she obviously knows nothing about love or good. I wonder how Ayn Rand would define a mother’s love? Of course, somebody like her wouldn’t have children, and she made the choice not to do so, because children require care and giving.

Evil can not relate to that sort of love. Self-serving infatuation is fleeting and true love is not all about you. True love endures and gives. Love is forgiving, love is long-suffering, and love sees and believes the best, or it won’t last. Period.

Here’s a redux of Opposite World, what if women were as horny as men? I still chortled at the strip club part.

“You want mini lop for the cool and positive attitude and hare for the bigger size and long back legs,” Ms. Hedlund says. “But you don’t want too much temperament; you’d want a mix of a cool and a competitive attitude.”  LINK

I wants one!  I want one of those super cool bunnies with much swag that would put my cat and dog in their place (they would be all around the same size)

I hate my web host with a passion. It’s a pain in the ass to change hosting, but I have to do it. Site has been down off and on for over a week. They don’t give a damn.

Emma Bovary

She was pale all over, white as a sheet; the skin of her nose was drawn at the nostrils, her eyes looked at you vaguely. After discovering three grey hairs on her temples, she talked much of her old age…Her eyelids seemed chiseled expressly for her long amorous looks in which the pupil disappeared, while a strong inspiration expanded her delicate nostrils and raised the fleshy corner of her lips, shaded in the light by a little black down.

Link

Zane is all for AA book segregation for one very simple reason–the fact is it makes money, and as a publisher she’s clear that’s what she cares about.  “They sell better. That’s been documented. There’s no question about that. When someone goes into a bookstore and they’re looking for African-American books, they’re going to look for the African-American section. “

Money is the trump card in this day and age. With the success of Terri McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale in the early nineties, publishers drew in a breath as they saw a fresh and untapped niche with a seemingly insatiable hunger for books that had characters that looked and identified as the readers did. Many black women buy books based on the race of the character and author. They are wonderfully loyal and voracious readers, similar to romance readers. Writers made and are making careers writing for these readers. Separate publisher imprints were established, with editors and other personnel hired for this niche.  Obviously, those publishers and writers want those readers to easily find their books.  Those readers want to walk into a bookstore (or click into one) and easily find the books they want written by black women about black women.

Without the niche, AA niche readers wouldn’t get the types of books they prefer, authors would lose their careers, and publishers would lose revenue. Seems simple and straightforward, right?

Other black authors writing within and dependent on the niche were asked for their opinion of it in the article.  It’s interesting that articles by the mainstream about the niche only asks those black authors writing within the niche, not those black authors such or readers such as Oprah who write and read outside of it.   The replies by those within and dependent on the niche for their careers must be carefully worded, because who is going to shoot themselves in the foot about a niche one depends on and possibly piss off your readers or your publishers?  It’s as if the media asked a vampire romance author to critique her genre niche.  She’s going to be very careful not to anger vampire romance readers or those who acquire her books, no matter if her opinion that the market is over-saturated, limiting, derivative, and publishing needs to move on.

Noire stays on point–like Zane, she’s about the money. “…it’s more important to place our books in an area where our proven target audiences actually shop. People basically know what they’re looking for when they walk into a bookstore, and we have to make it easy for them to find it.”

Bernice McFadden would like to write books that are accessible to everybody. The niche limits black commercial fiction authors in a way authors of other races aren’t limited.  ”White people and others avoid the AA book section like the plague. They believe that the stories housed in that section were written exclusively for black people. They believe that there is nothing in our stories that they will be able to relate too – which of course is untrue.”

Tanisha Christie is practical.  If you move the AA books into genre, readers are pissed, authors and publishers lose money and careers.  She knows there is no easy solution (other than giving up the money, which is not an option for most). She mentions a multicultural section (opposed to an AA section), “…which is probably the ‘safest’ place to put authors of color but this comes with a price, that Zane speaks of, authors might get lost and Terri Woods will get shelved near Alice Walker.”

The big picture is never gazed upon, because that would mean that one would have to look away from the money that buys the bread and pays the rent.

Here is the question that matters, the one that the mainstream won’t ask and those within the niche can’t voice.

Why are AA women the only ones with our own special racial book niche?  (Most AA niche books are women’s fiction). Why don’t Asian women want a niche? There’s lots of Asian women readers who could financially support a racial niche. Why not Hispanic women?  Their numbers are growing by the moment.  They read.  (Oh, Kensington tried that with the Encanto imprint, a dismal failure).  What about Jewish women? They aren’t a race, but they are a homogeneous group with shared culture and history, along with a history of oppression and exclusion. Why don’t they want to solely read books by and about other Jewish women?  With the numbers in publishing, that niche could cordon off half the bookstore shelves.

Why don’t other races or discrete groups of people clamor for books that reflect themselves instead of reading the same books the majority does?

We know the answer.  Other groups of people trying to make in the USA don’t tolerate segregation the way we do. I think most people know bone deep that nothing good comes from being separated from the mainstream. They want to be a part of the mainstream, not niched away from it.

So, why do American blacks tolerate it, and in the case of the book niche, prefer it?  I say continue because blacks have been formally segregated in this country in ways other races haven’t experienced, for a far longer time.  We’re used to it and conditioned to it. For a long, long time the chitlin’ circuit was our only option for nonhostile, inclusive entertainment.

Bottom-line, the niche exists because it’s what readers want, so it makes money.  Money is our true god, so it’s not going to change as long as money continues to be made.  There are no solutions to the niche.  It does exist and it will exist.

What if a black author wants their books accessible to all races and not just niche black readers?  They can write literary fiction, this works sometimes.  They can not be American, but rather be Caribbean, British, African or whatever.  This seems to work for some.  They can write outside the niche.  This only works if we both downplay our race and write diverse protagonists from the jump. This is what most minority (other races than black) genre and commercial fiction authors do, talented ones such as Tess Garritsen, Nalini Singh, and Majorie Liu.  I love those authors.   They have no niche, and I doubt if Asian readers of their fiction would tolerate and/or support one.  Would I be less able to relate to them if they write works populated by characters of their own race?  I don’t think so, but they would certainly make less money.  Their mainstreaming route is highly uncomfortable to most of us, and thus not an option for many black authors, (which is a whole ‘nuther conversation).

As black commercial fiction authors, we are in a box we helped construct.  Some find it nice and comfy and there is money to be made in it.  Some feel limited and constrained, but that’s the way of the world.  We’d best figure out how to deal with the status quo, because it isn’t going anywhere.