Thursday News: Diversity in publishing, Litrate wants to take on Goodreads, Teju Cole on James Baldwin, and 86-year-old debut Romance novelist

JanetPublishing Newsauthors / crowdfunding / diversity / Goodreads / James Baldwin / Literary fiction / publishing / Race / racism / reviews / Self-publishing3 Comments

To Achieve Diversity In Publishing, A Difficult Dialogue Beats Silence – A thought-provoking post about how much change needs to come to publishing in order to truly diversify both the industry and the literary voices that are brought to the public. Not only do more and different stories need to be published (and we need to move away from the idea that there is an ‘ideal’ or ‘typical’ POC voice/experience/character type), but publishing professionals also need to reflect broader demographics.

“African-American women … we just learned from Pew are the largest group of readers in the country,” she says. “The most likely to read a book: college-educated black women. I tried to forward that to as many people as possible.”

Educating others in the business is just part of the job for Davis, but it might not be so necessary if there were more people of color in the industry. She believes that a company like Simon & Schuster is trying, but she says it’s not easy to attract young people. Starting salaries are so low, few can afford to take a job in publishing. –NPR

Litrate: An Online Community for Book Lovers – I don’t know anything about this site or its creators (and I tend to be wary of crowdfunded projects like this to begin with), but I would love nothing more than to see a reader service rival Goodreads, especially since it’s become clear that Goodreads is using free reader content to leverage authorial participation and revenue. Anyone supporting this venture? What do you think?

LitRate is our dream for a new website for the literary community. It will essentially be our version of Goodreads—but better. We’ve seen all your ideas, all your complaints, and all your dreams of new features. We’re here and ready to implement them in a new site that we can build together! –Litrate

Black Body: Rereading James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” – A really powerful meditation by Teju Cole on James Baldwin, American racism, and, in the background, of course, Ferguson. I’m not even going to try to summarize the piece, but I will suggest that after you read it, you check out Laila Lalami’s All Things Considered narrative, ‘This Fight Begins In The Heart’: Reading James Baldwin As Ferguson Seethes.

If Leukerbad was his mountain pulpit, the United States was his audience. The remote village gave him a sharper view of what things looked like back home. He was a stranger in Leukerbad, Baldwin wrote, but there was no possibility for blacks to be strangers in the United States, nor for whites to achieve the fantasy of an all-white America purged of blacks. This fantasy about the disposability of black life is a constant in American history. It takes a while to understand that this disposability continues. It takes whites a while to understand it; it takes non-black people of color a while to understand it; and it takes some blacks, whether they’ve always lived in the U.S. or are latecomers like myself, weaned elsewhere on other struggles, a while to understand it. American racism has many moving parts, and has had enough centuries in which to evolve an impressive camouflage. It can hoard its malice in great stillness for a long time, all the while pretending to look the other way. Like misogyny, it is atmospheric. You don’t see it at first. But understanding comes. –The New Yorker

Great-Great-Grandmother’s New Gig: Steamy Romance Novelist – Yes, yes, I see the stereotypes here. But I can’t help but smile at the idea of an 86-year-old woman loving 50 Shades and deciding to write and publish her own Romance novel.

While she’s proud of the buzz her steamy story has generated, she never dreamed of being a writer and had only taken one creative writing class when she was younger. Gorringe, a fan of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” has no plans for a second novel. For now, she’s just enjoying the spotlight. –ABC/Yahoo

Janet

isn't sure if she's an average Romance reader, or even an average reader, but a reader she is, enjoying everything from literary fiction to philosophy to history to poetry. Historical Romance was her first love within the genre, but she's fickle and easily seduced by the promise of a good read. She approaches every book with the same hope: that she will be filled from the inside out with something awesome that she didnʼt know, didnʼt think about, or didnʼt feel until that moment. And she's always looking for the next mind-blowing read, so feel free to share any suggestions!

→ Janet