How book covers today still use racist visual stereotypes

Let's be honest — despite the saying, everyone judges a book by its cover.

But what many readers may not realize is that, as reported in The Walrus, some book covers today still use unfair visual stereotypes to market books written by people of colour. So how does this change how these books are received, and ultimately sold?

Today on Commotion, writers Tajja Isen and Jael Richardson talk with guest host Ali Hassan about how book cover design can be fraught for racialized authors.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Ali: Tajja, I want to quote a line from your piece that stood out to me. You wrote: "there persists in the industry the sticky question of how explicitly a writer's identity should be signalled on the cover." Can you unpack that for us a little bit?

Tajja: In book publishing, if the author is a writer of colour, it kind of doesn't matter what the genre of the book is, or even the subject matter of the book — the question of projecting the writer's identity onto the cover in some capacity almost always comes up. Sometimes it might be something the writer wants. It might have something to do with the subject of the book. But quite often, as I learned, it doesn't.

It's a sort of default assumption that puts the writer in a weird position: there are people on their publishing team often thinking that their identity has to be signaled somehow on the cover, and the writer is having to advocate for themselves and, honestly, trying to educate the team about why that might feel not that great or like they're being stereotyped.

Ali: Jael, can you give us some concrete examples of the stereotypes you've noticed on book covers?

Jael: Yeah. The lotus flower for Asian authors is often used. For a lot of Black writers, especially those who are writing in Africa or about Africa, there's this acacia tree or the big tree on the sunset, Lion King style. I think you also see patterns, and it's a kind of laziness to be honest, where LGBTQ stories are all hot pink or have hot pink lettering, and Black writers, it's black and white and red — these very serious, somber colours are used. It's these patterns that publishers get into that are almost habitual, and not pulling at the uniqueness of the book.

Ali: Jael, let's dive into this book cover design process. It might surprise people to know the author does not have direct access to the book designer…. As it turns out, there is a committee of people, as Tajja is suggesting, who approve this design before it's shared with the author. How did it feel for you as an author in that situation?

Jael: It's been a stressful experience almost with every book, in different ways. For The Stone Thrower, they showed me four covers. This was a memoir about my dad, so I was very passionate about it, debut — and they were so ugly that I admittedly cried. I think I cried because I wasn't sure I was going to have much say. We went back and forth a little bit, couldn't find anything, and then they took a break. We came back, and we landed on a cover that I love. So it ended up being a positive experience because I felt heard and I was able to contribute to some of the revisions that happened.

I judge books by their cover. So when a cover comes to me and I don't like it, and I wouldn't buy it, I certainly don't want that cover for a book that I've spent years writing. One time it happened and I said I don't like it…. And when I presented to the publisher, they were kind of like, "Well, everybody here loves it, so." There's this feeling that you can't actually shape the book that you've created. Sometimes there's even an inability to communicate. Usually you're kept from even knowing who the designer is, communicating with the designer — who may or may not have even read the book.

Ali: Tajja, in your Walrus article, you reference another piece from The Atlantic … [that] goes on to suggest we are hitting a wall with diversity in publishing. So how does this conversation about book covers fall into the greater conversation that people are having about the lack of diversity in publishing as a whole?

Tajja: I think in general there's a consensus that the most recent push to diversify publishing … sort of hit a wall. What that piece hypothesizes is that this incredible sea of change that we've seen over the past four years, we're now going to see things start rolling back because in a lot of cases … not all those books did really well, because those authors and editors weren't given the support that they needed.

And so now, I think in terms of cover design, if there's a general risk that we're going to see losses in those gains of diversity in publishing, there's a risk that cover conversations might trend more stereotypical as well. If publishers feel like, "We took this risk. It didn't work. We lost the money," then they're going to be even more committed to their logic of risk aversion…. I think that logic really hems in so many people: writers, editors and designers. It's very difficult to do good creative work under those conditions.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Jane van Koeverden.