I held off on writing up this week’s post because I knew we were about to release the cover art for my second book, Infidel, and I wanted to speak about how both the covers for God’s War and Infidel came to be.
Most writers are stuck with their cover art. It is what it is. If you’re lucky, you get to say something like, “Can that white chick with the sword on my cover actually have brown eyes or something? I mean, she’s supposed to be hispanic.” Or you can say, “Can she have a bigger sword?” But there are all sorts of things that happen with covers. Spaceships end up on books that don’t even feature spaceships. Protagonists of the “wrong” gender end up on the front – for marketing purposes.
But if you write the sorts of books I do, which posit worlds that aren’t teeming with white people, more often than not what you end up with is something like what Justine Larbalestier went through, which is that not only does your cover not feature your protagonist, but your brown protagonist magically becomes a white one for “marketing purposes.” (more…)
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