Camouflage
Dec. 15th, 2020 12:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
supergeeLike Dolly Parton and Freeman Dyson, among others, I am a big Octavia Butler fan, and so I am delighted to see that she is finally getting the recognition she deserves. Literary Hub has an article about the new trade paperback reprints of four of her books.
The first Butler book I read, and still my favorite, was Mind of My Mind. When it was reprinted in mass-market paperback, the publisher had a problem. The protagonist, unsurprisingly, was a Black woman. But everyone knew that books with Black people on the cover don’t sell. Making her white would be too obvious, so they compromised with a picture of a blue woman (though the book had no extraterrestrials in it).
Now of course we are too civilized for that, but there was a new problem. As the article details, the publishers wanted to make sure that buyers did not think the books were that vulgar, low-rent sci-fi stuff (which of course they are), and they would appear to have succeeded. Buy the books anyway, if you don’t have them.
The first Butler book I read, and still my favorite, was Mind of My Mind. When it was reprinted in mass-market paperback, the publisher had a problem. The protagonist, unsurprisingly, was a Black woman. But everyone knew that books with Black people on the cover don’t sell. Making her white would be too obvious, so they compromised with a picture of a blue woman (though the book had no extraterrestrials in it).
Now of course we are too civilized for that, but there was a new problem. As the article details, the publishers wanted to make sure that buyers did not think the books were that vulgar, low-rent sci-fi stuff (which of course they are), and they would appear to have succeeded. Buy the books anyway, if you don’t have them.
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Date: 2020-12-15 09:43 pm (UTC)