For more about their history and their books, visit:
Minority Book Publisher

as someone who works in the design end of the industry, i can tell you it probably has nothing to do with marketing decisions or white washing or anything similar. these days, the image for the book cover mostly chosen from a catalogue of stock photos, or in rare cases specially comissioned for the project. i mean, even dan brown got stock imagery. the person who choses/puts together this cover will nearly almost certainly not have read the book beforehand, and is just working on a brief description. these people work on a very tight budget, both in the way of time and of money. originality takes time, mistakes happen. if that short bit of text doesn’t include the colour of the protagonists skin/hair etc, chances are they won’t be correct.

that said, the british seem to generally have covers that are both beautiful and correct, while the us versions…

I’ll be sharing this post with all my friends, and we’ll be sending out the complaints.

If a book has a black protag in it and the cover shows a white person representing said black protag, what the publisher is actually saying is, having a white person on the cover is a lot better than having a black person on the cover, because having a black person would be just wrong.

That’s the message they’re sending. Period. And to a lot of black people, that hurts.

You can spin it all you want, but it’s the truth.

But of course, I don’t expect you to understand. I mean, what’s racism to you anyway? It’s not like you experience it or understand it, other than what you read in a book. To you, all of this is just something that will spike and recede after a while.

To the smugglers, thanks for actually taking time to address this issue.