"I Just Read Good Books": The white male algorithm and western publishing

Alternate title: spreading my cheeks for SFF validation

We’re nearing some hard deadlines in my publishing journey. Over the next few months, I should have some idea about the marketing and publicity strategies, with a cover reveal taking place in the near future. The cover reveal is probably the most significant milestone for a debut author, even more than the pass pages and the first edit letter. It allows you to imagine the book on a shelf. The book has a visual face and an identity – it will be what the public sees first to determine whether to pick it up. It’s a scary prospect when you think about it deeply.

We first started talking about book covers a year ago. My editor asked if I had any ideas or preferences. One aspect of THE REAPER is an item called a Grim Book, and it crops up regularly throughout the story. I imagined my novel basically looking like a recreation of the Book, or something that denoted writing or script of some kind. Basically, I said that I loved the UK edition of The Book Eaters. My editor agreed that she liked the cover too, but said for my type of urban fantasy, it was a bit unconventional and implied something gothic. My editor said that the office had envisioned something with neon in it. I wasn’t overly enthusiastic, but was told to keep an open mind and make a moodboard, so I did. I popped onto Pinterest later that day and looked up “neon city” and its derivatives, and I’m so glad I did. By the end of the evening, I was totally sold on the neon.

Over the next few months, we threw ideas around and the basic brief was: neon, city, London, gritty, words to that effect. I had a deal breaker in my mind that I never thought to express, because the brief suggested that I had no need to worry about it. Well, in September 2024, I was sent the rough sketch of the cover, and my heart pounded with worry. The sketch featured my internal, unspoken deal breaker – there was a person on the cover.

As a disclaimer, I am not totally against characters on covers. There is some stunning cover art out there with characters, such as two of my recent favourites, A Fate Inked in Blood and Masquerade. However, there is a risk of some character covers looking slightly YA, and I was worried people would assume THE REAPER is a YA/teen book instead of adult/adult crossover. There is another more uncomfortable reason why I’m hesitant about character covers, and it’s because my characters are Black.

Since entering this world, it’s been made explicitly clear that Black authors struggle to push sales and find success. The numbers are in, and since the 2020 Black Lives Matter acquisition boom, Black writers have suffered with low sales, lack of support, and general opportunities. This does not mean that the books are automatically bad, but that there needs to be intentional effort to counteract marketing biases. For Black writers in the SFF space, we are already up against a culture and industry that thinks fantasy = white Europeans. We have seen the internet racists argue that Black mermaids can’t exist, protest Black dwarves in the Lord of the Rings television series, harass the actors of colour in the Star Wars films, and get The Acolyte cancelled due to all its “wokeness”. But alongside these loud and proud bigots is another type of SFF consumer that has been heavily influenced by this noise, but is unconscious of it. I don’t care about appealing to racists, but I do believe that the success of Black SFF writers is connected to breaking down the mental barriers of this latter group.

They hated him because he was too pretty.

There are many readers out there who believe themselves to be openminded. They say “I don’t care about the race of the authors I read, I just like reading good books”. They think this is a profound, progressive stance to take. But when you ask those readers about the last five books they have read, the authors will all have been white men. You ask them to name five of their favourite authors from the last five or ten years, and once again: white men. They are unaware that their metric to measure “good books” has been carefully curated and assembled around an unofficial canon and that canon’s derivatives, and this canon is of such influence that it is ingrained in general western consciousness. I lurk around these spaces often, and I’ve noticed such readers all share the same tastes and preferences. Obviously, every fantasy fan is told to start with Tolkien, and after Tolkien, they are then recommended Martin, and after Martin, it’s Jordan, and after Jordan, it’s Herbert, and after Herbert, it’s Erikson, and after Erikson, it’s Sanderson, after Sanderson, Abercrombie, etc, etc. Whenever (if ever) the need for a woman arises, to show that these readers do in fact care about diversity, they will mention Le Guin. Not even Robin Hobb or Margaret Atwood or PD James make the cut. It’s quite predictable.

All of us born and raised in the west has experienced the othering of Black voices in publishing spaces. I’m 32, and for most of my life, all Black authors have been relegated to the “Black Writing” section of bookshops. Whether you want literary, book club, thriller, erotica, romance, science fiction, or fantasy, all the books are shoved into the same place (I have gone to my local WH Smith and seen Zane sitting beside Toni Morrison for example). It means that generations of SFF fans have not had the chance to experience Black authors writing across various genres, because they’ve likely seen “Black Writing” and assumed it to follow literary, traumatic themes. They are unaware that Black people also write SFF.

Online bookstores are the same. You search for Malazan, and will then be recommended Stormlight Archive, or Wheel of Time, or First Law or Gunslinger or American Gods. Sometimes the recommendations are incoherent, and then you realise the algorithm is not so much as linking genres, but authors. So, if you like one white male SFF author, here is a host of others for you to try. You will not find Kindred or The One Hundred Thousand Kingdoms listed in these recommendations. Social media contributes to this also: GoodReads releases the top pics for each year all based on reader buzz, lists, and pre-orders, and once these lists are collated, they are predominantly written by white authors. Booktok, whilst amazing in how it can boost an author’s career, is also centred around white American authors writing about white protagonists in heterosexual contexts, or romantasy based around straight white couples of the same archetype: oppressed but determined (read: “stabby”) white women contending with broody, monstrous men. The biases are everywhere, and Black authors are forced to shoulder these burdens when planning their marketing and publicity.

There is a trend that I’ve observed that I can’t determine has been intentional on the authors’ parts, so I won’t suggest it, however, many of the writers of colour who have achieved mainstream and critical success for their SFF works have character-less book covers (or the characters are small) and/or ambiguous names, names in which you can’t readily determine the gender or racial identity. Authors that come to mind are NK Jemisin, Evan Winter, CT Rwizi, RF Kuang, and ML Wang. This is obviously a very general observation, as there are many recent books that have had major success that goes against this, like Children of Blood and Bone and Blood at the Root and Legendborn. However, those books are all YA, and I wonder if readers of that demographic are more enthusiastic, responsive, and likely to discuss books on social media. Those books also received good word-of-mouth marketing among Black readers, who hyped and gave them extra support. Publishing houses would do well to try and replicate this success for their own Black authors.

Another gorgeous cover that easily fits onto an SFF bookshelf. I actually think this is a perfect mix of non-ambiguous ambiguity.

With all that being said, I wondered whether those readers with unconscious biases, so accustomed to seeing Black SFF writers relegated to the Black Writing section, conditioned to believe that SFF is a white space, would see a Black woman on the cover of a book in the fantasy section of Waterstones and automatically walk past it because the deep recesses of their mind had told them it’s just a book for Black people about Black issues? These might be unfair assumptions, but the numbers are clear that Black authors struggle to appeal to the mass market, and that SFF spaces are extremely hostile to Black protagonists. As someone who wants to sell a lot of books, who has been contracted for three books (but has drafted six), I want GETHSEMANE to be a mainstream success, and I’m prepared to “neutralise” its image in order for that to happen.

This is obviously unfair and impractical. Black writers should not have to anglicise their ethnicity or hide their characters from the public. When I was discussing my fears with my friends, they did ask me “don’t you want people to know there are Black characters in this book?” For them, as Black readers, they are likely to pass over a book if they think it's unlikely to have Black main characters. Another friend rightly pointed out: “it’s clear in the first few pages that your book is about Black people, so won’t certain readers get turned off by that anyway?”. Do I want to whitewash my book’s identity just to appeal to readers suffering from extreme unconscious bias? Would I not also want to answer the calls of many Black readers for more Black-focused SFF? This could also be a good marketing angle, to have a London urban fantasy series that can sit alongside Kraken, Neverwhere, and Rivers of London written by a Black British woman and unapologetically featuring a majority Black British cast. Thanks to shows like Supacell, the world is prepared and ready for more Black-focused SFF stories from these shores. I would feel worse if I put in all that effort and the book still didn’t take off anyway. Better to be myself, right?

There is no real point to this post other than to express the realties that Black SFF authors face. There are some things we must consider that white writers simply won’t need to. It’s frustrating and exhausting, and makes the lead-up to my debut year one of much anxiety. I worry all the time that people will see the cover and choose not to give THE REAPER a chance, but I truly hope they do. The silver lining is that the cover artist is phenomenal, and I have no doubt they’ll do a fantastic job in interpreting Amy. Although I’m nervous to see the finished product, my excitement is very real.