When Lisa began brainstorming concepts for the cover of her forthcoming non-fiction book, she wanted to give the creative team a lot of space. The thoughts she sent her editor were mostly open ended—social media handles of artists she loved, examples of books where she liked the aesthetic, notes on mood and palette. As a debut author, she didn’t want to overstep. But she also included a few more specific things: She wanted the art to be gender neutral—no pinks or purples. No images of Black people or linked hands, no variegated splotches suggestive of DEI or unity. She’d seen it done to too many other books by Black women—think Maame by Jessica George, or Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half. By giving a clear sense of her limits, Lisa figured she’d avoid the problem. (Lisa is a pseudonym; her book is in production with a major press.)
Of the design options that later landed in Lisa’s inbox, the majority were pink and purple. One had people holding hands. Another, a picture of a Black person. Even the paint splotches were there. All the signifiers she’d asked to avoid. By crudely foregrounding that the author was a Black woman, the design eclipsed all other aspects of the book—including the thing it was actually about. As if a clichéd depiction of the author’s identity was the only reason a reader might want to pick it up, and the only thing they would find inside.
Lisa began losing sleep. She doubted herself and her writing. “If you tell me that you read a sample of my work and this is the cover you created,” Lisa says, “I’m having a crisis of What did I write that would evoke this? What did I do wrong? ” The situation was resolved, four rounds of revisions and one year later, when she was finally allowed to speak to the design team—access she had asked for, and was denied, when she first saw the cover options. But the process, and the exhausting self-advocacy it demanded, eroded some of her trust in her publisher and anything they said the book needed for it to be commercially successful.
Lisa’s experience was not an outlier; it’s broadly representative of how the cover process often goes. For author and designer not to be in direct contact is standard practice. The designer gets a brief that contains comparative titles—books of the same genre or similar subject—and notes about the publisher’s and author’s preferences. There’s always an element of negotiation. And, most significantly, there persists in the industry the sticky question of how explicitly a writer’s identity should be signalled on the cover—and the ensuing struggle, for many authors, of how hard to push back if and when things veer into stereotype.
It’s become upsettingly commonplace to concede that publishing is inhospitable to minoritized writers. In a piece published in The Atlantic on Juneteenth of this year, academics Richard Jean So and Dan Sinykin elegize the sea change that almost was: the unprecedented demographic shift in the decreased proportion of fiction published by white authors versus the increase in books by racialized authors in the past five years. But, they note, we are now seeing a rollback of those historic gains, in high-profile firings of prominent editors of colour and disavowal of the “diverse” titles they championed. A commonly cited reason for this backlash is that the books didn’t do as well as hoped. But, as So and Sinykin point out, the prophecy that “diversity doesn’t sell” is self-fulfilling—across imprints, there was a failure to throw serious marketing, publicity, and sales resources behind such books despite their eager acquisition. These writers were set up to fail.
This climate creates a volatile set of conditions for cover design. A cover is likely a reader’s front door to a book. The art needs to entice, convey the subject—books on nature will probably have an image from the natural world; a science fiction novel might depict the cosmos. Friction comes when that reach for recognizability gets tangled up in trying to represent minoritized identity. The problem of stereotypical covers may emerge, in part, from the idea of whom they are meant to be legible to. The industry, So and Sinykin attest, has a narrow concept of its target market. Most decisions cater largely to white women between the ages of thirty-five and sixty, with little effort made to develop readerships beyond that bracket. It follows that this group is also the imagined consumer whose putative tastes shape the product. “Cis white women between thirty-five and sixty” is also an accurate description of the majority of industry workers, including editors. If a book adorned by racially reductive imagery was gobbled up by the target audience in the past, publishers will be motivated to do it again. The goal is commercial viability: “By (quite literally) blurring a whole group of authors together with bright, often meaningless shapes,” Miles Klee writes in the Observer of the “blobby book cover,” “the major book publishers hope to maintain a financial consistency through an aesthetic one.”
In this context, a writer may find themselves the lone dissenting voice. “The pressure to comply is enormous,” another author says, especially for debut writers. For her first book, she had told her publisher she didn’t want a cover that said—by the way, this author is Asian; she felt heard and respected and was happy with the outcome. But when the rights sold to a different company in another format, she was pressured to accept their redesign, which contained a stereotypical element. What made self-advocacy harder was the gulf she felt between her team’s expertise and her inexperience at the time. “If they’re telling me this should go forward—either because we’re pressed for time or because it really will play well, or because this is just what readers are looking for—I didn’t trust my own instincts as much as I have since learned to.”
Cover design is a careful navigation between creativity and brute-force market logic. Often the writer doesn’t even see the art, explains Brooklyn-based art director and book designer Tree Abraham, until it’s been approved by many parties at the press. That step alone can take a lot of time. (It can also add subtle pressure if an offensive cover comes with a note saying, Everybody loves it!)
When starting a project, what Abraham gets in terms of a brief varies considerably. It’s her job to walk the line between a manuscript’s contents, the publisher’s commercial hopes, and her creativity. She often feels like the designer has little agency in the process. She cites the racial reckoning of 2020 as a positive development in conversations about design, but when it comes to representing non-white cultures, she says, publishers have not fully moved past making that otherness a major part of the cover discussion—“some element signalling that this is in some way foreign.”
To readers, these signals of foreignness can be conspicuous, even alienating. Michelle Cyca, a magazine editor and a contributing writer for The Walrus, has noticed the recurring use of Papyrus font in books about Indigenous life and history, like Dee Brown’s Folktales of the Native American and The Wisdom of the Native Americans, both from the 1990s. (For a more recent example, see the Papyrus dupe used in the Avatar logo.) The lettering, Cyca says, has strong connotations—antiquated, unsophisticated, and conjuring a reductive image of Indigenous people. “It’s a font that looks primitive,” she says, “it looks unrefined.” The visual language of design, Cyca observes, has a leeway that words do not. “It allows you to perpetuate ideas that are no longer really acceptable to articulate aloud, but you can usher them through in these unspoken ways.”
In a 2008 piece from Hyphen magazine, Neela Banerjee expresses a related frustration. Sorting through a box of titles at the Hyphen office, she is confronted by “an array of stereotypical Asian images: lotus blossoms, flowing saris, flawless Asian faces.” Her initial thought—that surely the commercial success of Asian American writers should obviate the indignities of exoticized marketing—gives way to a more disturbing one: perhaps the trend of offensive covers is related to that success. Maybe books by minoritized writers do well only when they are marketed as “‘authentic’ cultural artifacts.” The moment recalls a piece Abraham wrote for Spine magazine, in which she recounts designing a memoir by a Chinese American writer and is caught between “a brief that said NO ASIAN IMAGERY [and] a publisher that said ‘maybe Asian imagery?’”
My first book is about exactly this problem: how well-meaning institutions advance reductive ideas of race by catering to the hunger of white audiences. It was acquired during the boom So and Sinykin describe, in which books by writers of colour were eagerly scooped up and then thrown into the marketplace. The cover brief I sent to my publishing team identified bodies and faces as “general zones of discomfort,” a coolness that belied how terrifying it felt to assert myself. I wanted to avoid things like coy tableaux of inclusion or discrimination, or graphics of multi-shaded people cheerfully getting along. I knew how quickly a book that even touched on race could get me pigeonholed as someone who writes about race and nothing but. But the book is a researched critique of culture, not a guided tour of trauma. I didn’t want the demeaning treatment of a so-called diverse author. I wanted to be treated like a smart white lady who was respected by her press. So I said, no bodies. And it worked. Like a fairy tale. I approved the first option they sent—the title, Some of My Best Friends, in a punchy serif font, with an enigmatic graphic of a leaf shaped like a mouth, a clever play on the lip service mentioned in the subtitle.
When it came time for the paperback reissue, it was suggested that the original cover had not been clear enough. (Clear to whom?) Lest I seem difficult, I made the same point I had two years prior, like it had just occurred to me: “In general, I’m uncomfortable with full faces or bodies on the cover.” The email in response tolled like a knell. “I think the big question here,” it asked, as if I had not spoken and did not exist, “is do we want a person on the cover?”
Of the design options that later landed in my inbox, most were pink and purple. One had a stock photo of a white girl throwing her arms around a Black girl. Another, a drawing of variously shaded Black and Brown people in a style reminiscent of Corporate Memphis, like a DEI graphic. Yet another had variously shaded black and brown letters, like Chicka Chicka Boom Boom had been updated for the BLM era. “A good cover tells a story,” someone at the press said when I begged for a less literal treatment. What story, I wondered, was this: People of colour exist? You have no voice here? It doesn’t matter what you say or how elegantly or intelligently you say it—how we see you is and always will be the precise way you insist on not wanting to be seen? I knew they only wanted the book to do well; so did I. But trying to explain why facile diversity gestures were wrong for a book critiquing facile diversity gestures made me feel crazy. Like Lisa, I lost sleep. I doubted myself and my work. If my book could be misread at such a scale, I wondered if writing in public was worth it at all.
After much back-channelling, we got there eventually. But even in this industry, where the bare minimum of self-advocacy can feel like asking too much, it doesn’t seem overly ambitious to want the process to be better. How it might be improved is something Abraham thinks about a lot. More detailed author questionnaires would help, she says—ones that go beyond the manuscript’s contents to give a deeper sense of the writer’s world view. It’s a lofty goal in a field where the creativity of so many parties—writers, editors, designers—is hemmed in by the logic of risk aversion. While it may be true that what sold well once will do so again, that reasoning can collapse the difference between what makes money and what causes harm—a distinction, it’s increasingly clear, publishing has not learned how to make.
