Ruining book sales because MC isnt white???

The blurb didn't work for me either. Repetition, too many pronouns and poor sentence construction.

She discovers that the creepy hooded figure is holding her dad’s ghost captive so she enlists the help of Kit to rescue her dad from the ghost who’s chasing her.

Click to expand...

And the book apparently opens with the MC's family being killed, which should be devastating. Instead, it doesn't seem as important as the ghost in the black skinny jeans.

So if she thinks the book isn't selling because the MC isn't white... there's another, more plausible explanation.

The writer insecurity/ego imp will energetically jump up and point a finger at anything or everything to steer the focus away from the writing. It's a wee vicious beastie.

I'm sure her other books coming out soon will sell like hotcakes.

Hmm, I must be bucking a trend. One of my MCs is of African descent, and my book has actually sold okay during its first year.

I use all sorts of different PoC. Hasn't hurt my book sales at all.

Life of Pi will never sell!

Oh, the excuses authors use to explain the poor sale numbers! Let's add another one to the long list: race. Why not. Everyone from politicians to teachers is already using the race card.

That cover is just *BAD.* From the fonts to the models partly-shiny and mostly-shadowed faces and poses to the color selection to the positioning, everything just feels like it was done by a 12-year-old using bootleg Photoshop she learned how to use by watching bad Youtube manga art tutorials.

Plus two models have NO chemistry (because, duh, they've been cut and pasted from two different stock photos to look like they're sitting together.) I guarantee you had the female model been replaced by a blonde, blue-eyed gal doing the same pose it would still get the same sales results.

She's getting plenty of reviews and airtime from the readers of her genre. She's self-published three novels and she's jumped on the Amazon fanfic bandwagon. It's going to be hard to get any best-seller traction in a genre so flooded with stuff, but she has as good a chance as any other self-published teen vampire author.

The problem for me is not the East Indian main character. It's the cover itself, which screams 'amateur'.

It's the prose inside, too. I used Amazon's Look Inside feature. The first page - which should set up the angst of a survivor going to her family's funeral - is multiple paragraphs of passive voice narration. No dialogue. No deviation from the plodding pace. I felt no real emotion from the character, and no interest in reading more. YA Paranormal is often accused of being a lazy genre to write, but I've seen gut-wrenching, vivid, joyous examples.

And gee, her book has only been out since May, and it's not selling that well? It takes time. This probably isn't even a PoC issue, but an attempt to drive traffic and sympathy.

Well, the female figure might be a POC, but I think the guy is so blindingly white as to balance it out.
Didn't care for the blurb, but it's not my preferred genre, so that might be just me. But, why are the only words that hang in my memory 'creepy hooded figure in black skinny jeans'. Don't know why, but this detail is killing the mood for me.

I took a peek inside--curiosity was killing me. And honestly, the very first thing that came to my mind was "What kind of hospital denies an orphaned girl visitors, keeps her in the equivalent of solitary confinement, and forces someone with few to no physical injuries to stay an inpatient? Those people get sent home to what's left of their families!"


And as the burial details have been taken care of--and by extension paid, someone she's related to is still alive and kicking. Why isn't she with them? It's probably explained further down, but I didn't get too far.

ghost said:

Ok, came across this one. Personally I don't buy her argument at all. I spent some time looking at her book cover and didn't even notice that the MC wasn't white.

Click to expand...

She might want to talk to James Patterson about his character, Alex Cross.

Alex Cross, one of James Patterson's main characters, is black. He was popular and even got to be in the movies!

dangerousbill said:

She might want to talk to James Patterson about his character, Alex Cross.

Click to expand...

Shoot, I didn't see your response when I posted mine. In fact, we cross-posted. Love Alex Cross

Note non-white main character. Note non-white main character on the cover. Note selling since 1996....

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005QPBDH8/?tag=absowrit-20

ghost said:

The topic of race came up on an author group that I’m part of and after reading the experiences of other authors, I realized that race was the cause of my low sales.

Click to expand...

I love how she states that as a fact. Couldn't possibly be any other reasons for low sales.

ETA: Read the first few pages. Her writing is awful.

In the second paragraph:

It was a miracle that I had no broken bones given the car crash I had survived. I was sore and banged up, but otherwise okay. ... It had only been a week since the accident that had claimed my family and injured me so severely.

Click to expand...

Stylistic issues aside, she was just a little sore and banged up, but "injured severely" and thus made to stay in the hospital for a week?

The story is inconsistent and makes no sense starting from the second paragraph.

But yeah, I'm sure it's the race thing.

WAIT, this is supposed to be a YA book??? But the models on the cover look to be in their mid-20's! (I'm being kind.)

ETA - Wait no, okay the girl could be like 22-ish. But the guy literally looks like a translucent vampire who's had half his face smoothed out with Photoshop.

And his face is slightly too big in comparison to hers. Like in real life if she was 5'4, he would have to be about 6'4-6'7 to make up for the difference in face size... (Or the person who made the cover just didn't shrink his photo enough.)

I can buy that race could be a limiting factor, sadly. There are enough cases out there of covers being whitewashed (intentionally or not) by publishers. And there can certainly be a strong tendency to default characters to white.

But I find it curious how certain this author is that race is the reason her book isn't selling as well as she'd hoped. I don't see much evidence of that, even ignoring the issues with the cover and blurb. And the fact that the author was so quick, and so determined, to come to that conclusion makes it more suspect to me. It gives the impression that she hasn't given it a very thoughtful analysis.

frimble3 said:

But, why are the only words that hang in my memory 'creepy hooded figure in black skinny jeans'. Don't know why, but this detail is killing the mood for me.

Click to expand...

That bugged me, too. It made me think of Pretty Little Liars or something. Not that Pretty Little Liars involves skinny jeans--I've never seen it, so I don't know. But it makes the hooded figure sound like a style-conscious, teenage stalker instead of a supernatural being.

Little Anonymous Me said:

I took a peek inside--curiosity was killing me. And honestly, the very first thing that came to my mind was "What kind of hospital denies an orphaned girl visitors, keeps her in the equivalent of solitary confinement, and forces someone with few to no physical injuries to stay an inpatient? Those people get sent home to what's left of their families!"


And as the burial details have been taken care of--and by extension paid, someone she's related to is still alive and kicking. Why isn't she with them? It's probably explained further down, but I didn't get too far.

Click to expand...

I had the same problem with the opening part. If I were considering buying it, the opening passages would really hurt my suspension of disbelief.

The supporting comments on her blog are worth reading, for examples of the genre's worst insularity and defensiveness.

ETA: at the current end of the comments, she's starting to be called out for cover and writing.

I guess I have another excuse to add to my list when my stories suck. I can finally drop the "my vampires don't sparkle" one I have been using.

I'm also getting stuck on the skinny jeans. Seriously, who gets stalked by a creepy hooded figure and notices that kind of thing? In the prose itself, that's one thing, but in the blurb? Jeez...

However, I must say I've been seeing that font crop up a loooot lately. It's called "Bleeding Cowboy," if memory serves, and it's pretty sweet for wallpapers. Dunno why it's been so "in" recently, but...yeah, I've been seeing it everywhere.

I won't discount the possibility that the model's skin color may turn some readers off, even without the poor blurb etc. But I'm curious about her other books; the Amazon rankings for those aren't any higher, really, than the one she's talking about. Perhaps they sold better out of the gate and have leveled off now?

Rhoda Nightingale said:

However, I must say I've been seeing that font crop up a loooot lately. It's called "Bleeding Cowboy," if memory serves, and it's pretty sweet for wallpapers. Dunno why it's been so "in" recently, but...yeah, I've been seeing it everywhere.

Click to expand...

Ha, I used it a few years ago for my BRAVE TALE OF MADDIE CARVER free short; I had no idea at the time that everyone would be using it later.

Well, I have to agree with those who say the cover and the blurb for this particular book weren't so great. But the covers of all her other books appear to be of similar quality. I'm guessing the blurbs and the actual level of the writing are also similar. So if this one book did so much worse than the others, and it was also her first book with a non-white character on the cover, it's reasonable to suspect a connection.

You can't say too much on the basis of just one book. But if you read some of the links she provides, you'll find lots of examples and some fairly detailed statistics. As far as I can tell, it's common for books with non-white main characters to wind up with covers that feature abstract designs, or people viewed only in silhouette, or models who just look a lot more white than should make sense. That suggests publishers believe putting a non-white person on the cover will hurt sales. I hope they're wrong about that. But I'm afraid it's more likely that they know their business.