Story power. Human Power. Black Power. To me, story power, human power, female power, black power, et. al. are all trains that run along the same vast system of tracks known as ‘publishing.’

It’s why Black History Month is such a fantastic time to highlight authors of color, to maneuver otherwise fringe/invisible authors—schedule those ‘trains’—to travel into the public view.

In an age where discoverability is a nightmare for all authors, Black History Month offers an organic time to highlight authors of color and treat readers to writers they might never otherwise see. This is critical because stories are important.

Stories shape cultural values.

A new breakout author could completely tip the pop culture world on its side. But how can these authors break out if they’re never even unboxed?

As we’ve learned from pop culture history, shows like Star Trek did far more to change public opinions, to ameliorate racial tensions, close the gender gap, push women’s lib, and ease xenophobia than a hundred protests.

Sure, Star Trek was TV (crossing the streams) but it was STORY, and these days Netflix and Amazon are scooping up books for production.

Just sayin’.

Story power is real! Stories bridge gaps legislation can’t. Why? Because stories allow us to empathize and understand another perspective in a way like no other. We can BE another gender, race, or species!

Story power is…well, POWERFUL.

That was why, when Random Penguin and Barnes & Noble decided to put literature in blackface to celebrate Black History Month, I was livid. A chance to highlight new, fresh voices was squandered.

Their loss, my gain.

What did I have? I’m blessed with a big mouth and a large platform of wonderful readers who CARE. I also have no filter, and passionate fans and friends eager to help. Which is how I can bring you *drum roll*….

Story Power From a Fresh POV

I stalked reached out to a subscriber and colleague, the brilliant author Lynn Emery. Since she likes mystery, murder, suspense and a high body count as much as I do, I figured we’d hit it off well.

I’d tell y’all ALL about her—SO much to gush about—but this is one seriously accomplished lady, so her full bio is HERE.

A couple of highlights? Lynn Emery has won three coveted Emma Awards. Romantic Times Magazine not only recognized her earlier works in romance but also nominated her later fiction Good Woman Blues (August 2005, HarperCollins Publishers) for Best Multicultural Mainstream novel of 2005.

BET turned her third novel, After All into a movie, and I need to stop there because the gushing will just get absurd.

***So, seriously, y’all can go read her full bio.

Suffice to say, Lady Lynn is a force.

Granted, I was angry about the shenanigans with Random Penguin and Barnes & Noble. But, I was also self-aware enough to appreciate that my anger came from the position of a spectator, a consumer, an ally maybe?

So, I wanted a voice from the inside. A voice of authority, and so I reached out to Lynn. What did she think of all this, especially after the RWA meltdown? We had a fantastic and enlightening conversation. Lynn, the amazing lady she is, generously put part of our conversation into a post I know you’ll enjoy…

Take it away Lynn!

Story Power: Why Can’t a Book Just Be a Book?

Black people—mostly women—who love a good romance are super stoked about The Photograph. I know what you’re doing right now. Looking at the title of this post and wondering why I’m talking about a movie.

Hang with me a minute.

Articles have been written on black pop culture sites praising the heavens because it’s just a romance. The authors of said articles contrast The Photograph to Queen and Slim.

They pose the question…

‘Why can’t we have a black romance without trauma?’

In other words, why does every love story about a black couple have to involve the themes of oppression, suffering, and death? Or prostitutes, gangstas, and drug dealing?

They point to how many years it’s been since we had such sweet classics as Love and Basketball, Love Jones and Brown Sugar.

***Btw, Love and Basketball is my favorite (sigh).

Sometimes we simply want a cute meet, flirtatious banter, trouble, arguments, and then loves wins. Okay, back to books.

Let me make this clear, I’m not the Black People Whisperer. So, don’t take this as the definitive ‘How All Black People Feel’ on this topic, but sometimes we just want a book to be a book.

And black writers?

Sometimes, We Just Want to Write

No heavy topics or weighty issues. Another caveat, we love and devour books that tackle the meaty (and sometimes depressing) subjects of slavery, racism, mass incarceration, and more.

We know those are issues that need to be voiced, written about, and tackled. Daily. Relentlessly. Thank you very much.

And yes, there are black prostitutes, criminals, and drug addicts. BUT… sometimes we just want to read and write mysteries, sci-fi, horror, fantasy, etc. No lesson, no message.

And please Lord, no trauma.

Okay, story time!

Several years ago, I attended a writers conference, as writers are wont to do. As part of the draw for authors was the chance to have one-on-one appointments with editors and agents.

For around ten minutes or so, we could pitch books in progress with the goal of getting an agent or editor interested.

I’d switched genres, having written around twelve romance novels for various publishers (Kensington, HarperCollins, Penguin). Yet my true love (see what I did there?) had always been murder mysteries. Which is why most of my books were romantic suspense.

To quote my late husband, ‘A dead body always has to be in there somewhere.’

So, I’m at the conference and I go into my appointment. An agent who already had my synopsis and the first three chapters. Btw, she didn’t know my publishing history.

I walk in with a smile and noticed her bright expression dims. To her credit she recovered fast. I almost didn’t catch the reaction. Almost. I sit.

She looks down at the proposal in front of her, sighs and says, ‘So, these characters are black.’ It went downhill from there.

To my credit I didn’t cuss her out.

Deep Breaths

You see, I could tell she’d been at least engaged with the characters and the story. Until I walked in with my brown skin self. I let her squirm and stammer through some BS to kill the time.

I may have controlled my temper, but I wasn’t going to make it easy. She struggled to make negative points about the proposal. I didn’t try to help with self-deprecating statements, although I didn’t argue with her either.

After twelve books from NY I knew better. It’s all opinion. Educated opinion, but still subjective to a large degree. She could have been correct, and I sure as hell hadn’t written the next great mystery masterpiece. But it was good.

Three middle-class black women who turn amateur sleuths to solve a murder, the ex-husband of one of them.

Best Enemies stars a soccer mom, an ex-stripper, and a committed gold digger. A professional freelance developmental editor agreed with me (to my immense relief when I got her notes).

And so, we return to our topic.

You see, black authors have historically faced a challenge if our fiction doesn’t include misery or the fight for civil rights. It’s not that we don’t include some of that in our genre fiction, but mostly not or at best a light touch. And we get dinged for it.

Translation—rejected and ignored, or even told the stories aren’t ‘real enough.’

Sometimes a cozy mystery is just a cozy mystery. Sometimes a space opera is just about traveling to other worlds and cool tech. Sometimes a horror novel is just about getting the bejeezus scared out of you.

Authors of color have the glorious freedom to write the stories inside us. Some of us will write about white privilege, racism, mass incarceration, and other issues that affect us daily.

But some of us will just write about amateur sleuths, space travelers, ghosts, and more. No message. Just fiction. We’re making room for all the things. Join us.

It’s Black History Month. Yay!!! Here’s my blog post Badass Black History to help celebrate story power.

Story Power & Books to Love

I present my reading list. Please know I had to restrain myself to limit the number. I kept finding something else on my Kindle app and going ‘Oh, that’s so good!’ Yeah, I’m all over the place lucky for you. Feast upon this buffet. You’re welcome.

Horror

Spook Lights by Eden Royce

Sisters of the Wild Sage by Nicole Givens Kurtz

Forever Vacancy, a Colors In Darkness Anthology

The Adventure of the Spook House by C. Michael Forsyth

Mystery

Blanch on the Lam by Barbara Neely

My Darkest Prayer by SA Cosby

Tangled Roots by Angela Henry

A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes (and anything else he writes!)

Sci-Fi/ Fantasy

Order of the Seers by Cerece Rennie Murphy

The Wolf Queen by Cerece Rennie Murphy

Taurus Moon: Relic Hunter by D. K. Gaston

Steamfunk by Milton Davis and Balogun Ojetade

Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology by Milton Davis and Charles Saunders

The Acacia Trilogy by David Anthony Durham

Story Power & Thank You, Lynn

I INHALE books, so I’m really grateful for this new list. When Lynn and I spoke, it was funny/interesting to me how we’d come to similar conclusions. Her from the author’s perspective and me from the reader’s perspective.

Not that I haven’t read the heavy books or shy away from them, but when Lynn gave me a list of new horror, mystery, and sci-fi/fantasy I hadn’t before heard about? Better yet, from authors of color? I was like a kid in a candy store.You mean I can just enjoy stories with a fresh cast of characters?

Story power is real regardless. It’s why I believe all genres serve an important function and meet readers where they are. It doesn’t all have to be hard core literary stuff.

Again, Star Trek?

***Trekkies know no color.

We (readers) can learn about others who aren’t ‘just like us’ simply by being consistently immersed in their worlds and struggling by their side facing their problems and sharing their victories. When we come to care about the characters, we form a unique bond.

In fact, the MORE stories like this are in circulation, the better the odds readers will be exposed to a wide and varying array of characters they’ll come to better understand, love and enjoy.

I hope y’all will check out Lynn’s books and the books she was kind enough to curate for us. As writers, we all bleed red (ink).

I LOVE Hearing from You!

If you have some questions of comments for Lynne, you can leave them here. I also would love some suggestions for classes, and am putting together the upcoming classes for spring.

I’ve had a bugger of a time getting over my cough, so I am offering these three ON DEMAND classes on sale before I delete them.

On Demand Branding: When YOUR NAME ALONE Can Sell

Normally $55, and now $35. This class will be deleted to make room for a newer version. Most of the content will remain the same since what I teach is evergreen, so it is definitely a bargain.

ON DEMAND: Bring on the Binge: How to Plot and Write a Series

Normally $75 and now only $50 and this is over four hours of instruction on everything you need to know about plot. So if you want to know about the synopsis? You will BLOW it out of the water after this.

Also…

ON DEMAND: The Art of Character for Series

Normally $75 and also only $50 and this class pairs excellent with the plotting class (like a fine chardonnay and a Chilean sea bass). Treat yourself!

The post Story Power: Why the Lecture? Why Can’t a Book Just Be a Book? appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

For those who might not know, in the United States, Black History Month is celebrated for the entire month of February. The point of dedicating an entire month is so we can bring focus to the works, art, history, and voices of a specific community within our vast and diverse nation.

We can learn, grow, heal hurts, right wrongs, increase understanding and create and deepen friendships that will (ideally) endure far into the future.

Like most other authors, I’m a huge advocate of literacy. Books, stories open up new worlds, and place us in perspectives we have no other way to experience.

Reading is Crucial for Understanding

Stories allow us to be another gender, race, or even species (Um, Trekkies?).

It is a level of empathy we can experience no other way, which is why it’s so vital.

Which is why for the LIFE of me I cannot understand what the HELL Barnes & Noble was thinking with their Black History Month initiative…which apparently to only THEIR shock was canceled midday Wednesday after massive online backlash (which I hope to fuel).

*pours out gasoline* *strikes match*

I know I’m going off my usual script here, but it’s been a long time since something made me this angry.

When I first saw the Barnes & Noble ‘diversity initiative’ I thought the same exact thing as Frederick Joseph, the black author of the upcoming book The Black Friend: On Being a Better White Person.

“Instead of platforming black writers during Black History Month, they’re basically doing blackface. They’re using our imagery, our likeness, to still sell white narratives.”

Frederick Joseph

AMEN! I could not agree more. Who was smoking what when they approved of something as insulting as to put white literary characters in blackface to honor Black History Month?

No, I am NOT making this up.

New covers on classics only illustrated with multiethnic characters. They PAID good money to be this insulting.

Penguin Random House, I literally frigging give up on you. We are DONE. Barnes & Noble I will never spend another cent in your stores EVER.

*throws furniture*

And Barnes & Noble is being run by a British C.E.O.? I thought y’all were supposed to be teaching us rube Yanks something about sensitivity.

Pound sand.

Black History Month: Literature Goes Blackface

Barnes & Noble has screwed up so catastrophically that I am embarrassed I ever envisioned my books gracing their shelves.

So the bright idea Barnes & Noble had to honor African Americans this month? Redo covers from classic books like—I kid you not—Moby Dick, The Wizard of Oz, Alice and Wonderland—but make the characters on the covers dark-skinned.

Oh-kay, so classic books written by white authors, for white audiences chronicling white problems are appropriate for Black History Month…if we just change the color of the characters on the covers? Just put them in blackface?

NO ONE THOUGHT THIS WOULD BE OFFENSIVE? Yes I am posting the pic again because *screams*…..

What About Actual African American Authors?

Last I checked, there are actual living breathing African American authors that Barnes & Noble could have used its remaining power and influence to highlight and promote.

In an age where discoverability is a nightmare for ALL authors who aren’t Stephen King (no hating on King, just we’re down to a handful of mega brands commanding most of the name-recognition), why not help authors of color?

Why NOT? There is a DEDICATED MONTH TO DO THIS!

Readers are wanting something new and fresh to read. We’re in a unique time in history where readers are WANTING to read authors of color. Race relations are a hot topic right now, and this was a huge window of opportunity.

And you missed it. You could have used this moment in time to take a primed audience and introduce them to authors of color, but instead, you squandered it on titles that anyone over the age of six knows exists and has seen a movie version.

Barnes and Noble, do you really think we’ve NOT yet heard of Alice and Wonderland? That we somehow missed The Wizard of Oz?

Who in your marketing department thought that we wanted to spend our very limited free time reading Moby-Frigging-Dick?

Oh, but the book is somehow better and less mind-numbingly boring because Morgan Freeman posed for the cover?

Bite me, Barnes & Noble. Just…bite me.

What I find fascinating is I’ve been on the hobby horse of exposure-dollar bullsprinkles, and how this industry will do everything it can to screw over authors and avoid paying them.

You Know What I Think?

Some beancounter crunched numbers and it was cheaper to redo some covers of white people books with dark-skinned characters than it was to risk that some authors of color might break out and sell big.

Don’t have to pay Lewis Carroll or Shakespeare royalties. I never thought I’d be mentioning Lewis Carroll in Black History Month. Wonders never cease.

I really have fallen down a rabbit hole.

Barnes & Noble has lamely offered what I will call The J.K. Rowling Defense, how Rowling claimed she never expressly described Hermione Granger as any race. Publishing and B&N then used that lamely to go back through the classics where race was never expressly described and **POOF** make the characters ethnic. And THERE is some diversity!

No one is going to imagine Alice in Alice in Wonderland as anything other than a wealthy white girl of a privileged time. The entire POINT of Black History Month is to highlight black people and their works, their art, their history, their voices and THEIR STORIES.

It is the entire frigging reason for the month. There is SO much to learn about. An incredible richness of language, custom, culture, history, myth that too many people–READERS–are missing out on. That you—YOU—Barnes & Noble, that YOU publishing industry could have done something REAL about.

Instead, you offer people of color this petty token? When y’all could have offered something real? As in tables or giant glorious displays of books by black authors in the flagship store in NYC on 5th Avenue? But you didn’t. You could have. But you didn’t.

SHAME ON YOU!

This is…

Is there a stronger word for atrocity? To do this is essentially saying that people of color are incapable of having their own art or their own stories…so let’s lend them some white stories and help them out.

God, I just can’t! I am so, so, so sorry that the publishing industry has done this to you. It’s appalling.

White People Get Offended Too

I get it. I know that I’m whiter than a paper plate of Minute Rice trapped in a blizzard. But I’m a human and also a female, which comes with a bag of worms there. I can also empathize and WANT to empathize.

It’s why I want to know about books from authors with perspectives I NEED to see from, and I don’t believe that perspective includes a half-mad sea captain hunting an albino whale.

God even the WHALE is white! Did they make the whale black, too?

*sobs into laptop*

Granted, I can never truly know what it’s like to be a person of color. The closest I can get is pretty much STORY.

Which is why saying the publishing industry and Barnes & Noble dropped the ball does not BEGIN to cover cataclysmic proportions of how they’ve insulted a) people of color b) authors of color c) authors d) readers e) anyone with a brain f) anyone with half a brain g) anyone with a moral compass…

AHHHHHHHHH!

*breathes into paper bag*

This is why I strive to read many different genres from a wide array of authors, time-periods, opinions, and backgrounds. I WANT to be uncomfortable, to be challenged. This is how we form bonds, common ground, understanding.

Black History Month and Focus Time

Time can get away from me, which is why it’s good for me to be deliberate about what I’m choosing to read.

One day tends to blend into the next and the next into the next until a year has passed. So Black History Month or Women’s History Month or Asian/Pacific History Month is helpful for me.

These months are earmarks. Reminders. Black History Month is where I discovered novels like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Most of my favorite African American authors are non-fiction, so I rely a lot on Black History Month to discover the novels.

I’ve read fiction, non-fiction, memoirs and more, and I count on booksellers to help me.

Booksellers Should Be There to Help

I generally can count on Audible to offer up suggestions, books I might never have found on my own, stories that I may have never discovered. Librarians will do their magic and curate wonderful tables highlighting authors other than the megas we see donning every airport bookstore.

Historically, Barnes & Noble would do the same. But this? This is why the aliens don’t land.

Seriously Publisher’s Weekly, Random Penguin, Barnes & Noble? Y’all need to go sit in the corner and really think hard about what you’ve done. More importantly about what you’ve not done.

Shame on you.

For Authors of Color

My goal with this blog has been to help ALL authors. I’ve spent over ten years and millions of words going to the mattresses for creatives—traditionally published, self-published, indie published. I’ve stood behind all forms of publishing namely BECAUSE so many voices are being ignored by traditional publishing.

Or y’all get this…I don’t even know what to call this. I’d meant to blog on something else when I saw this headline and I was so angry I couldn’t see straight.

This is sickening. Just know it did NOT go unnoticed. We see you. We see the charade and we will not tolerate this behavior and will not let this pass. You deserve the best.

Go create because the world needs more stories. We need YOUR stories!

The post Barnes & Noble Puts Literary Classics in Blackface for Black History Month appeared first on Kristen Lamb.