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    Sending the wrong message

    WARNING this is just a rant, so excuse me while I scream ARRAGHHH!!

    Why do some publishers do this? Why do they completely ignore the diversity of their reading audience and also diverse writers?

    Before I self-published in 2012, I was and still am a voracious reader. Yet some publishers still choose to ignore people of color and other groups whenever they advertise their authors.

    Note to Montlake. Crowing about your new releases that only show white couples is an EPIC FAIL. Think of the message you’re sending, that this is the only target group you either care about or that you don’t have any books ready for release that celebrate diversity.

    If either one is the case. GET ON IT, quickly. If playing with the big boys of publishing means exclusivity and not being inclusive, then I repeat, think of the message that you’re sending.

    Montlake isn’t alone in doing this sort of thing, so this rant also goes for other big publishers out there who fill their front web pages  and newsletters with book covers that inadvertently (or purposely)  tell the reader that the only romance worth having is when the couples are of the same race, or that you can never have enough covers showing model worthy white lovers. What about Asian cover models? Or African? Or African American? Or First Nation, just to give a few examples of the under-represented.

    Or bi-racial, like the President of our country?

    This is 2014, not 1940. Why Montlake, did I click on your site to see a WTF wall full of this:

    ****I decided against posting any screen shots. This is no fault of the authors themselves, and I don’t want this rant to be viewed as such.****

     

    Okay, I’m done. And yes, I feel a bit better now 🙂