CBC Diversity Committee Hosts a Panel to Discuss Children’s and YA Book Covers

September 28, 2012

How can we best create strong children’s and YA book covers that represent cultural and ethnic diversity? This question was at the heart of a panel discussion led by the CBC Diversity Committee.

On September 25, CBC Diversity hosted a panel featuring all of the bloggers who contributed entries to their “It’s Complicated! – Book Covers” blog series: author Coe Booth, Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing art director Laurent Linn, Penguin Young Readers Group senior VP of sales Felicia Frazier, Flying Pig Bookstore owner/author Elizabeth Bluemle, and Barry Goldblatt Literary agent Joseph Monti. The lunchtime event, moderated by Alvina Ling, CBC Diversity vice-chair and executive editorial director, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, continued the conversation begun online, addressing the challenges the panelists have faced and successes they've had in selling/designing/writing books portraying diverse characters on the cover.

"The group theorized about new approaches to book covers that might service the content of the books, the authors, and readers. While removing all faces from YA covers and relying on iconography rather than photographs may free readers to envision characters as they would like, Ling raised the possibility that younger readers particularly may value the physical depiction of a central character. Linn suggested that depictions of emotion are often what draw readers to books, rather than to a specific image or the race of the individual. Linn believes that part of the appeal of the cover for A Certain October is the “hopeful” nature of the image. Readers receive an impression of the main character from the cover, but the partial concealment of her face as she turns skyward allows the emotion in the image to play a greater role. Such images successfully “show the character without showing the character.” Whether iconic, photographic, or somewhere in between, Linn emphasized that each book and its cover treatment have to be considered on their own terms."

Read the full Publishers Weekly article here>>

To learn more about Diversity in children's literature, check out this ShelfTalker blog post>>