Sarah Rees Brennan and Justine Larbalestier said lovely things (Sarah spoils, Justine doesn’t) and my US editor Alvina Ling did a wonderful post in her Beyond the Book series on Guardian‘s road to publication, which also collected a number of MY favourite posts on the publication process, so be sure to check that out.

Internets, I want to reward you if you are one of the lovely people who has purchased the book. So here you may find some website extras in the form of mini-essays.

This essay explains some of the real people behind the names I used for the fake Mansfield College.

And this one talks about the creation of my treasured replica of Mark’s bracelet.

You may rightly imagine very minor spoilers in each.

The advantage of them being in so many incarnations is that I got to grab two songs – one from Crowded House, and one by The Finn Brothers. Some people might call this “cheating”.

“Together Alone” is a song partially about one of the myths underlying Guardian‘s creation. It was this song that made me think, “Hey, maybe I could use song titles for chapter headings?”

“Won’t Give In” is a song about family, and what it means when you belong to a people and a place.

The “Won’t Give In” chapter is near the end, and horrendously spoilery, so instead I will give you an excerpt of “Together Alone”, where Mark tells an origin story.

“Okay. In the beginning…” He hesitated, then shook his head. “Look. This is a dubious version of the myth. It isn’t the whole story, or an entirely true one, and there’s no way to get around it. I can’t even tell it to you in the right language, because you don’t speak it.”

“Chapman’s Homer?” I suggested.

He slanted a tight smile at me. “Heh. Close enough.”

“So,” I said, and half-bowed, trying to mimic Professor Gribaldi’s drawl. “At least be gloriously inaccurate.”

He returned the bow with an arm flourish that set his charms jingling, and tried again.

“Okay,” he said. “This is a story of how mankind was made, and how death entered the world. A long time after the beginning, there are Papa-tuanuku, who is the Earth Mother, and Rangi-nui, who is the Sky-Father. So strong is their affection that they cannot bear to be apart, and remain always in loving embrace. They bring forth many children, but will not relinquish their grip on each other. Those brought forth from Earth’s womb are forced to crawl upon her surface, while their father presses against her. There is only close, moist darkness and suffocating warmth. Like everyone, these children want to stretch and grow without the constraints laid upon them by their parents.

“Some of their sons gather to decide what should be done. One of the brothers says that they should kill their parents, but he is shouted down. Another proposes they do nothing at all and be content in their closeness, but no one listens to him. As always happens in such meetings, the most charismatic speaker wins the argument. One by one, five of the brothers, crawling in their claustrophobic prison-home, set their shoulders against their father and push. And finally, the last of the brothers, the tallest and strongest, lies on his back and pushes with his mighty legs, and measure by tiny measure, their father’s body moves.

“Rangi-nui calls to Papa-tuanuku, and they cleave ever tighter to each other. But they have seeded their own destruction, and the six brothers fight for every finger of space until their father is a torso’s length from their mother. Then a body’s length. Then as far as they can reach with their arms outstretched. And then, with one final heave, they hurl their father high above the loving reach of their mother’s embrace.

“And Sky-Father weeps in his grief and Earth-Mother tosses and rumbles in her anger, but it is done, and nothing they can do can ever reverse it.”

So I’m writing this instead, on the grounds that it is sitting at a computer and typing, and thus looks similar enough to work to fool my laggard conscience. Not a cricket, my conscience. More a very paranoid sloth that wakes up with a start every few days and screams a fearful sound that condenses the very essence of panic.

But I have many things to tell you, internets! Many many things!

First, the Junior Library Guild picked Guardian of the Dead to be one of their Spring 2010 choices.

Fool that I am, and because things are a little different down here, I did not know quite what that was. I was just like, “Oh, that is nice! I like when people like my book.” Then SRB explained it to me, and I was VERY EXCITED. Basically JLG is a school/library book collection development service who look at a lot of books and decide on a relatively few of them that they want to sell to their members. And they chose Guardian!

My excitement was assisted by this visual aid. Pyramids! Who can resist them?

Second, I have very interesting new hair.

Salon straight:

And in its natural state, which is how it will spend most of its time:

I like especially how in that second shot you can’t see my pupils. I look positively demonic. Truth in photography!

Third, I saw Up In The Air and Precious, both of which were very interesting and rather good and superbly acted (especially Precious, holy crap) and both of which I applaud for not deserting their underlying principles to manufacture cheap happy endings.

I ought to do a post about happy endings some time, and why I like them, and why I find overtly manufactured happy endings very disappointing.

Anyway, the point I was getting around to making was that both of them had different trailers for Boy, the latest effort from Whenua Films, which looks choice. (I read a review that was like, “these Māori characters aren’t at all spiritual and in touch with their noble heritage of the earth!” and I was like, American reviewer, the point, you have missed it. The fantastic Sarah Kuhn has a quote from the director illustrating same in her mini-review found here.)

Those are the things I had to tell you, internets! What about you? How have you been? Do you have new hair? Tell me stuff, internets! I’m trying to sort of ease back into work.

* Conversation with SRB, also known as the worst spoiler in the history of the internet, who used to tell people the plot to her book The Demon’s Lexicon by starting with the twist revealed at the end:

Karen: OMG OKAY I READ SCARLETT FEVER
SRB: OMG QUIET DUNT SPOIL
Karen: AHAHAHAHAHAHA WHAT?
SRB: I HAVE IT DOWNSTAIRS
Karen: I CAN SCARCE BELIEVE MY EYES SARAH REES BRENNAN DID YOU TYPE THOSE VERY WORDS WITH YOUR DELICATE FINGERS?
SRB: Spoiling is for when I DUNT HAVE THINGS. Spoiling happens b/c otherwise I HAVE TO WAIT. But I HAVE SCARLETT FEVER. SO DUNT SPOIL.
Karen: Well, all I am saying is that scene where Spencer rises from the chocolate fountain is worth it. Although maybe ten pages of describing how chocolate runs down his chest is a bit much, coming from a sister’s PoV.
SRB: If you are lying I will be so cross!
Karen: Of COURSE I am lying, it’s like you don’t know me at all.
SRB: Hey, with MJ you never know
Karen: Actually that lie is less crazy than some stuff actually in the book, so I concede your point.

Responders were generally outraged by this, although there were a few people of the “but white people are the only people who sell on covers so therefore making a dark-skinned character light-skinned on the cover is okay” stripe who I do not want to bother with (which is why comments on this post will be screened). Even were this true, which no one has proved to my satisfaction, economics do not equal ethics. There is no way for the putative economic benefit of whitewashing to justify the ethical harm it does in visually erasing people of colour from the fictional worlds they inhabit.

But there was one response from people who were justifiably angry that I do not think was practical, and that was the expectation that the author should have spoken up publicly and denounced this cover. Even if, these people said, even if authors really have no control over their covers and it’s all the publisher’s doing, she should make a stand!

This is roughly equivalent to expecting someone who has just acquired their dream job to curse their boss for doing something wrong. In front of a packed press room. While the boss is standing beside them on the podium.

Economics do not equal ethics, but I think it is important to consider how much we demand of people who could endanger their livelihood and their futures by speaking out. Great change has been made by brave people who have spoken out on social injustices committed by their employers, but they paid and paid and paid for it. There is real and substantial risk, and it is sometimes hard to gauge the cost-benefits to society of taking it, especially when we are talking about someone who wrote a story about a woman of colour who could well end up unable to do so ever again if she is decided to be a troublemaker not worth publishing.

Fortunately, this story has a happy ending. Following the outcry of determined and entirely justified people who spoke out against racism, Bloomsbury will republish the cover, with a new model who resembles the description of the main character more closely. I applaud this decision, even as I am disappointed and angry about the terrible mistake that made it necessary.

Anyway, I do not so much want to talk about Jaclyn’s cover as to discuss mine. I know, I’m such an egoist! But I thought I could perhaps shed some light on the process of cover creation and the social justice implications and authorial control thereof via the creation of my Australian/New Zealand cover*.

Okay, so that’s the cover that will appear on shelves. (There are some things to note about this being a slim, white-appearing, sort of unclothed girl, which I will get to later.)

Just to remind people, or inform newcomers (hi!) Guardian of the Dead is a book set in New Zealand/Aoteoroa that depends a great deal upon Māori mythology as the guiding supernatural force of the land (there are others – it’s an “all stories can be true depending on belief” narrative – but that’s the major influence). A lot of the book is concerned with how the white protagonist handles the reality of those myths.

Here was the first potential cover I saw:

My screams, they were heard from space.

Here is the email I sent my editors after I had run up and down the stairs gibbering for a while.

I hope you can put this diplomatically to the designer, but I’m going to be direct here, because it makes me very uncomfortable: there is absolutely no way you can put tā moko on an apparently-white girl’s face, especially with a pattern he just made up, and have that not be incredibly racist. Moko is something people earn the right to wear; women don’t traditionally get full-face tattoos; they’re traditional designs usually applied by someone who has trained in the art, conveying ancestry and achievements (not random patterns); and Pākehā desires to wear moko or “Māori-inspired” body art are controversial at best. That cover is really inappropriate.

Then I clicked send and had an anxiety attack. Good times!

I was freaked, readers. I have alluded briefly above to how much control first-time authors have over cover decisions, and the reality is, none whatsoever. Sometimes publishers give authors some say, but they are very rarely obliged to by the terms of their contract, and often they don’t. Every imprint of every publisher will have a different response, and often it’s not even the publisher who has the final say – the book buyers for big chains might want something different and then BAM new cover ahoy.

I know authors who have provided a cover brief and get something almost exactly like or even better than they wanted. I know authors who have got the first look at their cover after it had gone to the printers (sometimes they were happy, sometimes not), or who were shown a cover and told “It’s going to be our catalogue cover! The catalogue goes to press in three days. ANY COMMENTS NO EXCELLENT.” Ursula LeGuin had to cope with crappy white-washed covers of her books for years until she was in a position where, as a bankable talent, she was able to leverage a little more control over what went on the book.

My point is that my publishers could have made me eat this cover, and then my choices would have been to swallow and say “mmmm!” or vomit in public and get branded as a disloyal spew monster, who, incidentally, had already signed a contract to deliver a second book. I cannot even imagine how uncomfortable that could have been, much less the damage it could have done to my career, and I honestly don’t know what I would have chosen to do. And I knew all this when I wrote that email, and I was really, really scared.

But my editors, who are awesome, wrote back and said thank you for explaining! They would go in a different direction. Afterwards they confirmed that they had already been uneasy about the implications of using tā moko, and would have consulted with an authority before proceeding in any case. But my explanation had made it sufficiently clear that this design would be a bad idea. That was the end of the racist cover.

Ethical publisher, awesome editors, happy ending! But wait. Wasn’t there a thing about implications I wanted to talk about?

Right. This is a conversation slightly different to the one I was participating in above, and I want to make that divide clear. The one above is about racism; the one below is going to be about the tyranny of conventional beauty standards (which intersect with, but do not solely comprise, racism).

As you can see the cover of the book features a slender red-haired lady whose visible skin is white. She is the antagonist. The protagonist, who narrates the story, is a fat blonde white girl who is not viewed as pretty in the society she lives in. Ellie is six feet tall, overweight, flat-chested, and pimply, with skin she describes as “more skim milk than cream”. She does not have the sort of features conventionally regarded as deformities (scars, facial growths, etc), but neither is she anything but (again, conventionally) plain. She has long, straight blonde hair that she regards as the only pretty thing about her.

(It is incidentally difficult to accurately convey her appearance to readers because the story is told from her PoV, and most readers who have spoken to me about this have assumed that a lot of her self-assessment is based on typical teenage-girl low self-esteem about her body image. In my opinion Ellie is more or less accurate regarding her looks. She is also more or less okay with them, and becomes more so – she has moments of doubt, because when you’re a non-attractive woman in a culture that prizes very narrow beauty standards it’s hard not to, and she sometimes worries about how much space she takes up in the world, but she is on the whole more concerned about other things.)

The person on the cover does actually exist in the book, so this is not a case of pretending that this skinny person is Ellie and thus misrepresenting a character who is not attractive by Western standards. Although the cover person is not actually white, she textually appears so and passes as such for half the book, [SPOILERS] being half-Māori, and half-patupaiarehe, (but identifying as patupaiarehe) a species that is canonically pale-skinned. So it’s not whitewashing either. (Though it also doesn’t actually help correct the lack of visible characters of colour on book covers.)

But what it is is a very conventionally attractive woman (by Western standards) on the cover of a book told from the perspective of a young woman who is not. I, and my editors, and a lot of people in the book world, think this is in general very problematic. I am going to explain a little bit about how it happened in this case, but I want to establish that I am not trying to excuse what the cover is. It’s right there; pretty lady on the cover to entice the potential reader.

We wanted Ellie on the cover.

The first problem was that a search for “strong+girl” in the picture libraries brought up many many pictures of girls in bikinis hugging their boyfriend’s biceps.

The second problem was that organising a photo shoot with a model would have been both expensive and risky – it’s hard to get something like that right, and it’s hard to throw it away if it’s not right when you’ve spent so much on it already.

The third problem, which I kept in my heart, is that I did not believe a model could be found through any customary channels – even one of the right physical proportions – who wasn’t pretty. I felt that putting a big woman who was pretty on the cover and saying “This is Ellie” would have been a misrepresentation and a betrayal.

So my publishers showed me the cover, and said, do you like it? And I said yes, because I do. It’s creepy and mysterious, just like the woman it features, and like the mood of the book. We would all have preferred big, strong Ellie on the cover, but the entirety of established cultural expectations was working against it, and frankly, we gave in. Mine is a debut novel, from a non-established author. No one ever told me this, but I suspect a search for the exactly right cover might have taken more money than was worth risking on my work.

As far as visually standing against tyrannical and misogynistic beauty standards goes, this cover is a failure. What I hope is that the cover, which is very pretty, will help get a fat, not-pretty protagonist into the hands of readers who will find a book where she is shown to be worthy of love, friendship, and respect (and hopefully think she is as awesome as I do). Economics is not ethics, but sometimes we compromise, trying to be as ethical as we can within economical demands.

I have nothing but respect for my Australian editors (and my American editors!). I think Allen and Unwin is a fine house, and that I am lucky to be with them, not least because as soon as I sent my objections to the moko cover, they said, “You are right.” I am disappointed that this cover is not something else, but I am happy with what it is, especially in comparison to what it could have been.

The US cover, by the way, avoided all of these issues entirely by going with an iconic cover featuring the mask that plays a big part in the book. I like that cover a lot. But I hope that my talking about the ANZ cover has exposed a little of the complexity and compromise in the ethics of cover creation.

* Incidentally? When I started thinking about writing this post, I emailed my Australian editors telling them that I planned to do so, and asking if they had any concerns. I am not so brave that I will stand on a podium and shout either.

So you seem to have written another thrilling, tense novel – with a goodly dollop of URST and very appealing characters. How extraordinarily clever of you!

Thank you, S. I think you’re neat!

What else do I think is neat, could it be…. MY AUSTRALIAN/NEW ZEALAND COVER?

Wait, that wasn’t very patriotic of me.

My NEW ZEALAND/AUSTRALIAN COVER!

(ETA: I should note that this might not be the final-FINAL cover.)

That’s from the Allen and Unwin catalogue page for Guardian of the Dead, where you can also find out exciting things like the price as well as poke around many other fine books.

*happyclapping*

Would you like to know an Interesting Fact about the person on the cover? That isn’t the protagonist! Mmmm, mysterious redheads.