In 2009, author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delivered a TED Talk that would be echoed in public schools across the United States. Titled “The Danger of a Single Story,” she begins her presentation with a story about herself—a child in Nigeria reading Eurocentric children’s books that were absent of her culture and her perspective.
According to a 2020 New York Times analysis, 90 percent of American published fiction books between 1950 and 2018 were written by white authors. During the same year, the National Endowment of the Arts released a report that indicated approximately a quarter of regular readers are people of color. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, many American institutions vowed to confront racial inequity, including several in the publishing industry. According to PEN America, traditional publishing houses pledged to invest in people of color’s stories and examine policies supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Although the New York Times report does not distinguish between self-publishing and traditional publishing, historically, the financial disparity in authorship has favored those with the availability to write and the resources to publish. With existing biases present across the publishing ecosystem, marginalized writers have found greater creative autonomy as self-publishers and indie authors to explore identity on the page.
Bringing Southern Comfort to a Fantasy World
Deston Munden, Fantasy and Sci-Fi author of Tavern, writes with authenticity and accessibility. Both of his genres tend to use formal language or words that aren’t easily understood by the layperson, he says; he seeks to change that.
Munden’s values as a Black author from Outerbanks, North Carolina, have guided his journey through indie authorship. Munden was initially rejected by traditional publishing houses that told him they were unsure how to market him, even though today he’s often told by fans that his writing is emotional and easy to connect with.
“It’s harder … to market when you’re a minority because people already have expectations of you. Even the people within your minority have expectations of what you should be doing, and that is probably one of the biggest uphill battles with being a minority indie publisher.”
“You don't see a lot of Black Southern Fantasy writers. You don't see them at all, really. Usually they're in the Midwest or the North. I'm in a weird space where a lot of people are like, ‘Your accent don't feel right.’”
Munden’s observations have been made by others in the industry. The Southern Review of Books, an independent press in North Carolina, released a statement in 2020 about the challenges of bringing attention to regional Southern voices. “In publishing, as in politics, money has a voice, and the continued consolidation of publishing companies and the money behind them will widen the chasm between the haves and have-nots.” The statement reaffirmed their dedication to celebrating the chance for greater representation of the South in literature.
Munden’s second novel, Dusk Mountain Blues, centers a self-proclaimed hillbilly family, the Caldwells, who live on a backwater planet. The term hillbilly is often thrown at rural Americans condescendingly, implying poverty, ignorance, and violence. So when a beta reader made an offhand comment about space hillbillies, Munden felt strongly about including the wording in the final print to emphasize that the rural South is a place of positivity, empathy, and knowledge.
Munden’s fans have expressed surprise at how accepting his worlds are.
“I want to be the change I want to see in the world. There's not a lot of people like me, so I want to change that by presenting it in a way that you can come to me as much as I can come to you.”
Stoking Imagination by Diversifying
Falencia Jean-Francois, who uses she/her and they/them pronouns, planned on marketing to a traditional publishing house until she discovered an easier path through self-publishing. After publishing her first two Romantasy books, Jean-Francois, who lives with their partner in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, self-published Devil of the Deep, a Haitian-inspired Fantasy novel set on the high seas, featuring queer romance, pirates, and religious conflict. That was when Bindery Books, an independent press, reached out to Jean-Francois about republishing as an opportunity to deepen the story.
“I was also going through a hard time and having a hard year, and kind of finding myself in different ways, and so it felt right to showcase my identities,” Jean-Francois says. “I wanted to see more representation of Haitians in the publishing world. I wanted to see more representations of queer folks in the publishing world. Those two identities together are significant.”
Jean-Francois also makes an effort to incorporate the languages she speaks into her texts, with an emphasis on Haitian Creole.
“I really want to showcase Haitian Creole for the beautiful language that it is and raise more awareness of its status as one of Haiti's official languages,” Jean-Francois says.
Other indie authors have sought to incorporate their native languages into their books, despite messaging from traditional publishers that this can make the book harder to market. Gloria Anzaldúa, author of How to Tame a Wild Tongue, received criticism throughout her career for her mixed use of English, Spanish, and Chicano dialects in her writing. She coined the effort to stifle her and other language speakers “linguistic terrorism” and purposely left passages untranslated in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.
The United States has consistently low representation of translated works, cited at 3 percent of all published books. There is no precise data about the number of bilingual books in the United States, nor regarding bilingual LGBTQ+ stories.
Jean-Francois sees a mirror between traditional publishing and the independent publishing ecosystem and calls out indie and self-publishers for emulating the traditional publishing world as a method for achieving success.
“There's room for a little bit more imagination as to what self-publishing can truly be. That is where the inclusivity would come in. That being said, I still think that both indie and traditional publishing exist within the systems and structures that are overwhelmingly non-diverse.”
Balancing Perception and Identity
Illustrator and author Elaine Ho is wary of assigning herself a genre based on her identity. Having grown up in Singapore, having graduated with a degree in psychology, and now as an illustrator by trade, Ho navigates independent publishing through many lenses.
Her latest book, Cry, Voidbringer, is a dark political novel exploring postcolonial societies repeating the crimes of their oppressors. She doesn’t want the book described as an Asian Fantasy novel; the setting is a fictional country, where fictional languages are spoken.
Her experience as an illustrator drives her understanding of how books are marketed and shelved. As such, the cover for Cry, Voidbringer is minimal, with a gray background, simple lettering, and a white void expanding from the text. The halo effect, or “judging a book by its cover,” is a cognitive bias a reader develops when they see a book cover. There they can decide the book’s genre and quality. Ho took this into account when designing the cover for the book.
“I can see the importance of highlighting diverse authors, and I fully agree with that. But at the same time, I also think that it creates a pigeonhole for authors of color to be writing in a particular way that reflects their particular culture, and then that stifles them.”
Ho believes that it’s too early to know if representation in the publishing workforce and the expansion of the indie author ecosystem will change the identity tokenization. At the same time, Jean-Francois says change won’t come from greater content representation but from representation in the decision-making process. To enact it, she encourages readers to support marginalized authors by buying books, reading them, and discussing them.
At the end of her TED Talk, Ngozi Adichie warned that empowering one narrative reduces lived experiences and complex communities to one dimension, leading to greater misinformation and stereotyping. Munden echoes her sentiments—and views it as a mindset shift that can happen among authors, too.
“We tend to forget that we're people, not problems. And we need to start accepting that people want to write and be who they are,” Munden says. “That's one of the biggest things that I had to learn as an author, is to just let myself be myself. I can't be anyone else, and what I bring to the table is going to be unique if I know how to present it to someone.”
Samantha Margot
