RITAs So White

Hi everyone! I am YA, and now MG author Barbara Binns , writer of contemporary and realistic fiction for adolescents and teens. My tagline tells you what I am about - Stories of Real Boys Growing Into Real Men - and the people who love them.  My newest book, Courage, is middle grade fiction that will be coming out this summer from Harper Collins.


If you care about romance (and I bet you do, that’s why you love reading this blog) you know that it's a billion-dollar industry that outperforms all other book genres. It's also an industry plagued by an inclusion problem.

Especially when it comes to books by black authors.

The RITA Award, the top honor for romance writers, is presented by RWA, the Romance Writers of America. After announcing yet another slate of finalists for the 2018 RITA with a disappointing lack of diversity, the  RWA issued a statement admitting the organization has a problem with diversity. In its 36 year history, the nearly all white RITA contest judges have somehow never considered a book by a black author  worthy of a RITA. Click HERE to read the RWA Board’s statement.

In 2017, Bea and Leah Koch authored a report on diversity in the romance genre. The Koch’s run The Ripped Bodice (http://www.therippedbodicela.com/), a romance bookstore in Culver City, LA. They found that fewer books by authors of color were published by the leading romance presses in 2017 compared to the previous year, despite an increase in the numbers of romance books published. Few of those authors of color (AOC) were African American.  Click here for a PDF copy of the report.  The Koch's noted that, “Clearly there is plenty of room to pull up more chairs as long as the people sitting in those chairs are white.” And now both Kimani Press, Harlequin's African American line, and Crimson Romance, a Simon & Schuster line featuring a larger than average percentage of AOC among it's authors, are closing.

Riptide is a New Jersey-based publisher (noted on the report as having 4.8% of their books written by AOC in 2017). Queer romance writer Cole McCade, once one of those authors, described Riptide as “at all levels hostile to me as a person of color”. Click here to read details of his experience,  including an email from Riptide editor Sarah Lyons stating: “We don’t mind POC But I will warn you – and you have NO idea how much I hate having to say this – we won’t put them on the cover, because we like the book to, you know, sell.”

Riptide has since accepted Lyons’s resignation. Which does nothing to change the overall attitude.

Take a look at your own recent reads. Do any of them have a black hero or heroine? Were any written by a black author? People like Brenda Jackson, Rochelle Ayers, Alyssa Cole, Piper Huguley, Farrah Rochon, and Rebel Miller. 

Black romance authors write historical fiction, contemporary, dystopia, suspense, paranormal, LGBT, and sci-fi romance. They write about cowboys, gangsters, billionaires and preachers. They write about black love and interracial, multicultural love. They write romance that is inspirational, or clean or sizzling with sexuality. They write long novels and short novellas.

If none of these books or authors are on your shelves or TBR lists, maybe that’s why even bestselling black authors get little respect from romance publishers or RITA judges who have never felt the urge to open one and discover that love is love, no matter the outer wrapper.

We black authors also write YA. 

My own experience comes from the publication of my first novel, Pull, a YA romance. My publisher daringly placed my African American lead on the cover. Shortly after publication, I attended a romance book fair in Milwaukee where I was the only author of color and one of only a few YA romance authors. Meaning my book was one of the few that young people had to chose from. On two occasions, white teens came and looked at my book. They picked it up, read the back cover (the publisher had an enticing blurb there) and even opened the first chapter. And, if I do say so myself, I had a great opening hook, a reach out and grab the reader first page. Those kids went off to get their parents and drag them back to buy the book. The white parents took one look at me and the book cover, and took their kids away. One even told their child in so many words, “This book is not for you,” without ever looking beyond the black boy on the cover. Before reading a single word, they decided the book was untouchable.

I can’t help wondering how many RITA judges have that same attitude. Do the words on the page written by a black author have to be twice as good as others to get past that initial prejudice? I left RWA a few years ago because I saw the signs and signals and grew tired of being quietly excluded. (And because I primarily write YA, and have now slipped into Middle Grade with my newest book, Courage) I am now part of SCBWI - Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators.

The children’s book industry has been addressing the inclusion issue for several years, thanks to the work of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (http://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/books/pcstats.asp) to document and track diversity and inclusion, childrens book publisher Lee and Low (https://www.leeandlow.com/), WeNeedDiverseBooks (https://diversebooks.org/) and similar initiatives that keep the issue in the forefront. As a result, SCBWI is well into the process of addressing them with initiatives at both the individual chapter and national levels. I'm proud to say the Illinois chapter, which I belong to, is at the forefront of the diversity and inclusion efforts.

All is not lost in RWA land. In a few weeks, I will be at the 2018 Spring Fling conference (http://chicagospringfling.com/) in Oak Brook, Illinois. This writer’s conference, given by the Chicago North chapter of RWA, has brought in the incomparable Beverly Jenkins, a historical fiction author with over thirty novels published, to be one of their featured speakers. Ms. Jenkins may never have won a RITA, but over her stellar career she has been a bestseller and won numerous awards, including the Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award.

Later this year I will be speaking at Romance Slam Jam Booklovers Convention (https://rsjconvention.com/) for black readers and authors. It’s a place where no one will wonder if a black author really knows how to write well, or chose to move to a different table when one sits among them.

I’m human. I like being welcomed.




One more thing:

My next book, Courage will be released at the end of July by Harper Children's. And they dared put a black child on the cover. Its written for young people in 3rd to 7th grade.  If you want to give the young people the gift of inclusion, take this book about six children of various backgrounds and races as they explore friendship and empathy, and what it means to display true courage. (And, they will also learn a little about diving.) You can let Harper Collins know publishing diverse books is important by preordering Courage at
https://www.amazon.com/Courage-Barbara-Binns/dp/0062561650

Editing Your Book, Part 3 Copy Editing

by Madelle Morgan

Copy editing. Copyediting. Copy-editing. 

Which is correct? Answers will differ, depending on the editing style guide used. 

Copy editors go though manuscripts word by word, and their job is not simply to correct spelling and grammar.

After the developmental edit (See Part 1) and the polish (see Part 2), I contract out copy editing to a professional. The first question to ask when requesting a quote is which style guide she or he prefers.

Choose the Style Guide for Your Book

Editors may select from several editing style guides for the English language. The goal of a style guide is to ensure consistency within a manuscript, or across all books published by a particular publisher. A style guide addresses: spelling; grammar; dates; times; italics; capitalization; titles; punctuation including hyphens (three types); formatting (such as this list); numbers (spell it out or use numerals); and much more.

In the United States (abbreviated U.S. or US depending on the style guide), The Chicago Manual of Style is one of the most widely used. Some publishers may adapt a style guide to use for in-house editing of their publications.

The British have several style guide choices. Canadians tend to choose between The Canadian Style: A Guide to Writing and Editing, or an American style guide, depending on the nationality of the majority of the readership. One important consideration for Canadian authors is that American readers are accustomed to American spelling. Canadian/British spelling may appear to be typos. Examples of Canadian spelling include modelling, honour, and centre instead of the American modeling, honor, and center. 

Then there are the dozens of words with multiple spellings; e.g., fore, for, and four, or your, you're and yore. Spell check software doesn't know which you intended to use. Copy editors are trained to watch for these spelling variations.

A style guide will provide guidance on how to handle foreign words. Should ingénue have an accent? Should it be italicized? Not according my copy editor for Caught on Camera. The style guide she used considers the word ingenue to be one of the many foreign words absorbed into the English language.

To illustrate how complex and seemingly arbitrary these arcane rules can be, a style guide dictated how to address the song and film titles in Caught on Camera's playlist. Here's how the first track was edited:

"Train on a Track," performed by Kelly Rowland, from the film Maid in Manhattan.

The rationale, to paraphrase my copy editor who used The Chicago Manual of Style, is that shorter works, such as song titles, are set in quotation marks. Longer works, such as an album name or book title, are set in italics. Who knew there was a difference? Not me, before the copy edit.

Style guides don't cover everything. A copy editor will present the author with a manuscript marked up with an overwhelming number of proposed changes/edits, including his or her own preferences. It's up to the author to accept or reject each change.

I overroad style rules for some compound words that, to my eye, are more readable when hyphenated; e.g., I retained post-traumatic rather than change to posttraumatic, but agreed with the change to makeup rather than make-up.

Sentence Structure & Errors

Copy editors will normally identify and suggest changes for problematic sentences and dialogue, lack of clarity, paragraph breaks, inconsistencies (e.g., the hero's eye color changes), and structural weaknesses that were not caught in your revisions or by beta readers. Be sure to ask a prospective copy editor what s/he includes in the price quoted.

Do You Need a Copy Editor?

You may believe that your grammar and punctuation is excellent—oops, that should be are excellent—did you catch that? You may figure your readers care about the story, and will not notice the trivial errors a copy editor painstakingly corrects. However, the bottom line is this:

Do you want the quality of your published work—your legacy—to be comparable to that of traditionally-published books?

Professional editing raises the apparent quality of the career-focused indie author's work, as does a professionally-designed cover. Caught on Camera is my September release. As I promote it on various websites, I've been asked by a couple of site owners if the novel was professionally-edited. When I entered it in the Romance Writers of America RITA contest, short contemporary romance category, I was required to supply the editor's name. I'm careful to include my editors' names in my books' acknowledgements.

It appears that professional editing is becoming a quality benchmark for indie-published books, as in:

Good cover? Check.
Four and five star reviews? Check.
High sales rank in an Amazon category? Check.
Professional editing? Check.

Finally, copy editing won't transform a poorly-written story into a great one. However, a copy edit guarantees that oh-so-important reviews will be focused on the story, not jarring typos and grammar mistakes which take a reader out of the story.

Caught on Camera Blog Tour November 21-December 2

On this two-week blog tour there'll be interviews, reviews, guest posts with the inside scoop on the book, playlist and the rest of the series, and Rafflecopter ebook giveaways at each stop. US, Canada and UK residents may enter for a chance to win the grand prize—a Muskoka T-shirt, a movie clapboard, and a print copy of Caught on Camera. 

Subscribe to MadelleMorgan.com or like my Facebook author page where you can join the event to be reminded of each stop on the tour and the daily giveaways. 

Caught on Camera is 99 cents / 99P for the promo period!

Author Bio

Madelle Morgan is the author of Caught on Camera, a New Adult romantic comedy, and Diamond Hunter, a romantic suspense about diamond smuggling inspired by her years as a young engineer in Canada's far north. Retired from a career in the public service, she lives with her husband in Ottawa, Canada's capital, visits beautiful Muskoka every summer, and watches too much TV.

Madelle tweets and posts about Hollywood, filmmaking, the settings for her stories, and of course, writing.

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