Superheroine Away!

The readergrlz are asking that you make your own hero this month at The Superhero Factory. I love The Superhero Factory and would happily play there all day (there's no way to directly link your hero to a blog post and perhaps you should all be glad about that, because I might spend whole days linking heros here). Here's my tricked out Superheroine:

I'm not so keen on the name, but man does she look cool! Now what sort of adventures might she have?

Blog Improvement Project - Blog Post Bingo

Hopefully you’ve been noticing all the different types of content over the last couple of weeks (because if you haven’t then this exercise has been a little futile). I’ve been taking part in a three week run of ‘Blog Post Bingo’ as part of ‘The Blog Improvement Project’. We were challenged to try and create twelve different types of content. I managed to get nine different kinds up here which I’m pretty happy about:

Link post about projects bloggers are running.
Resource post about books to read for ‘The Spice of Life’ challenge.
How to get me to buy your book.
'Expert' post about speedway.
Short post, where I express fear and freak people out ;)
Review post of ‘The President’s Daughter’ (really there could be multiple entries for this because this is primarily a book reviewing site).
List post about the countries I’ve read about this year (Weekly Geeks).
Long Post about Nick Hornby’s ‘Slam’ – I’m going to count this review post as my long post because it got totally off track and turned into a post about my views on teen pregnancy.
My own kind of post was a picture post (not very original but I think the cool superhero generation makes up for that).

Now some questions for you:

Which of these types of blog content did you enjoy the most?
Could you distinguish between them, without the list above?
What do you think of the usual mix of reviews and general content at this blog (would you prefer the review posts to be more spaced out or do you wish I’d quit chattering sometimes and just review)?

Liar, Liar Bloomsbury!

Chasing Ray has a comprehensive post about the 'Liar, Liar' cover scandal that is infuriating bloggers everywhere. In case you haven't heard 'Liar, Liar' by Justine Larbalestier features a black narrator, with short, nappy hair but its cover shows a white girl with long hair covering her face.

Colleen's post contains the link to the author's honest explanation of how the cover came about and a link to the publisher's lame attempt to spin the situation in their favour. Her post is also a clear call for bloggers to take to their keypads and explain to Bloomsbury that what they did with this cover was not acceptable.

As a marketer I'm appalled (once again) to see the industry making untested assumptions about what will sell and what the people want, assumptions which seem to be based mostly on lazy stereotypes conceived back in the bad old days. Often my frustrations with the marketing industry are caused by the way companies use gender in their campaigns, but lately I'm seeing some seriously foul marketing when it comes to the use (or in this case the exclusion of) race in marketing campaigns. The fact that marketing departments design campaigns that fit so poorly with the consumers they're suppousedly marketing to suggest that either marketeers aren't doing any substantial primary market research anymore, or if they are they're making damn sure they only conduct this research in areas where their existing views will be confirmed.

I want to know what kind of research Bloomsbury's team did to lead them to the conclusion that putting a black girl on the cover, or using a different kind of cover, would cause the book's sale to plummet. Looking at past numbers for books with black characters on their covers and using them as proof that their assumptions are solid is not good enough. Publishers need to go to the readers and test their assumptions with real people, the people that may or may not buy their books. They can't ask everyone personally, but they could set up anonymous web surveys to collect opinions, they could set up focus groups, they could listen to their authors and take their opinions seriously. Bloggers are even helping them out for free right now by explaining that many of us want to see books with black main characters to show black people on the covers. Maybe we need to be a bit clearer - we have money and we want to spend it on books, we want to see more books and covers featuring black, hispanic and asian characters (and a bunch of other things but that's a different, although closely related, fight). Do you see the the correlation?

Companies could be creating marketing campaigns that make consumers love their brand and attach that all important, industry sustaining brand loyalty to their company name. They could be increasing their sales by reaching new customers. Instead they're so worried about alienating existing customers that they're rolling out the same old excuses and the same old campaigns, thereby alienating a whole host of potential customers.

Read the posts linked at the Chasing Ray post. If you think it's wrong for a publisher to put a white girl on the cover of a book where the main character is clearly described as black, if you dislike the assumptions you see being made by the marketing industry, if you think spinning a bad decision is worse than a publisher admitting they made a mistake then please raise your voice in your corner of blogland.

By the way Amazon's 'Liar, Liar audio cds now carry the tag 'cover art not final' - which might indicate progress or further spin. Let's wait and see shall we.

Updated: You can now see some of the many responses to Bloomsbury's epic mess (and their sad and sorry attempt to spin the situation) collected.