Remember a few months ago when Bloomsbury got nailed for putting a white girl on the cover of a novel about a black girl? That, but with a fantasy novel this time. Must have something to do with space/time warps or something.

Magic Under Glass, a young adult novel, is the story of a “foreign” music hall girl, Nimira, hired by a sorcerer to sing with a piano-playing automaton. But she finds that a fairy has been trapped inside the clockwork automaton, and the two fall in love. Although Dolamore’s heroine is described in the book as black-haired and brown-skinned – and the official trailer for the novel shows her as such – the cover chosen by Bloomsbury USA Children’s Books shows a white, brown-haired girl. The choice has provoked outrage from bloggers and commentators, particularly following the publisher’s decision (later reversed) last year to feature a white girl on the cover of Justine Larbalestier’s novel Liar, about a black girl.

And speaking of book covers, Liar is getting a new one for its American edition. I realize there was a colossal bumble made at Bloomsbury, but the explanation they give (that putting a white woman on the cover a book about a black woman was to “symbolically reflect the narrator’s complex psychological makeup”) is just so grasping and ludicrous, and reeks of denial. Anyway, glad to see that they’re making amends, even if it is only after a monstrous public outcry. Symptom addressed. Now for some preventative medicine?

Larbalestier said she was “very impressed” with “how quickly and decisively” Bloomsbury responded, and that she was “very happy” with the new look for Liar, which follows the story of Micah, for whom lying is second nature until her boyfriend Zach dies. “I was hopeful that people would notice and speak up and that if they were loud enough that there’d be a change for the paperback edition. People spoke up sooner and louder than I dreamed. I’m extremely grateful,” she said. “I think the new cover is gorgeous. While it’s true that the model is not exactly as I imagined Micah (she looks quite a lot like the American basket ball player Alana Beard) she is much, much closer than the previous model.”

But Larbalestier believes the issues of “whitewashing” of covers, ghettoising of books by people of colour, and low expectations for these books are industry-wide. In 2004, Ursula Le Guin asked why “even when [my characters] aren’t white in the text, they are white on the cover … I have fought many cover departments on this issue, and mostly lost. But please consider that ‘what sells’ or ‘doesn’t sell’ can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If black kids, Hispanics, Indians both Eastern and Western, don’t buy fantasy – which they mostly don’t – could it be because they never see themselves on the cover?”

Moby points to this piece from an author’s blog on her novel called Liar that features a young black girl with short “nappy” hair, but the cover of which features a white girl with long hair. The reason? It’s supposedly hard to sell books with black people on them in the US. Good thing we fixed that endemic racism thing by electing Ol’ Slim Jim to the White House, eh?

The US Liar cover went through many different versions. An early one, which I loved, had the word Liar written in human hair. Sales & Marketing did not think it would sell. Bloomsbury has had a lot of success with photos of girls on their covers and that’s what they wanted. Although not all of the early girl face covers were white, none showed girls who looked remotely like Micah.

I strongly objected to all of them. I lost.

I haven’t been speaking out publicly because to be the first person to do so would have been unprofessional. I have privately been campaigning for a different cover for the paperback. The response to the cover by those who haven’t read Liar has been overwhelmingly positive and I would have looked churlish if I started bagging it at every opportunity. I hoped that once people read Liar they would be as upset as I am with the cover. It would not have helped get the paperback changed if I was seen to be orchestrating that response. But now that this controversy has arisen I am much more optimistic about getting the cover changed. I am also starting to rethink what I want that cover to look like. I did want Bloomsbury to use the Australian cover, but I’m increasingly thinking that it’s important to have someone who looks like Micah on the front.