Putting a good face on it

Black Issues Book Review, March-April, 2005 by Angela P. Dodson

Visit any magazine rack in a bookstore, on a newsstand or at a grocery store, and the faces of celebrities jump out at you. The hope of all those magazine publishers is that you will see the photo of someone famous whom you want to know more about and run to the checkout counter with a copy of that magazine.

One challenge for those of us in the magazine business is that we must decide months in advance who is likely to catch your attention and entice you to buy our magazine. As editors, we have our tricks: we keep abreast of books, movies and other icons of popular culture scheduled for release in the distant future. We also listen to our guts about what engages our readers.

In our last issue (January-February 2005), we ran a letter to the editor in which ZZ Packer, author of the critically acclaimed Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Riverhead Books, March 2003), took us to task for choosing celebrities for our cover, especially those she did not consider writers. She particularly singled out our September-October 2004 issue, which featured india.arie on the cover.

"Every time you dedicate your cover to a musician or actor (which is about half the time, by my count), you send a message to young, would-be-black novelists and short story writers that even a magazine dedicated to black books reveres its recording artists more than its writers," wrote Ms. Packer.

We value the opinion of Ms. Packer and all who take time to write us. However, we take issue, lust as publishers are in the business of selling books--and they dress those books in jackets that will attract readers--we at Black Issues Book Review want to draw the widest possible audience to our magazine about the world of black books. Widely recognized cover subjects draw new readers to our magazine. The number one reason we choose a celebrity for our cover is that the individual best personifies our most important story. The india.arie article demonstrated how books feed the mind of artists who write intelligently in another form--notably songwriting, of which she is a queen.

This month, Alicia Keys graces our cover. She is an author. She exemplifies our cover story topic: How celebrity status is dominating the decision of who gets published, by Joy Duckett Cain. Keys has penned a widely distributed book of poetry. Her book of lyrics and poetry is particularly relevant to this, our annual poetry, issue.

The community of book people we cover in this magazine is limited neither to authors, certainly not "literary" authors, nor to those who make book writing their primary occupation. Black books also belong to the readers, the subjects, the booksellers, the librarians, the publishing industry, unpublished writers and others. We choose to open up the world of black books to those people from all categories.

If you detect a shift from the past, in which authors did predominate our covers, it is because we are fulfilling our mission--to be a resource for everyone involved in the world of black books. Our reward for widening the range of our cover subjects has been that more and more readers--as well as advertisers and newsstands--are choosing us.

Our hope is that this wider coverage is also a reward to our longtime readers and subscribers.

Angela P. Dodson

BIBR Executive Editor