Racist, Sexist, Misogynistic

This makes me want to weep bloody tears, and scream, and hit someone. Check out what one author has to say about publishing:Millenia Black - Taking Care of Business: The Great Betrayal - Jim Crow Publishing

I'm a big reader. Always have been. It takes more than two hundred books a year to feed my jones, and I've been known to stuff my rapacious maw with every imaginable genre, subset, and Dewey classification. Put two readers together and pretty soon they'll be talking about the ghetto that their favorite writers are in - unless the writers happen to be white males. While there is an advantage in narrow marketing to the group-most-likely-to-buy any given book, it has to be cross-marketing. Sure, advertise the book where the narrow target is most likely to find out, but if you also market to everyone else you stand a chance of creating a bestseller.

It seems so obvious, doesn't it? But publishers, loathe to stoop to advertising anything except a guaranteed bestseller (based on previous bestselling books by the same author, natch) just don't get it. Stephen King is assumed to appeal to readers other than late-middle-aged white men. He must, because those guys aren't buying a lot of books.

A short list of random authors who deserve the attention:

A hat tip to M.J. Rose for the fighting words, and a fine, sexy backlist.

Lauren Baratz-Logsted, whom I've mentioned before, always makes me laugh.

David Levithan writes wonderful romances.

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez deserves a broad audience.

There, that's a start. Five writers, every single one of whom is writing Great American Novels, all of whom are in some kind of publishing ghetto. Feel free to suggest more.