Oracle Bones<\/em> for publication, and he asked that his books not have red jackets to avoid the red China book cliche.<\/p>\n\u201cI also just don\u2019t much like the color red\u2026and I also didn\u2019t want the title to have \u2018red\u2019 in it,\u201d laughs Hessler.<\/p>\n
While red jackets have been the subject of a \u201clong, long running chuckle among China watchers,\u201d Ash says that writers often don\u2019t have the final say when it comes to their book\u2019s cover design or even the title. \u201cIn the end, it\u2019s their [publisher\u2019s] money and their call on what goes on the cover.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Lusby is more optimistic and offers some advice for writers hoping to publish a book on China.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would always tell them to go into the Bookworm [the now-shuttered iconic independent bookstore in Beijing] because that was the bookshop library that had the biggest selection of China titles available in China in English. I would tell them to go and stand in front of their China interest shelf and tell me what color they see, and then tell me what color they therefore think would stand out as a China book, and maybe go in that direction.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The color red, dragons, cropped Asian faces\u2026when it comes to presenting China, book publishers often rely on a set of familiar tropes \u2014 to the detriment of the authors and the genre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19773,"featured_media":231250,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"","audio_file":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","filesize_raw":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[12908],"tags":[14023],"column":[],"class":[],"coauthors":[16949],"acf":[],"la_post_categories":{"society-and-culture":"Society & Culture"},"la_post_tags":{"book":"book"},"content_writeup":{"rendered":"
\nThe color red, dragons, cropped Asian faces\u2026when it comes to presenting China, book publishers often rely on a set of familiar tropes. How should we feel about that?\n<\/p>\n
\n\u201cThe sad reality of publishing is that it\u2019s an industry of pigeonholes,\u201d says Jo Lusby, the former managing director of Penguin Books North Asia.\n<\/p>\n
\n\u201cThe problem comes when the books start all looking the same and you can’t differentiate, when actually these books are very different.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
\nAlex Smith has more than a few examples in this feature story on The China Project<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n\n\u2014Anthony Tao<\/em><\/p>\n"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thechinaproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231242"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thechinaproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thechinaproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechinaproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19773"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechinaproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thechinaproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231242\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechinaproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/231250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thechinaproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechinaproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechinaproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231242"},{"taxonomy":"column","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechinaproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/column?post=231242"},{"taxonomy":"class","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechinaproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/class?post=231242"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechinaproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=231242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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