The whole battle between Amazon and MacMillan thankfully appears to have come to an end. For those of you who may have missed the headlines, the issue is pricing of ebooks. Amazon wants to deep discount ebooks at $9.99 and the publisher, MacMillan, wants more flexibility, pricing up to $14.99 for new releases. Paul Carr over at Tech Crunch posted a nice article about the impact (or lack thereof) to authors.

MacMillian is a publisher of many science fiction writers. As a writer in that genre, I’m always struck by the relatively small number of writers and readers who look like me. I’d guess this applies to fantasy and the broader, speculative fiction categories as well. We could explore the reasons, examine the social and psychological reasons why black people in particular, may not delve into the waters of the scientific and fantastic – but I’d rather spend my precious few minutes of blogging time today to instigate a change.

If you are a perpetual reader of literary tomes, why not try a little speculative or science fiction? If all the authors you’ve read are American, try something from an African writer and vice versa. The point is that each genre, each country in the African diaspora has unique and interesting stories to share. So take a chance, you might find something you like.

I’ll kick this off with a suggestion of a few writers to check out in the speculative space, feel free to add your own in the comments:

• Octavia Butler
• Charles Saunders
• Steven Barnes
• Samuel Delaney

And your picks…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 10:42 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.