US writer uses self-publishing to get past industry 'racism' | Books | guardian.co.uk

Kristine Kathryn Rusch, who is white, has won a series of awards for her novels, which range across mystery, romance, science fiction, and fantasy, and have hit bestseller lists. She chose a setting of Memphis in the 1960s, just before Martin Luther King's assassination, for a detective series she wrote under the pseudonym Kris Nelscott in the late 1990s, in which her "detective, Smokey Dalton, happened to be black, because I knew he had grown up with Dr King".