“Many white editors are not exposed to Black life beyond the headlines.”

ByEmma Shacochis

June of 2020 was a time of Instagram posts: black squares, infographics, and corporate statements. The publishing industry was not exempt from the latter, as houses began posting their own acknowledgements of the calls for companies to support people of color and improve the way they treated and hired diverse employees. These were promises to “do better” and “lift up all voices” – uplifting phrases that ultimately meant little. None of these statements offered an action plan for how publishing planned on improving, only that they knew they should. Couldn’t their neat black cubes be enough? How were they supposed to know how to fix all of these problems? Who were they supposed to turn to for advice on true improvement?

Well, nonwhite authors, for one. In June of 2020, there were calls on Twitter made for white authors to share what they had been paid in advances for their books. There was an agreement that it should happen, but no action. Finally, L.L. McKinney asked, “Do y’all need a hashtag? #PublishingPaidMe[.] There you go.” For weeks after, writers revealed how #publishingpaidme, and in doing so, exposed how differently the industry was treating Black authors from their white contemporaries. After winning the National Book Award, Jesmyn Ward revealed that she still “fought” and “wrestled” her way up to a $100,000 advance for her next novel; in contrast, Chip Cheek, a white author, explained that he received $800,000 for his debut novel. Roxane Gay and Mandy Len Catron both published essay collections: Catron received $400,000 for hers, a debut, while Gay was paid $15,000, despite it being her second book. At some point, this cannot be dismissed as a difference in projections or profit & loss statement results: Black authors are systematically paid thousands less than white authors. Publishing houses needed to admit that they had taken part in financial discrimination for years, and they weren’t fixing anything by trying to move on from these scandals without accountability.

Payment isn’t the only change publishing houses need to put effort into improving for their authors: They need to be thinking about the number of nonwhite authors they’re publishing, and how those authors get treated. In Richard Jean So and Gus Wezerek’s piece “Just How White Is the Book Industry?”, the data surrounding the publication and treatment of nonwhite authors was disheartening. Of the 7,124 books they surveyed for author’s race, 95% were by white writers. If 2020 was such an enormous turning point for publishing houses, particularly the “Big Five,” then would they openly admit the fact that, despite accounting for 60% of the U.S. population, non-Hispanic white people were responsible for 89% of the books sampled in this study? Or that, among 7,000 books published by houses including Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Macmillan, just 11% were written by people of color? 

As we’ve discussed before, limitations are placed on these nonwhite authors and the subjects that they write about. Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo was told that her novel Mr. Loverman was considered “triple niche” by the industry – its focus was an elderly, gay Black man. “What were they saying?” she wondered. “That whiteness reigns supreme, heteronormativity is acceptable and old people begone from the pages of our books because you are of little importance?” The dismissive nature of the industry is frustrating to writers of color; Evaristo believes that it limits them, as the industry is still focused on catering primarily to “the perceived target reader…a middle-aged, middle-class white woman, who apparently does not have the imagination to want to engage with writings by people of colour, which is plainly untrue.” Former Simon & Schuster editor Michael Strother recalled a meeting where white colleagues were hesitant about publishing Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give, wondering aloud, “Do we need Angie Thomas if we have Jason Reynolds?” (Reynolds is another Black author of young-adult novels). “Their books are not similar at all,” Strother pointed out, “except they both have Black characters.” Not only are few nonwhite authors hired, they are expected to write stories that cater to white audiences. Perhaps publishing houses could consider the standards they place on their nonwhite authors as ways of standing with and listening to marginalized voices.

A stepping stone to improving the environment at publishing houses for nonwhite authors is hiring nonwhite staff members, especially in editorial departments – without relying on them to do all of the heavy lifting, diversity-wise. So and Wezerek mention Toni Morrison, whose impactful career as an editor we chronicled in a post a few weeks ago. During her time at Random House, 3.3% of the 806 books they published were written by Black authors. After she left, of the 512 books the company published between 1984 and 1990, just two were written by Black authors. Another influential editor, Marie Dutton Brown, believed that Black writers are viewed as ephemeral, being “rediscovered every 10 to 15 years.” She brought up the theory that, “Many white editors are not exposed to Black life beyond the headlines,” meaning when Black people are in the news – in this instance, after George Floyd was killed by police officers – interest in their lives will spike; as media coverage wanes, so does attention. It should not fall to the few Black editors employed to bring Black and nonwhite authors to the attention of their house; white editors need to do their part to find and understand these stories, rather than attempting to tap into a “cultural moment” or worse, ignoring them entirely. Editor Krishan Trotman summarized it well: “I’ve worked in publishing for more than fifteen years, and I’ve seen Black voices become a trend, and I’ve seen the trend die. We should not have to wait for a moment in the country like George Floyd to wake everybody up to the fact that there are tons of brown faces missing in the room.”

It isn’t just speculation that racial diversity is missing from these publishing houses when it comes to staff. Publishers Weekly has reported on the internal workforce demographic reports released by Hachette Book Group and Penguin Random House. The report on HBG reveals that, “While HBG’s anti-racist titles have drawn lots of attention in recent months, the publisher’s audit of its publishing programs found that only 22% of its new 2019 authors and illustrators were people of color. HBG plans to ‘broaden its publishing lists’…However, concrete projects have yet to be announced.” The report discussed the demographics of HBG’s U.S.-based workforce: “69% white, with Hispanic staffers making up only 18% of all employees, and Black and Asian workers accounting for 4% and 7%, respectively, of all employees…New hires in the 2019-20 period have been 61% white.” Penguin Random House released similar findings: 78% of its non-warehouse employees are white, as are 80% of their warehouse employees.

While these reports were described as attempts at accountability from these companies, it doesn’t make them look as progressive as they might have wanted to be. These houses have been established for years. Is the issue of diversity so fleeting that it has taken these companies this long to attempt any changes? After all, the whiteness of publishing has been well-reported on since at least 1995, when James Ledbetter wrote “The Unbearable Whiteness of Publishing” for The Village Voice. Even then, Ledbetter was drawing attention to the fact that, “White editors usually deploy less inclusive recruiting methods. Mostly, they cull from other mainstream publications, which themselves aren’t printing many articles written by people of color.” Sources that Ledbetter interviewed helped explain the effect that only hiring white editors has on the books published by the company: “You can’t get in unless you know somebody. And people know people like themselves.”

It’s 2021. Last summer, Dana Canedy became the first Black leader of a major publishing house, working as Vice President of Simon & Schuster – an imprint founded almost 100 years earlier. Publishing may be willing to openly support diversity and promise that they will “do better” in the future, but they need to realize that they are currently doing poorly. Zora Neale Hurston wrote “What White Publishers Won’t Print” in 1950 – a time when it was still apparent that, “Sympathetic as [publishing houses] might be, they cannot afford to be crusaders.” Publishers have the chance to prove themselves now: Will they choose to be crusaders, or continue to limit their perspective?

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