Publishing Progress

What happens now?

Improving the lack of inclusion is one of the most important discussions within the publishing community. Publishers identify that the industry has historically ostracised writers of colour. They have continued to evaluate different ways in which their companies can expand on diversity, however, the solution to this remains elusive.

So, what can be done? This is a question that has stumped the industry for years, with numerous houses trying to create different plans, programmes, and initiatives to tackle this. In 2020, Dr Anamik Saha and Dr Sandra Van Lente of Goldsmiths University released Rethinking Diversity in Publishing; a deeply researched academic study outlining the problems and potential solutions. Also in April 2021, Marianne Tatepo in combination with the Bookseller released The Black Issue on ‘a celebration of the difference without tokenism’ creating a space for Black people within the industry to be unapologetically themselves.

Developing strategic relationships

Both papers established that there is a strained relationship when engaging with ethnic minorities as writers, colleagues, and readers. Publishers must engineer a way to familiarise with, and become familiar to, the new non-white middle-class audience. This can be done by developing strategic relationships and different pathways to find writers, colleagues, and readers. The conventional way of acquiring people only produces homogenised results. Not everyone with the capacity to work within the publishing industry needs to be from a Russell Group university. Actively using social media to partly navigate engagement, to search for Black, Asian, and ethnic minority influencers for guidance, collaboration, and input. Many independent Black platforms such as Bad Form and Gal-Dem have an abundance of knowledge in exposure and broadening diversity.

Questioning your reasons

When publishing a book, a key consideration must be assessing and ensuring that this book can appeal to a wide audience of readers. Bengono Bessala, marketing manager at HarperCollins express to The Black Issue, to make sure campaigns “reach diverse audiences for every book”. To do this, she continued with “by asking ourselves what the “reader” really means at the start of every campaign, determine what the reader looks like, not what we want them to look like” The assumption that all readers are white is a central belief in the publishing industry, enabling the system to pander to a single audience.

Different Experience

The industry must question how employees are acquired and how employees are retained. In a 2019 survey conducted by Creative Access, an employment provider for Black, Asian and ethnic minorities. Out of 66 employees, 24% reported that their employment left them feeling discouraged about working in the industry, while 18% decided to leave the trade. 55% did not feel the industry was accepting of people from different backgrounds. Jasmine Richards, co-founder of Storymix, with more than 15 years of experience as an editor and author told The Bookseller about her personal experiences “it’s hard, the pay can be low, pressure is intense, how exhausting it is to be the only one in the room!” Jasmine experienced being referred to cloakroom staff at book launches and being mistaken by her colleagues for another Black girl in the room.

Ethnic minorities can experience separate types of hardships from their white counterparts such as dealing with microaggressions and cultural biases, and this can contribute towards a decline in retention. Therefore, publishers need to address this head-on and be transparent in how this will be tackled. How do diversity and inclusion plans progress within the company? The plans need to be dissected and outlined in detail to workers and the public.

Nancy Roberts is the founder of Umbrella Analytics. A business that uses AI and data to conquer institutional biases within companies and make quantifiable developments in diversity and inclusion.

Nancy résumé is impressive, she has worked in the publishing industry for twenty years for houses such as Cambridge University Press, Penguin and Pan Macmillan.

Exclusivity

One of the reasons Nancy left the publishing industry to pursue a business for inclusion was the struggles she faced, and how she repeatedly felt unheard. She explained why the publishing industry is entrenched in problems.

“The biggest problem I see in the publishing industry is there's a tendency to be very it's all up for discussing the problem but not enough people taking concrete action. For a couple of years, it was a big saying about unconscious bias training, I’ve always said that there is no evidence that it makes any difference. But companies were and are spending a lot of money on it, it felt a bit virtually signalling to me. Because, what would you expect to change after a half-day of training, that is not enough time to change a culture and that is the issue, it is a cultural problem” There are a lot of companies that have adopted unconscious bias training in light of the BLM movement, Nancy continued her discontentment for the process “I see many publishers do this, it is good PR but aren’t addressing the issues and the issues are that the culture of publishing is exclusive”.

Nancy made it very clear how class, tradition and therefore exclusivity and elitism play a big part in the disparities within the industry “Everyone is extremely well educated, a ridiculously high proportion of people went to Oxford or Cambridge, which in itself creates a certain atmosphere of elitism” with “Publishing is full of random traditions that go back around 200 years, and nobody knows why they still happen; one that always came up was, we publish books on a Thursday. But, why?”

“A lot of decisions were made based on opinion therefore personal biases, so you know we would get a book through that had been commissioned and the Commission editor saying that we have to publish this book it's great and if you try to say well why is it great? Where is the data to back this up? What’re the sales on similar books that we have had previously, that is not a topic of conversation that anyone wanted to have"

Nancy explains how these issues can seep down into a lack of diversity and inclusion, “You can do all the great outreach schemes and graduate internships but if the culture itself is based on elitism, then it is very hard to succeed”

Retention and Recruiting

Alongside attracting a diverse group through internships and outreach schemes, the industry should be monitoring the maintenance of retention. Nancy describes why there is a block with the industries standards, attracting and retaining employees “There is quite a high snobbery factor in publishing. That has consequences for diversity in all sorts of ways, ethnically and socio-economically and this is not recognised, it is an industry with high expectation of its employees with very low salaries, comparatively speaking and there is a real lack of understanding at the top for the consequences about that”

“You do not need a degree to work in sales, production, marketing, people in the industry have inherited this expectation that you will have a degree, yet the salaries do not reflex that, and this is a class issue. It is reflected in the fact that a lot of publishing senior roles come from a higher background, and they don’t understand the ramifications of that”

She emphasises that the industry should tackle this to be more efficient, “Publishing is not professionalised in the way that it should, and it's should acknowledge that if we want good people to work in this industry, we want to continue to attract the talent we have to be competing better as employers”

BlackStories

Inclusivity, when it came to race, was a recurring issue Nancy had to confront, she was left puzzled by how publishing stories that contained Black, Asian, and ethnic minority groups were approached.

“So, when you talk about having not seen Black characters in books, I mean this was a conversation that had the all the time, which was kind of like along the lines of them saying Black people don't buy books. I’d be like well maybe they don't buy the books that you're producing because they're all about you know white middle-class women living in North London. There's that kind of lack of understanding and sometimes I think commissioning editors can bit kind of like almost it's not for the market to tell us what they want to read is for us to decide what's good and give it to them”

She noticed that the industry does not have any guidance or intentions of changing its mindsets. This was especially prevalent with the rise of Black authors post BLM movement “The only way now, that publishers are trying to serve that market, is by buying the authors in and that means the culture hasn’t changed.

Oh, we can see this is successful, we better buy the rights and publish it ourselves, it is not changing their mindsets on how to publish it is just plastering over the problem by importing genres and things that they don't want to know much about. If we see something successful, we want a piece of that pie, so we will pay for that author to come into the house”

Results

To see progress and get long-lasting results, Nancy believes is all about having a clear plan, relying on data, and questioning yourself “So, what I would want to see, okay, if we get let's say 20 writers from underrepresented groups whether that's ethnically, socio-economically or different sexualities. How many are likely to get a publishing contract at the end and what's all the success criteria of that publishing contract? What’s the end goal here? The end goal must be measurable otherwise you’re just making yourself feel better and you’re not doing right by the people on the programmes because what are they getting out of it.

It should be clear, this is how we will measure it, this is going to be the impact and they are how we are going to know we succeeded in making a change”

When it comes to inclusion pieces and outreach schemes “There is a lot you can do to improve diversity, changing recruitment practices, looking at ways in which you recruit, how you recruit, rethinking all qualification needs above those types of things to open up a wider talent pool. How comfortable people are in that environment? and how to the extent to which they feel they can succeed in that environment?”

Self-publishing

Nancy understood why authors gave up on industry and started leaning toward being self-sufficient “People started self-publishing, the reason that lots of things were so successful is that publishers didn't like to publish things that sold. They didn’t understand the market but people who were in the market knew what to do and how to get it out there and I didn't care if it wasn't considered great literature.

If you don't have people who understand the market about selling to that were going to happen right so it's a vicious circle you know like we can't be successful publishing books by Black writers, but you don't have anyone in marketing who might be a reader of that book. You will not know who those readers are, where to find them, they are not in Waterstones”.

_{Nancy Roberts}

On the 15th of June 2020, over 100 Black authors which include Elliot Lawal, Diana Evans and Candice Carty-Williams came together and formed The Black Writers Guild, an organisation with the aim of expanding Britain’s literary culture. Collectively authors of the guild wrote a letter to the ‘big five publishing companies’- Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster demanding reform.

In the letter, the authors called on the publishing industry to “tackle the deep-rooted racial inequalities in the major corporate publishing companies and support grassroots Black literary communities such as booksellers”. The authors listed eight crucial points they believe will improve the industry. One of the points was the acknowledgement of the lack of “Black stakeholders and senior decision-makers”. They called for reconciliation between the two professions, as well as stating that publishers should pursue different methods to acquire Black authors, “We would like publishers to create a ring-fenced fund for marketing and specialist publicity focus to support the books of new and emerging Black talent”.

Elliot Lawal, author of The Clapback and member of the Black Writers Guild says “I have no doubt whatsoever that organisations like the Black Writers Guild and Black writers, in general, will continue to produce the goods”.

The Black Writers Guild has offered to work closely with publishers to achieve their goals listed in the letter. Ending the letter with “all of these requests will not only help to guard against pervasive racial inequality but will unearth more talent and help nurture a thriving literary culture in this country”. Till then they will continue to be an organisation that supports all Black workers within the publishing industry through any struggles that they face.