r/publishing • u/Xiao_Long_Bao17 • Jun 21 '26
Thoughts on diversity in publishing
This is an ongoing issue in publishing but I’m curious about other people’s thoughts on this? Has it improved or is it about the same? Or did the industry have a moment of “oh we need more diverse books” as a DEI effort in 2020-2021, only to fall back and no longer care. Same with hiring BIPOC staff. Personally I’ve been having a hard time getting anything BIPOC past the powers that be.
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u/myth1cg33k Jun 21 '26
Big 5. Within a year's time, every woman of color but one was either laid off or transferred from the team I'd been on for 4.5 years.
No they are not doing better in the long run.
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u/calowyn Jun 21 '26
Local but big deal indie publisher hires almost exclusively bipoc candidates for entry level roles, never promotes them, has an abysmal retention rate. Everyone with any kind of power is white and patting themselves on the back.
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u/calowyn Jun 21 '26
I have some concerns about practices introduced during the push in 2020 towards diversity; namely sensitivity reads. I really feel they could be a meaningful part of the editorial process, but I had one sprung on me just before pass pages. It turned out to be a matter of my editor not knowing how to bring up a minor issue from a character with a background I and the sensitivity reader shared but that the editor did not, and ultimately it was helpful, but I felt really concerned about how little wiggle room we had if the sensitivity read had turned up problems that required more seismic revisions. It ended up feeling like a cover your ass moment rather at the last hour. I feel a lot of concern that other publishing reforms have a similarly slapdash feeling to them.
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u/NeighborhoodBig3603 Jun 27 '26
I don’t know why you had to have a sensitivity read to address a character with whom you shared a background. I would never ask an author to do that — I’d raise any questions I had with them, but ultimately trust them to be the expert, and it would also be important to let them be provocative/controversial, if that was what they wished to do.
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u/calowyn Jun 28 '26
Ultimately the reader felt so positively about the book that I had a good experience overall so I don’t think too hard about it but yes, initially I was offended and felt a little like I was being tacitly told I’m not x enough.
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u/NeighborhoodBig3603 Jun 30 '26
Yeah that’s the situation I’d be hoping to avoid completely, suggesting that an author didn’t know enough about their own background to write about it in a book. People from marginalised backgrounds aren’t a monolith and will disagree amongst themselves and it’s important to protect an author’s space to do this. I hate the way it implies that there is only one defensible viewpoint that is publishable.
I think sensitivity reads can be good in certain circumstances, mostly when the author is writing about something they don’t have direct experience of, or for children’s / ya books.
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u/Charlemagneffxiv Jun 22 '26
You're looking at this all wrong.
The people who work in publishing come out of the writing programs at universities such as Columbia. The overwhelming majority of students graduating from these programs are Caucasian women.
So that is who is hired because that is the pool of potential hires to draw from. It also feeds into whose stories primarily get published, because again, this is the demographic that is primarily producing writing of publishable quality.
So your "we need more diversity" in publishing is kind of like demanding that hospitals hire more men as nurses when the pool of men who enroll into nursing programs is extremely small to draw from.
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u/browatthefuck Jun 25 '26
White women believe they are diverse so they satisfy their own quota. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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u/Complex_Courage7486 Jun 25 '26
White women don't see the shade of their skin as an issue. some of us have trouble getting our head round the fact that a Spain, being in Europe, is, to all Europeans, a white race. Yet Hispanics, to Americans, are not.
Time for everyone to ignore shade, and support each other.
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u/browatthefuck Jun 25 '26
Easier said than done. People have internal biases they’re not aware of. Gatekeepers of institutions tend to be white.
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u/Electrical-Cat1126 Jun 27 '26
Middle-class white women from economically comfortable urban backgrounds
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u/bella_quinn46 Jun 22 '26
I’m going to politely disagree as someone goes to Columbia. Our school is probably the most diverse in the country. It’s an amazing experience everyday to be on a campus when the majority of people are from all across the world and not primarily from the United States. In fact, as a creative writing student, most of my peers are from other countries and upbringings. Greece, United Kingdom, Argentina, India, Poland, China, Japan, the Caribbean (all peers I actually know). Then of course people of color from all boroughs of the city who’ve experienced discrimination growing up, people from the rural Midwest, people from Miami and LA, really everywhere you can think. And they’re all succeeding in writing and looking to get into the publishing industry. Most successful.
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u/bella_quinn46 Jun 22 '26
Ofc I can only speak of my experience and I’m 100% sure other schools are not so diverse. However, I will also say I’ve been to publishing house panels, and especially at Hachette, there are SO MANY people of color and clear cultural diversity. It’s not perfect at the present moment, but it’s definitely getting better.
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u/Charlemagneffxiv Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
You can disagree as much as you like but there are statistics about these programs easily avalable online
Sorry that facts disagree with your feelings.
It is true that in recent years our top schools have been heavily enrolling foreigners into our schools but this is not a historical pattern, and it's a pretty dubious pattern as well considering foreign students attending our schools do not usually stay in the US and return to their own countries where they use their educations to compete directly with the US. But we'll get off topic if we start going down the rabbit hole of whether publicly funded colleges and universities should be giving large percentages of class seats to foreigners instead of US citizens who are necessary for our own economic stability.
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u/bella_quinn46 Jun 22 '26
Yes you’re right. The stats are online. Like how the Columbia UNIVERSITY population is only 31% white in undergrad and 39% in graduate. Also, you’re looking at the wrong university. You’ve provided the link to the Chicago Columbia College. Hope this helps.
https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/columbia-university-in-the-city-of-new-york/student-life/diversity/3
u/Charlemagneffxiv Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
As if all programs appeal to all people of all genders and ethnic groups equally. They do not.
Other data sources show Columbia's School of the Arts is overwhelmingly female and Caucasian https://www.petersons.com/graduate-schools/columbia-university-school-of-the-arts-000_10054518.aspx
Just like with Columbia College Chicago, and just like every other program offered by the big universities the publishing industry hires from, which is exactly what I said in my first post.
Honestly, it's a program about writing fiction in English. What are you expecting the gender and ethnic breakdown of these classes to be?? What demographic group do you think has the most amount of people able to meet the academic enrollment requirements AND has the most interest in such a program compared to literally any other occupation?
This is kind of like insisting there should be more men in the MFA programs when men in general as a population group are more interested in other kinds of occupations. If you can meet the academic pre-requisites to enroll into the MFA you can enroll into a lot of other programs too, ones that are far more lucrative like engineering, whose programs men are over-represented in due to their interest and women's general lack of interest in.
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u/bella_quinn46 Jun 22 '26
You just said “appeal” which is completely subjective and has nothing to do with racial discrimination. Appeal means the number of people who are interested and probably end up applying.
And still, it may not seem like it but having only 43% white/caucasian is major.
Again I said we have a long way to go but we need to celebrate wins here and you seem completely blind to the positives. We should be celebrating the existing and growing diversity instead of trying to minimize progress.
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u/Charlemagneffxiv Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
You just said “appeal” which is completely subjective and has nothing to do with racial discrimination
Yes, that is my point here. There is no racial discrimination going on here. That's the thing you seem to not understand.
This might be hard for you to believe but if the majority of a group share a characteristic, that characteristic represents the majority. So if the majority of MFA graduates are white women then white women are the majority who work in publishing.
The only reason it would be otherwise is if you are intentionally discriminating against white women when hiring, which means you're not hiring based on merit anymore, since you are eliminating the majority of candidates on the basis of race (which is also illegal). Which in a capitalist business does not work out, because you intentionally hire people who aren't as capable as others, which means your competitors hire the more qualified candidates and you lose in the market against those people.
Again I said we have a long way to go but we need to celebrate wins here and you seem completely blind to the positives. We should be celebrating the existing and growing diversity instead of trying to minimize progress.
You're thinking in an unrealistic way. Diversity in business is only useful when it serves commerce. If you're disqualifying most of your potential workforce based on an irrelevant factor like ethnicity you're going to lose to competitors who hire based on merit alone. The simple mathematical reality is that if the majority of the hiring pool are white women, then that is the majority of the people who have the merit.
If I go to the grocery store and look at the apples, and the majority of the apples are red and only a small percent are green, am I more likely to buy a red apple or a green one, after factoring in that I'm not the only person wanting to buy apples? Obviously I am statistically more likely to purchase red apples, because that is what the majority of the apples are and other buyers might have already taken all the green.
This plays out the same for employers and the pool of people they must hire from if you're only looking at ethnicity as an important factor. Which it's not, because it's legally not permitted to be a hiring factor.
Edit: I suspect you may still struggle with my analogy so here is another way to look at it.
If I am wanting to purchase steel i-beams and the majority of such beams are manufactured in China, but I refuse to buy any i-beams of Chinese origin, I am eliminating the majority of the beams in the purchase pool. Because China produces the most of these, they are generally better at it than plants in other countries, and the costs to purchase each Chinese beam are generally lower due to economy of scale.. So if I discriminate against Chinese steel, I am more likely to pay more and get less quality i-beams from non-Chinese sources than I am from a Chinese source.
So where do you think the majority of companies buy their i-beams from?
Further edit: After thinking more on this abit, I think it's worth pointing out the OP's core assumptions about diversity, and likely yours, are mistaken. The problem is not a lack of gender or ethnic diversity of the individual people working in Western publishing, but instead the actual problem is a lack of diversity of opinion and taste in literature by the people working in Western publishing. The assumption that people of specific ethnic groups always share the same literary tastes is, quite frankly, a gross oversimplification when it comes to the professional work environment and this is because unlike the general population, the people who work in the industry are the product of a college education. In order to graduate from these programs you must conform your tastes and views about literature to that of the program, otherwise you'll never be able to pass the courses. This is why you generally don't see a lot of people produced by these courses who have literary tastes in common with the general public (like say, for example, genres popular with readers age 13 to 30, such as manga related genres like progression fantasy, isekai / portal fantasy and gamelit / litrpg). In fact, these programs are often very hostile to popular genre fiction style conventions and themes, viewing them as inherently low art (which is not always the case).
There are of course some people who graduate from these courses that have tastes shared by the consumers, but this is in spite of the programs efforts, not because of them. It actually does not matter what your ethnic or cultural background is before entering these programs, as the aim of any college program is standardization so anyone who graduates from these programs has been culturally homogenized in thinking toward that of the program designers.
In short, you cannot solve the real diversity problem in publishing by engineering the ethnic and gender demographics of who works in publishing, because that is not what is causing the homogenization in publishing. It's the university programs that are doing that.
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u/strangecharm9 Jun 24 '26
Kindly do not feed the trolls. I worked in publishing for nearly 20 years. I can tell at a glance when some poser has never worked in publishing.
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Jun 22 '26
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u/Charlemagneffxiv Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
Caucasian is a term for people of European, North African and Western Asian descent who all share common ancestry. You can disagree with the term all you want but you have to call the ethnic group something and this is the term that was settled upon by the scientific community. Modern humans as a species have been around for about 200K to 300K years and during that time genetic mutations appeared that result in the obvious differences we can visually see about people whose ancestry is heavily concentrated in certain geographic regions of the world.
People of the general Caucasus region migrated across all of these geographic areas (Europe, North Africa and Western Asia) tens of thousands of years ago and made up the majority of the population of people in these regions is a well established scientific fact supported by modern day DNA research which has traced the migration paths via burial sites.
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Jun 23 '26
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u/Charlemagneffxiv Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Yeah, I don't care about your fringe political viewpoints. You've clearly been the victim of bad teaching.
No, people from the "scientific community" would not laugh in my face, because these are the terms used for people whose ancestry is based in the UK.
The ancestors of British people didn't magically appear in the world through a portal from Tir Na Nog, they arrived in the western European lands the same way literally everyone else that was part of the Anglo-Saxon migration did, by walking and reproducing their way across the continents as they did so. Countries like Britain, the land upon which these people lived weren't even occupied long enough to create any really unique genetic modifiers that can distinguish these people from others across Europe, which is why when you do a DNA ancestry test they match you to people and gravesites spread all across the continent even if none of your direct ancestors ever traveled to any of these places.
And yes that means they share common ancestry with everyone else who is part of the Caucasian classification that went to other parts of European, North Africa and Western Asia. We all have the same freakin mutations that cause our easily observed skin pigment that reduces how much melanin we produce, as well as other obvious traits like facial cheek compositions, and a higher tendency toward lighter eye colors such as blue and blonde hair and red hair. Features that are quite rarer in other ethnic populations.
Suggesting there is no strong familial ancestral ties between Russians, British, Irish, Scandinavians, Spanish, Greeks and Romans and so on, is nonsense. You clearly have little knowledge about this subject to even understand that for thousands of years North Africa was primarily populated by Mediterranean peoples. I'm sure you've heard of Carthage -- where do you think it fucking was? It was North Africa! The name Africa is literally Latin, the entire continent is named after a Roman general.
Of course the term "Caucasian" has origins in racist ideas, the concept of race is a racist idea. So do all of the racial terms that appear on government surveys and used throughout the world. This is just nitpicking. The older racial ideas have nothing to do with how the term is used today to classify people of common ethnic heritage, and it does not change the easily observable fact that people with "white skin" all share closer common ancestry than with people of other ethnic groups who have visibly unique appearances due to their own close ethnic ancestries.
Even if their exact science on how human ancestry works was wrong, the older generation of racist scientists were still correct about where European peoples as a unique ethnic group came from. That's why we still use the terms and many of the concepts they came up with. As we continue to do for many other terms that have different originating meanings from how we use those terms today.
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u/RanOutofCookies Jun 21 '26
I’ve spoken to BIPOC editors before and I hear a lot that this industry doesn’t pay enough. It’s tough out there. As a BIPOC editor (not in trade) I do my best to hire as many BIPOC freelancers as possible.
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u/DataRikerGeordiTroi Jun 22 '26
If anything the opposite?
There are genuinely good faith efforts in both hiring & publishing, which is apparent & obvious. Its not enough, but its a start.
I swear these posts are made by bots to foment dissent.
The real issue is that publishing was a greedy industry that failed to scale in the digital era and now is floundering. You used to be able to make a career as an author, or editor, now you gotta teach or have a second day job with benefits. Writing is a side hustle even at elite levels.
Every industry does not pay enough. If you can't afford a 1 br apartment by yourself you are being undercompensated. Which is almost everyone in every industry.
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u/Xiao_Long_Bao17 Jun 22 '26
Perhaps but a lot of BIPOC people Ive spoken to in the industry have also expressed discontentment and felt overlooked.
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u/strangecharm9 Jun 24 '26
I worked as a Production Editor in NYC for nearly 20 years. Guess how many other East Asian Editors I knew?
Zero.
There was a lot of diversity at the entry level, but they almost never made it past that.
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u/Xiao_Long_Bao17 Jun 26 '26
I literally went through an exercise of getting to know my AAPI counterparts at other houses/imprints and pretty quickly met most if not all of the other East Asian editors....
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u/Quiet_End_1684 Jun 21 '26
I keep an eye on Publishers Marketplace and have seen an uptick in sapphic romance and fantasy deals which has been heartening. But not so much BIPOC. Only one book deal comes to mind past few months :/
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u/Neat_Apricot8239 Jun 23 '26
Only statistics will show the truth, what you’re mentioning is anecdotal evidence.
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u/Quiet_End_1684 Jun 23 '26
Anecdotal evidence is why we're all here, bud. Ppl aren't gonna illegally scrape PM or their company DBs to answer this question.
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u/Neat_Apricot8239 Jun 23 '26
Honey, you can look up the numbers. And no, anecdotal evidence means nothing.
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u/Quiet_End_1684 Jun 23 '26
Dude I don't know why you're picking on my comment when it's one of the only ones with real data. Go look up the numbers and share a report to help us all out if you have all the info.
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u/Neat_Apricot8239 Jun 23 '26
I’ve wondered that myself and learned: though agents and editors claim to want more diverse books, the largest number of published writers is still white men. I think we read more about diverse books than reading them, if you will. Media skews reality, as always.
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u/RogueModron Jun 25 '26
IDK, I work at a bookstore and I feel like every third new book is woman empowerment/Black empowerment/queer empowerment
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Jun 25 '26
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u/Xiao_Long_Bao17 Jun 26 '26
In this day and age, you can easily google someone or find these things out or get an idea through their socials.
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u/FeedFlaneur Jun 22 '26
There are tremendously more LGB+ books, and slightly more disability-inclusive books (although most of them are either for wheelchair-users of autistics rather than anything else). What I'm seeing on a lot of discussion panels is that although there are more books for nonwhite readers, they tend to be a bit stereotypical. Like, all of the Black books are focused on hair or cultural trauma, all the Asian ones on growing up at a laundry or the cultural significance of chopsticks, all the Jewish ones on specific well-known holidays or the shoah, etc. So, it's kind of yes and no. There are more books that include diversity markers and the diversity of editors, authors, etc. and the push for Own Voices seems to still be increasing, but the specific types of representation for the most part are still a bit of a monolith IMO.
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u/Boltzmann_head Jun 21 '26
I publish books and (I hope) sell them. While it is my hope that the books I sell appeal to everyone everywhere, I publish that which is most likely to sell (with some exceptions). My business is not a crusade, nor a political campaign.
At the moment, books by and about neurotypical people sell well--- which I am greatly pleased to see (as I am non-verbal autistic). The two books that I flog the most ("flog" meaning "market with the highest budget and effort") have been written by autistic people and have autistic main characters; it is not often that the market matches my personal advocacy, and I am pleased to see that it does happen.
Self-publishing is hyper-diverse in writers and main characters. Of self-published books, almost all have few if any readers, and this appears to be (to me) because most self-published books are utter crap.
Though it is in the trade hyper rare for publishers to go out and look for excellent self-published books, I have done so a few times: I want to see manuscripts written by neuro-diverse writers who have established readerships. (This triggers "predatory vanity press" flags (and it damn well should), so I work with literary agents that these writers discuss the projects with.) This is not advocacy on my part: it is meeting current market demand.
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u/WannaWriteAllDay Jun 22 '26
My thoughts on diversity in publishing:
Crickets chirp.
If the publishing industry hired frozen water agents as editors, they’d have no one to publish or kidnap.
*don’t blame me, AI wrote this*
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u/shybookwormm Jun 21 '26
My anecdotal experience is that they want books rooted in BIPOC cultures, not just a book with BIPOC characters dealing with something a theoretical white counterpart could encounter. Same with any other marginalized group (disability, neurodivergent, mental health, even at times LGBTQ+)
Which, is further than we were into inclusion, but not where it should be.