Reading Between the Lines: Race, Equity, and Book Publishing via PEN America

As readers of this blog know, I spend a lot of time on my presentations with Robin Bradford which we call "Actively Anti-Racist Service to Leisure Readers." And in fact, we have BIG news about that coming to the blog tomorrow.

One of the things we hear often from our critics is that our call to intentionally diversify our collections and suggestions to readers is not harming white authors. The argument goes that since the book publishers focusing on diversifying their offerings, there are fewer and fewer white books available now.

This argument is COMPLETELY FALSE and I have talked about here on the blog and in my presentations, but now we finally have an actual report from PEN America that debunks this completely and thoroughly. 

Entitled, "Reading Between the Lines: Race, Equity, and Book Publishing," the report can be read for free here.

Please take some time to read it and process it. To help you understand what is included, I have pasted the ToC below. But first a bit from the Introduction section of the report:

If publishers are the curators of our country’s stories, they have an obligation to ensure that these stories reflect the breadth of our society. Current diversity statistics, alongside the testimony of many publishing and writing professionals of color, point to persistent obstacles and shortcomings in fulfilling this responsibility. 

PEN America undertook this report to better understand why the debate over the lack of diversity in publishing has seemed to stagnate, or to progress only in fits and starts. Our hope is to shed light on the dynamics that both enable and inhibit the broadest range of voices in American literature. In researching this issue, PEN America focused on racial and ethnic diversity—acute and urgent, if not the sole, areas of under-representation. Our research and analysis incorporate interviews, conversations with major publishers, and open-source data and draw on PEN America’s deep contacts with authors and editors and throughout the field of adult trade publishing.

This is a report I know I will be coming back to as well. Please read it and save it for further use. 

Report Contents

This report has five sections.

• Section I offers a snapshot of the transitions afoot in the industry.
• Section II addresses recruitment and retention, delineating how the lack of staff diversity impedes the autonomy and authority of editors and executives of color, and limits the books that are acquired and how they are marketed and sold.
• Section III explores long-standing attitudes and platitudes that have shaped the way the publishing industry has dealt with books by authors of color, including the shibboleth that “diverse books don’t sell.”
• Section IV examines how certain timeworn conventions such as author advances and the use of comparative titles (“comps”) for sales projections may perpetuate existing inequities for authors of color.
• Section V focuses on the marketing, distribution, and sale of books and how standard practices can disadvantage books by authors of color.