Diversity

For budding authors, the submissions process can be daunting. For anyone with little understanding of the publishing industry and how it works, it can be even more so. And for anyone whose writing sits outside of the established ideas of genre, style or content, it can be utterly baffling as to how to present that to an agent or publisher.

Commercial book publishing was (and is) unbearably white. In 1971, when Toni Morrison became a trade editor, about 95 percent of the fiction published by the big commercial houses was by white authors. By 2018, that number dropped only to 89 percent. One of the only other black women working as an editor, Marie Brown, started the same year at Doubleday.  Read more

The Booker prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo says she fears that publishers' interest in black authors may be only a "trend or fashion" that could wane unless the business becomes more diverse.  Read more

This year's key prizes have gone to writers from Africa and the diaspora. Damon Galgut, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Abdulrazak Gurnah and others explain what winning means to them

People of Color in Publishing and Latinx in Publishing collaborated on an online survey in summer and fall 2018, reaching out to current and former BIPOC industry members about the extent to which they've experienced racism on the job. The results of the survey are now being released in a report, "Workplace Racism Survey," that documents the ways racism manifests itself at publishing houses.  Read more