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Like many others I was glad to be able to read the final breakdown from Lee & Low’s 2015 Diversity in Publishing Baseline Survey, however disheartening the numbers. Shortly after Mallory shared the report here, I found myself chatting about the results with my friend Linda, erstwhile book editor-turned-literary agent. It’s easy to look at stats like those in the Lee & Low survey and recognize that things ought to change. But as Linda pointed out, while many have brought their passion, commitment, and best intentions to publishing panels and discussions and roundtables, the lack of diversity is a tangled issue, and we often say “at least we talked about it!” without untangling any of the knots. So many conversations about working toward more authentic and diverse representation in publishing — as in the media, and the entertainment industry — seem to fire people up without necessarily resulting in change. I appreciated Linda’s thoughts and insights so much I asked if I could publish our conversation here, and she graciously agreed.
Nicole: Thank you so much for letting me share this chat with The Toast! First, can you tell us a little about your background in publishing?
Linda: I began in the industry in the recession, so jobs were disappearing like ice in August and Amazon had just become an unfathomable power player by launching the Kindle. I worked in bookstores, interned, and volunteered until landing a job in editorial outside of the then-Big 6. Through a number of freelance gigs that I took on in addition to being an editorial assistant—for both cash and caché—I was able to work my way up to editor at one of the Big 6 (now 5).
I then crossed the path from editor to agent (a common move), so I’m very much still in the game, but I don’t work in-house anymore.
The recent Lee & Low survey was sent to thousands of publishing professionals and reviewers. Did you participate in the survey?
I did participate! I know that I generally fit the bill of who works in publishing: white, middle-class connections, college-educated, straight, cis woman. I know that it’s important to see the data and the ratios on paper. It’s important for readers to know who is making books. It’s important for Big 5 parent companies to see, on a spreadsheet, that they have a measurable diversity problem.
According to the Lee & Low survey, 80% of publishing and review journal staff are white, 98.7% are cis, ~78% are cis women, 88.2% are straight, only 7.6% identify themselves as having a disability. In your opinion, what are some of the biggest reasons for the overwhelming whiteness in publishing?
Part of it is that publishing salaries are incredibly low for entry-level—my editorial assistant salary was less than $13.50 an hour, and that has not improved since I started some years ago. Without middle-class or greater resources to subsidize living in New York, where most of the publishing jobs are, it’s difficult to accept those wages in addition to the student loans associated with going to both a prestigious university and NYU or Radcliffe or Columbia publishing programs. So publishing’s whiteness is partly a class issue.
Our hiring pools are filled with nepotism, which just intensifies the segregation and class divide. I’ve gotten an email everywhere I’ve worked: “Hey, we’re hiring an assistant/need an intern/are looking for a freelancer. Anyone know anyone?” (I’m 99.9% sure this is not a publishing-specific hiring practice.) And if you aren’t born into this world, if your dad didn’t ride Metro North every day with an executive editor, and if you don’t make those important connections at universities—and these are all markers of class—then the opportunities to get hired in the first place become few and far between. You have to get creative about breaking those barriers, you have to be ten times as driven to make it work, and you have to want to be there enough to justify all that hard work for $13.50/hour.
It wouldn’t occur to so many people in the industry that diversity would be “nice” or necessary, in part because they have only ever known these white-only spaces. The uncomfortable tide of whiteness in publishing is in many ways old-fashioned WASP racism. And it is uncomfortable. As a white person, even I was uncomfortable with how white it is.
Why is publishing so dominated by women, in particular white cis women?
For the same reasons Finance is dominated by white cis men, except the exact opposite. For the same reasons Meg Ryan and Kate Hudson worked as a journalist or editor or at a magazine in every romantic comedy. I think it’s seen as a gendered profession in the same way teaching and nursing are. (You’d have to look at the demographics of college English departments to see who is filtering into the field as well.)
If I’m feeling more generous, I would say that literature is a place women have always thrived. I would cite Jane Austen, the Brontes, and A Room of One’s Own. I would point to Elaine Showalter’s excellent A Literature of Their Own and Gilbert & Gubar’s classic Madwoman in the Attic. It’s historically been a place where women have been able to share their voices outside of the scrutiny of men—perhaps we haven’t always been admired, but we’ve been published. And as women entered the workforce in larger numbers over the last fifty years, no wonder we choose it as a career. Our names were already on the spines.
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Can you explain what publishers are looking for when they consider what to publish?
It’s a hierarchy of needs: Money; Net Units; Award Bait; and Engaging, Talented, Probing, Soul-Crushing, Inspiring Books.
New tides of corporate publishing, self-published ebooks, social media metrics, and monopolist retailers have really disturbed today’s publishing business model. Modern publishers are built on a back-mid-frontlist model, and I’m watching that fall away before my eyes. Well-paid opportunities for new books by non-famous people (the midlist) are disappearing. I’m talking really specifically about corporate publishing: from the tippy, tippy, top—from the international media conglomerate parent companies down—editors are being instructed to acquire money makers.
And aside from coloring books at the moment, you would not believe the sales of “Rush Revere,” Rush Limbaugh’s revisionist children’s book series, or any big Fox News or GOP primary leader’s memoir. Then there’s the tier of blockbusters like 50 Shades, Gone Girl, Girl on the Train, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (all owned by the same parent company, for what that’s worth). So there’s a capitalist, simplistic kind of logic that says, “Only publish Republicans, coloring books, and sexy thrillers with an unreliable narrator” because these make money in the moment. This makes people evaluate the midlist (where most new books fall) as a “bad investment.” This in turn really, severely limits paid opportunities for new writers, for great writers, for new classics, and especially for diverse writers. We’re eliminating books that could nourish readers for years to come, for the sake of a quarterly profit.
Many needs must be met before we can afford to invest in a book because it’s beautiful. And there are a lot of people in the industry who want to achieve this goal! We take the pay cut and put up with the BS for the opportunity to usher life-altering beauty into the world. But in the industry, sometimes you wonder, how many people does Bill O’Reilly need to kill before I can do that?
We’re eliminating books that could nourish readers for years to come, for the sake of a quarterly profit.
In our conversations, you and I have also talked about a kind of literary tokenism — publishers looking for authors for “diversity”‘s sake, while at the same time disparaging efforts by some as “identity stories” without “broad appeal.” How often did you see this when you worked in publishing?
This is the hill that I will die on. Sapphire’s Push is a great example: At the time, 20 years ago, it was received as a “Black book” on an “African American Women’s Interest” shelf. Over time, with more readers outside that label, it made it over to the “fiction” shelf. Now that book is, in many ways, hanging out with Toni Morrison in this world where the metadata people don’t know if they should code it as “African American Women’s Fiction” or just “Fiction.”
But there’s no “white guy shelf.” There’s no “Lads Who Write About Gentrified Brooklyn” shelf. And every author needs the space to write about things other than their identity moniker ascribed and recognized by wider society. We need to actively expunge the premise that the only [identity] writer on the list can write about [identity] and nothing else. I think this is a fundamental right for the life of a writer.
I trust book buyers to read beyond their immediate experience, beyond their census box. This is what readers have done since literacy became commonplace, so I don’t know why that’s a great leap for our industry today. But I still hear it all the time: “Does this group buy books?” “Is this group enough of an audience?” I hear real fear in that question. Because if you’re looking for coloring book money or 50 Shades or Gone Girl or Rush Revere, a little novel centering a trans woman might only sell 5,000 copies, and it sounds too risky. When everyone is constantly afraid of losing their job, nobody wants to be the one who overpaid on a clunker.
It also makes me wonder if my colleagues who’ve said these atrocious things actually know anyone who doesn’t share their identity. Like, if you grew up in a white upper-middle-class neighborhood, got a job in a white, white-collar industry, continue to live in a white neighborhood, then maybe you actually don’t know if [group] buys books, because you don’t know anyone in the group. Alexander Chee says it better than I can:
That’s because diversity as an editor begins with your friends, your teachers, and your books. What rooms are you in? What conversations? Who are the people in your social media feeds? When you go home, is your family all white? When you go to a party, are your friends all white? When you look down your bookshelf, are all your books by white authors? Those are some tests. What people call diversity has always been, to me, my life. And so if your tastes are not diverse, your life may also not be. And if you find a result you don’t like in all of this, then you work on it.
Publishers need to commit to reaching audiences beyond the core group of rich white women and Republicans who we think of as the “book buyers.” It’s about sales reps saying, “This story broke my heart and you’ll love it” to their accounts, without mentioning that it’s about an [identity], so it doesn’t get segregated in the bookstore. It’s about editors reading outside of their immediate experiences. It’s about having diverse staff who are reading in their experience to say, “Hey, this is true to me and many people, and we can break it out to an even wider audience.” It’s about putting money toward those investments.
What about the gender issue — so many white women work in publishing, and yet books by women authors can still be pigeonholed, considered “less serious” than — as you put it to me — “Important Male Fiction.”
I once worked on a book that I love—philosophy that isn’t feminism by a woman—but I had a really hard time getting traction with it. My husband said, “If a guy wrote this, people would eat it up.” If I had to take a stab at it, I would say it’s just a microcosm of larger society. I think sometimes women might not take their own interests seriously enough. Maybe it’s because so many of our executives and the people who chair literary awards are men. A part of it is plain old selection bias. A few years ago, one of the big science journals published a study about how women scientists were given a selection of resumes to hire from, and they would disproportionately chose men. And the catch was, of course, that the resumes were identical except for the name on the top. Even women can display this unconscious bias.
The Philharmonic has had tremendous success with “blind” auditions. I take this practice to heart and try to blind my submissions. I do a style check before even reading the narrative: Is the sentence structure sophisticated? How is the dialogue presented? How deft is the exposition? I read pages out of order to get a feel for their rhythm. White males disproportionately fail these tests — these are writers who are professors of creative writing at universities, who’ve been published in every great journal, yet their sentences all have the same verb constructions! Maybe it’s because some are disproportionately influenced by Cormac McCarthy and Hemingway and Philip Roth, who are admittedly not my jam. But when I look at my list as a whole, I find that it’s diverse. There are queer writers, writers of color, a few men, and certainly women. When you read for quality, for what stirs your soul, I think a good reader and industry professional will find diversity on their own (if they’re reading and living diversely outside of work as well).
It seems obvious that publishing as an industry will have to change somehow if it’s going to represent and publish books about the world we actually live in. Do you think it can, and if so, how?
Hiring diverse staff is number one. If we have experience and diverse staff at the editorial board level to stop a colleague from saying something phobic, then fewer phobic things make it into the world. We need people in house who know where readers are, who aren’t blaming the readers for not being where we are. Like, if we’re only advertising in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and the Today Show, we’re only going to reach a certain pool of readers. If we have editors and agents from all backgrounds, we’ll have more voices acquiring to more tastes.
When an editor says, “This is amazing!” we need the purse strings to trust the editor to make the investment. It’s also about not privileging mediocrity. Let’s stop investing in work that doesn’t pass the style check just because someone’s CV is impressive. Let’s hire the person who maybe didn’t go to a prestigious certificate program but nailed the manuscript evaluation. Let’s hire someone because their worldview and their experience could offer something different and essential, something we need.
Many needs must be met before we can afford to invest in a book because it’s beautiful. And there are a lot of people in the industry who want to achieve this goal.
An immediate action readers who want diverse books can take is to read and buy and review diverse books…loudly. If publishers see a lot of NET units moving, they’re capitalists, they will put more of it out there. We don’t necessarily want to be working on Donald Trump’s latest, but Nielson Bookscan sales figures look a lot like midterm congressional elections. Where’s the readership turnout? We need diverse readers to be more voracious than a Trump supporter.
But it’s important to note that spending the extra $26 on a hardcover makes it a real luxury good. Books should not be a luxury good, and yet that’s how our business model can feel. Readers can complain at a publisher (like we recently saw with the Scholastic book about George Washington’s slaves) that books aren’t serving them. Readers can hold publishers accountable with a tweet. And it works, sometimes.
Honestly, I do think the industry wants to change. And in some ways, I think it has changed.
What positive changes have you seen, and what is left to tackle apart from publishers hiring editors who are more representative of the world we actually live and write in?
Amazon is really good at supporting the sales of the top 50 books, and providing access to more obscure books. Those latter numbers are like popcorn sales, though; they aren’t concentrated enough to make a measurable impact for big publishers. The Big 5—over half the industry—have their eyes on getting a book in the top 50, and compete for those few slots. Look at what’s in the top 50 overall now: How many of those books are even new? How many are coloring books? The industry has so much capital going toward the least risk adverse books, it results in mergers and layoffs. It leaves a lot of literary, brilliant, cool, driven, smart people out of the system. It leaves great authors out of the system. It leaves diversity out of the system.
Really, this whole conversation is about an open wound, but I’m paying attention to how we’re healing. I see it in the Renaissance of the indie publisher—it’s like a hundred years ago, when Knopf was Knopf, not an imprint of subdivision of a division of a multinational media conglomerate. It’s Coffee House and Graywolf and Two Dollar Radio and Melville House and Catapult and New Directions and City Lights and Norton. These publishers are investing in beautiful voices. By not competing for those 50 slots, they have freedom to be interesting. These books don’t earn blockbuster money, but they do win awards. And more are breaking through. Marlon James is a great example—his first book was rejected 80 times, but Akashic invested in him. His follow-up was published by Riverhead and went on to win the Man Booker. Now his name is on the lips of every literati.
The more attention readers give these smaller presses, the more literary judges and reviewers keep their eyes on them, the more capital will go in their direction, and the more weight they’ll carry in the industry as a whole. And if these newer, smaller presses build on a foundation of diversity, as they are looking to do now, that could hold the answer for the future of publishing. This is great news for industry professionals, for writers, and most of all, for readers.
I work in publishing, and like Linda, am a straight cis white lady from a middle-class background, and all of this is true!
This is a great, fascinating discussion that deserves much more than this comment, but– Wouldn’t it be great if they did stick all the “Lads Who Write About Gentrified Brooklyn” books on one shelf so the rest of us could avoid them?
so say we all!
What about “What About The Author’s Penis?”
I would also like this categorization system for music plz.
whhyyyyy isn’t dicklit a category.
According to wikipedia this term has been around at least since 2002 — why have I never encountered it before/why do I not use it constantly?
I feel bad that this was my main takeaway–picturing my bookstore organized this way.
“And if you aren’t born into this world, if your dad didn’t ride Metro North everyday with an executive editor, and if you don’t make those important connections at universities—and these are all markers of class—then the opportunities to get hired in the first place become few and far between”
So so true. I think I commented on the piece last week with similar sentiments. But, yeah, I fit the white cis woman with a good degree AND the certificate thing to a tee. Still couldn’t get a Big 5 job, because I don’t know anyone who knows anyone. Plus, I realized I would have needed a second job to afford my first job in NYC. You’re going to get the exact same people filling those jobs if you rely on nepotism to find candidates. And that homogeneity is going to produce homogeneous content.
It seems like the publishing industry, the acquiring side, needs to watch Moneyball. You can get what you need by way of several good (not great) books for less investment than 1 maybe great (but maybe not) book. People also need to invest money in creating ways of curating content and communicating with a desired audience, but not every book has to be a bestseller to make money. Invest in the midlist, dammit.
Maybe there should be a “Brooklyn hipsters” shelf way over in the corner of the store, a hundred feet from the fiction section and partially hidden by a display of calendars.
Thank you for this! I’m an avid reader, but don’t know much about the inside workings of publishing, this was very interesting to me!
I’m going to go examine my bookshelves and take a careful inventory of who I’m actually reading.
Sapphire’s Push is a great example: At the time, 20 years ago, it was received as a “Black book” on an “African American Women’s Interest” shelf. Over time, with more readers outside that label, it made it over to the “fiction” shelf. Now that book is, in many ways, hanging out with Toni Morrison in this world where the metadata people don’t know if they should code it as “African American Women’s Fiction” or just “Fiction.”
I’m a defender of the African American section in the bookstore, though I know writers don’t care for it. I like it because there aren’t enough books out there about people who look like me, and when that’s what I want, it’s so much easier for me to find. The middle-class dimension of my life is well-covered in what I read, but the black protagonist is something I have to deliberately seek out. More diverse books in the “regular books” section would eliminate the need for it, but until that day, I will hold onto it.
I can see how it would be useful! I used to work for an Asian American magazine, and sometimes we’d talk about whether the goal was for these specific platforms and publications and categories to become “unnecessary.” My friend is an American historian, and she and I were talking just yesterday about how “_____-American” history is just AMERICAN history, and should be incorporated into the broader history curriculum and not kept off on its own (where it is vulnerable to being overlooked, dismissed, or even cut if there’s a budget crunch). But that doesn’t mean these classifications and designated spaces are or ever will be irrelevant, or that people can’t also use them to find the kind of media/info/community/etc. they are really looking for. Media specifically dedicated to underrepresented groups & communities has been really important over the years, and still is, and I can definitely see how the “African American fiction” designation — while annoying to some — also makes it easier to find.
Yes! I agree with this in a big way! It’s part of the metadata conundrum. If people are searching for–actively seeking out–books that are about African American Women’s interests, then we need to make those books easy to find. Especially online where discoverability is typing, “best novel about an african american woman.” The tricky part is figuring out how, when white readers search for “best novels 2015” the ones about and by African American women are included.
THIS. I was just thinking about this the other day, in relation to the UK losing its mind that one of its big writing prizes went to a not-cis-het-white dude. I feel like regular inclusion of the AMAZING work being done by not-cis-het-white-dudes in lists like “Best books of 2015” would really help to truncate the “this is no longer a meritocracy” howls that go out whenever a “diverse” (for brevity, sorry, is not the best term) person is recognized by an award.
I personally always go back and forth on it. As a queer lady, the fact that all the queer stuff was in one section meant that I never just ran across books with queer protagonists because they weren’t mixed into the lit I was reading. But now that I am specifically seeking it out, it is nice to have one section to go browse.
Yes! I was working at Books-A-Million when my store decided to remove the “African-American Fiction” section and integrate the books into the “(just) Fiction” section. And our customers hated it. We ended up making a bookmark with all of the authors names who wrote African-American fiction so that customers could quickly find what they were looking for, the way they used to.
In addition to the list of indie publishers to be aware of in the second to last paragraph, I would add Beacon Press and The New Press, if nonfiction is your thing. I’m also fond of Seven Stories Press (both fiction and nonfiction). Bellevue Literary Press is worth keeping an eye on, as a reader. Mmmm, books.
There are a number of good speculative fiction small presses too – I’m especially a fan of Twelfth Planet Press.
Small Beer is another one.
Also, for some Canadian content, HIGHLY recommend Biblioasis and Freehand Books. I also think House of Anansi does some pretty fantastic stuff.
Second all of this!
Enthusiastic reader here (like most of the Toasties) – I really appreciate this look at the “inside baseball” of publishing. Any specific recommendations for small indie publishing houses doing great work? And how/where to find their books?
Check out Small Press Distribution: http://www.spdbooks.org/ This is the distributor that indie bookstores use to stock indie presses, and you can shop there like you would any other online store.
I posted some publisher suggestions above, but to keep up with new releases: most publishers will have an email list you can sign up for (and most seem to be pretty good about not selling your address and/or sending fifteen emails a day… looking at you, gap.com.) That will keep you up to date on new releases as well as special sales and promotions.
Some book review venues are really good at highlighting books that are independently published or otherwise not getting a ton of attention. I’m fond of Rain Taxi.
For (mostly) speculative fiction, Weightless Books is a good place for ebooks from various small presses: https://weightlessbooks.com
Tangentially related, People of Colour Destroy Science Fiction is currently raising funds on kickstarter and they’re posting great personal essays daily in the updates. Highly recommended, even for those who aren’t interested in the campaign. Here’s today’s essay, on African Fiction sections in Nigerian bookshops:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lightspeedma…
I see that I must’ve missed the bit in the penultimate paragraph: “It’s Coffee House and Graywolf and Two Dollar Radio and Melville House and Catapult and New Directions and City Lights and Norton. These publishers are investing in beautiful voices.”
Thank you for this, and everyone else for your recommendations!
Thank you for this. As yet another white cis-woman working in publishing, it was a jolt to be reminded me of my privilege. While it wasn’t an easy road (work hours cut in order to take an unpaid internship, moving costs, taking random jobs during the publishing search, then ending up making less per hour than I did back home where I paid much less rent)—I know I was lucky to have the ability to accommodate that integral internship, and in fact was introduced to the internship contacts through a university networking night. My undergrad education alone was a huge stepping stone not afforded to many.
I still find myself disillusioned, though. Like many I went into the industry to hopefully help put beauty and important ideas out into the world, and half the time end up working on the same old corporate fluff. And I have no say in that. Such a small, narrow department within the company affects what we acquire.
I am also feeling broken by the low-wage aspect. Not one of the lucky few to have “trust fund” access, I do odd jobs to make extra money and still—several years into joining the industry—watch my bank account hit $5 before every paycheck. I’ve come come to the decision that I have to do what’s best for my emotional stress level and try to join another field (though that’s proving really hard so far). I feel forced out, yet am still battling worries that I’m cynical, greedy, guilty when held up to my idealistic young self—as if we publishing lower-downs are expected to be the selfless ones.
Changing fields to have less anxiety is A FINE LIFE CHOICE.
Lizzie, your post is a couple of weeks old, so I don’t know if you’ll ever see my reply here. But have you considered going freelance, and editing for self-published authors? WE NEED GOOD EDITORS. Desperately. And we are willing to pay for excellent editing. I’ve helped a couple of friends make the jump into full-time freelance editing. I’m always willing to extend the offer or help to other people who love books and want to contribute to art, but who feel as butt-chapped as all the authors do by the dumb b.s. at the top of corporate publishing’s infuriating food chain. My name is a link–you can get in touch with me if you’re interested in batting around more ideas.
I currently work in publishing, and this all seems to be pretty true. I’m also currently job-searching.
I have heard people say “well maybe there aren’t that many books with Black protagonists because the people who would buy them don’t have as much money?” And I have stared them down with fury in my eyes.
I’m sad that I am not surprised to hear this.
AUGH. I am amazed that you managed to contain the fury to your eyes alone.
I gobble up publishing industry stuff, and you’re so right:
But as Linda pointed out, while many have brought their passion, commitment, and best intentions to publishing panels and discussions and roundtables, the lack of diversity is a tangled issue, and we often say “at least we talked about it!” without untangling any of the knots. So many conversations about working toward more authentic and diverse representation in publishing — as in the media, and the entertainment industry — seem to fire people up without necessarily resulting in change.
I’m happy to see the shift from “duh, everyone here is an underpaid white woman with a dad or spouse on Wall Street willing to support them” to “hang on, should everyone here be that?” and more often now, “no, that should change.”
You’ve highlighted several factors that not only should change, but that can change, in terms of improving diversity from the bottom up in publishing. Getting a broader group in the door is a fabulous and necessary charge, especially if the Big-5 want to stay a Manhattan-based Big-5 a generation or two from now.
I’m also eager to see conversations and ideas and actions that will improve diversity up the food chain now. And that cute stat about men being 12-23% in other parts of the industry, but 40% at the executive level, sure speaks to some old-fashioned dynamics.
I’m curious, those with publishing experience – say you’ve just gotten an entry level job after an internship at a not-Big-5 publisher, and you’re smart, savvy, skilled enough to be VP of Marketing some day. How long are you working to get there? Is it 7-10 years before you feel like you’re making decent money? Is it 30 years before you get a corner office? I always see publishing as an industry with a lot of movement (editors to agents to other company editors, etc.) and those moves are horizontal as well as vertical, right? Is it an industry a lot of people drop out of after 5 years trying to break in, and those left can rise quickly?
In my experience at a smallish digital academic publisher (holler if your experience is different, or, y’know, the same), most people who are VPs here are not people who worked their way up from entry-level positions in editorial or production or whatever, they are mostly people (ahem, dudes) with MBAs who skipped the slog and moved in on the managerial level. The exceptions in this particular case are people who helped start the company.
Note to self for next life: be a dude with an MBA.
The most viable strategy, obvi.
In my experience, you get a corner office when you have a blockbuster or big award winner. So I wouldn’t hold it to time? Like, there are people who worked from assistant to publisher of an eponymous imprint in say, 25 years. There are people who become executives with one big best seller. And there are a lot of people who drop out after 5 years. Like, a whole lot of people drop out after 5 years.
“Hi, my name is M, and I signed Girl on a Train. Welcome to my palace. It’s built on the slush piles of all the people who tried and failed and left.”
Hi, big 5 editor here. The salary thing is different depending on the dept. In my experience, if you’re marketing or publicity, you’re going to move up quickly and the money gets okay within your 5-7 year range. You’re still going to be able to make better pay in almost any other industry, but if you stick with it, I’ve seen people hit associate director or director within 10-15 years.
Editorial is the crux of the problem, I think. The salaries are low and they stay low for a looooong time. And, yes, a lot of people get pushed out either bc of the money or bc it’s incredibly competitive–very few assistants rise to editor at the same house, there just aren’t enough positions to go around. You usually have to move out to move up. And these are the people who are identifying the projects for acquisition. So even though the executives hold the purse strings, a lot of it comes down to the editorial staff, who have been winnowed to the people who were able to take an unpaid internship in the first place, can stick out the early years with very low pay, have had several lucky breaks along the way, and keep their p&ls healthy (usually by not taking on too many risky projects) so they’re not on the chopping block during the inevitable next round of layoffs. *For an added layer of terrible: those lucky breaks seem to come fast and furious for the very small number of male editors.
Thanks for replying – you’ve confirmed my basic sense of things, and given me a lot of good detail.
That added layer of terrible – for a while there when I was looking at places like PW regularly, I had the impression that the m/f split in editorial was about equal, bc that was what I was seeing with the news items. When I got to studying the industry as a writer looking for publication, and met a ton more authors, I realized how few of the editors anyone was working with were male. It’s anecdotal, but it sure does seem to be disproportionate, and it’s hard to claim that all the dudes must just be a lot better at the job, or whatever.
I work for a sales agency, so I end up working with a lot of small to medium presses. The movement in those places is almost nil, because many smaller presses are basically owner-operated. I’ve been at my job (same job title, although I have gotten more money, and some big changes in responsibility) for nine years and have been working with many of the same people in sales and marketing departments. I will say that the money is a lot better in sales than in editorial, from what I understand.
Thanks, all, for replying – this is fascinating info.
This is such a great article and echoes conversations I’ve had with colleagues and friends in the industry. It’s a complicated problem. I will self-interestedly say that I hope readers will look to diverse authors and books wherever they may come from–not just small presses. The big 5, as you said, respond to $$$. If you want to see more diversity in the frontlist, buy the kind of books you’d like to see more of–it makes it that much easier for the next one to get through the acquisitions process to publication.
I love that, in ten years, all the references to colouring books here will be baffling.
It’s quite interesting, because we keep saying that the midlist is dying, but I work with one of the big five and they are still publishing a very large number of titles every season. Too many, if you ask me! But I could just be bitter because I have to present all these damn books to buyers!
But look at Berkley, NAL, Putnam, Dutton consolidation. it happened for a lot of personnel reasons, it makes streamlined sense, it’s less internal competition, but 4 imprints that specialized in midlist are 1. Fewer Bigger Books is the mantra.
The most viable strategy, obvi.
this Billfold/Toast/Gilmore Girls crossover by Nicole Dieker made me so happy:
Jess paused again. The comment had to be written very carefully, because if he did it right it would also drive readers to Brooklino Press, and he wanted to make sure they went there in a positive frame of mind. The part of the diversity in publishing article that had gotten the furthest under his skin, of course, was the joke about bookstores needing a “Lads Who Write About Gentrified Brooklyn” shelf, and if he made his comment he’d have to trust that the Toast readership would be smart enough to get that Brooklino was a play on linograph, it alluded to the great history of publishing, and it also alluded to his last name—and sure, it was a masculine ending in a Romance Language sense but that was part of the point. Brooklino sought out thoughtful, incisive, and provocative writing about contemporary masculinity, the types of pieces that couldn’t get published anywhere else.
Me too!! I <3 the Billfold and I’m so glad there’s some Billfold/Toast cross-condiment (?) action!
this Billfold/Toast/Gilmore Girls crossover by Nicole Dieker made me so happy:
Jess paused again. The comment had to be written very carefully, because if he did it right it would also drive readers to Brooklino Press, and he wanted to make sure they went there in a positive frame of mind. The part of the diversity in publishing article that had gotten the furthest under his skin, of course, was the joke about bookstores needing a “Lads Who Write About Gentrified Brooklyn” shelf, and if he made his comment he’d have to trust that the Toast readership would be smart enough to get that Brooklino was a play on linograph, it alluded to the great history of publishing, and it also alluded to his last name—and sure, it was a masculine ending in a Romance Language sense but that was part of the point. Brooklino sought out thoughtful, incisive, and provocative writing about contemporary masculinity, the types of pieces that couldn’t get published anywhere else.
Yes! I was working at Books-A-Million when my store decided to remove the "African-American Fiction" section and integrate the books into the "(just) Fiction" section. And our customers hated it. We ended up making a bookmark with all of the authors names who wrote African-American fiction so that customers could quickly find what they were looking for, the way they used to.
It’s crazy how the thinking is “Does [x group] read?” when I consistently read that black, college-educated women are the most voracious reader group. The number one author that FLEW off the shelves when I worked at Books-A-Million was Zane, who writes African-American erotica/romance.
It's crazy how the thinking is "Does [x group] read?" when I consistently read that black, college-educated women are the most voracious reader group. The number one author that FLEW off the shelves when I worked at Books-A-Million was Zane, who writes African-American erotica/romance.
This is a truly excellent discussion. Thanks so much for having it, and in such depth.
It all illustrates–particularly the rapid vanishing of the midlist–why so many working authors, myself included, are fleeing to self-publishing. It’s mind-blowing to think that just a few years ago, self-publishing was absolute career suicide. Today, as a self-published author, I make better money than nearly all the traditionally published authors I know.
The times, they are a-changing. Thank goodness for Amazon and the Kindle; without them, diversity might have been quashed altogether overnight. (This problem didn’t originate with Amazon, folks… it started when the chain bookstores–B&N an Borders–took over distribution and began telling publishers what they could and couldn’t acquire.)
Hey, me too!
The tricky thing is that authors are making better money self-publishing now than they can hope to make with any publisher, particularly a small publisher. So while I think small presses that have a conscious focus on diversity are a good thing, and very much needed, you'll really have your work cut out for you. It's hard to compete with the 70% of cover price we can get by publishing ourselves.
Here's what small presses can offer to authors that has real value in today's publishing landscape:
-Distribution to bookstores, and not just being in the Ingram and B&T catalogues, but ACTUAL RELATIONSHIPS with independent bookstores, that have plenty of shoppers, and those relationships have to get your press's books merchandised in a way that reaches new readers. Print sales aren't a huge part of anybody's income anymore, unless you're a really major author, but good placement in popular bookstores can help with discoverability.
-Competitive royalties. The best royalty anybody is currently offering as a boilerplate is 35% of net on ebook sales, and ebooks make up about 75% of most authors' sales now, if not more. Do better than 35% of net. If you're small and you have low overhead, you should be able to pull it off. Ebooks cost almost nothing to produce. I speak from experience on this.
-Focus on your niche, and your niche needs to be a market that's still hard for authors to reach by self-publishing. Literary fiction, anything experimental, memoir, certain types of historical fiction, horror, and sci-fi with feminist themes are all niches that are currently tough to exploit as an independent author, but that have no shortage of excellent writers who want to sell those books. Stay focused on your niche and become purveyors of extreme excellence within that niche.
-Get smart about promoting. Promote books like a successful self-publishing author. They know how to sell. Study what they do. Pro tip: they aren't doing ANYTHING the Big Five are doing. The Big Five have no damn idea how to sell books in a post-Kindle world. If you can do the heavy lifting of good, effective promotion so the authors can spend more time writing, then your press will be worth the royalty split.
-Go after awards. Self-published authors are still ghettoized out of the awards scene, even in the case of awards that technically do "consider" self-published work. (They don't really consider it–not yet. But they will someday, and probably soon, so the window to use this as a feature of your press is closing. Act now!)
I hope this was helpful to you!