How Long Can It Take to Fix Publishing’s Diversity Problem?
Anamik Saha
Rethinking ‘Diversity’ in Publishing was a research project that began in 2019 led by myself with support from Dr Sandra van Lente, in collaboration with writer development agency Spread the Word and The Bookseller magazine. The project explored the politics of ‘diversity’ in the publishing industry, which research shows is the whitest and most privileged sector in the cultural and creative industries. This lack of diversity is something that people in the industry are acutely aware of and desperate to fix. Our interest was in how the obsession with diversity in trade fiction that manifests – and it really does feel like an obsession at times – affects the experiences of authors of colour and how their books arrive in the marketplace. We wanted to help publishers rethink the common-sense approach to diversity that sees it as a quantitative problem, a case of simply increasing the number of people of colour working inside the industry and who features on a publisher’s front-list. Instead we wanted to focus their attention on the publishing process itself, and how this impedes authors of colour, and is maybe the reason why so few black and Asian people make up the publishing workforce.
From our interviews with people who work in publishing at different stages of production – from scouting, to acquisition, to editing, to marketing/publicity, to sales, to retail – we found that authors of colour encountered obstacles throughout. Each stage of the publishing process contained Eurocentric assumptions about black and Asian authors in particular and how they would be received by ‘mainstream’ readers, or indeed one reader in particular. The key finding in our research is that trade publishers have a very narrow sense of their audience, perceived as a white, middle-class, woman reader who is at times sardonically referred to as ‘Susan’ or ‘Susie’. As such, books by authors of colour are edited, packaged, promoted and sold in a way to appeal to this one imagined reader. While publishing houses have spent a lot of money on market research and identifying different audience segments, the idea of Susie remained dominant, though no one could tell us where she came from. (In some ways, she resembled many of the people who work in publishing.) The focus on this one reader places limits and constraints on the creativity of these authors and the stories they are able to tell. Stories about migration, culture clashes and identity crises are prioritised and centred, as this is supposedly how Susie imagines black and Asian experience in the West. One Asian author we interviewed half-jokingly described how he just wanted to write ‘shit science fiction’ like other white writers but the expectations of publishers prevented him from doing so.
Overall, Rethinking ‘Diversity’ in Publishing was a big success and the report that came from the project was well-received by the industry. But I still have concerns about the actual impact of the research, and the extent to which it has led to meaningful change inside publishing. Three years after the project ended, I ask myself, how long can it take to fix inequalities in publishing that have been entrenched in society since the birth of modern Britain?
This question of time becomes an important one when reflecting on the impact of the project. Academic research is a frustratingly slow and laborious process. I am not referring to the research itself (which is conducted within a very tight timeframe), but the elongated period up until a research project actually formally begins. This includes the formulation of the initial idea, designing the research, finding willing research partners, writing the application, and putting together the budget of all the research costs. After the university reviews the proposal (usually requesting additional changes) it is then sent to the research funder. The funder’s task is to then find academics with the relevant expertise to review the quality of the application – including its feasibility, its intellectual and methodological contribution and the potential impact of the project. ‘Impact’, here, is a very specific term used in academic research, referring to the social/economic value the project has to wider society, that is, beyond academia, whether industry, civil society or particular communities. Without a clear sense of a project’s impact, it is very unlikely to receive a funding award from the (publicly funded) research council. Depending on the scheme, the Principle Investigator of the project will go through several more rounds of reviews/revisions/resubmissions before a final decision is made. It took four years to put together the application for our Rethinking ‘Diversity’ in Publishing project (admittedly, an unusually long time), and then a further year to receive the final decision from the Arts and Humanities Research Council or AHRC (we were one of the lucky 25% of applicants who won funding from the council that year). The actual project lasted 16 months, including nine intense months in the field, trying to cram in as many interviews with publishers as we could. The remaining months were spent analysing the data, writing, publishing and then promoting our report, and disseminating our findings to various industry ‘stakeholders’, including publishing houses, industry networks and activist groups. As I write, I am weighing up pursuing further funding to measure the impact of our research. I can already feel time slipping away as I mull on whether I want to pursue such an opportunity.
We believe that the success of our research proposal in getting an award was in how we were able to stress the potential impact of the project, specifically its value to publishers who understand that they need to do diversity better. As mentioned, while publishing is the most privileged cultural sector in terms of the social (and racial) constitution of its workforce, it is also the cultural sector that’s mostly acutely aware of its own privilege. Publishing is desperate to fix its diversity problem, if only for its own sense of itself as a meritocracy. Modern publishers generally consider themselves liberal and cosmopolitan, so the lack of racial diversity in its ranks becomes a source of embarrassment and guilt for it suggests obstacles to entry. But to return to the point of the article, how much impact can we expect an academically authored industry report to generate? Or rather, how soon can any such change come? Our report featured a foreword from Booker Prize-winning author and now President of the Royal Society of Literature Bernardine Evaristo, who lamented the publishing industry’s inability to change. Evaristo highlighted how Rethinking ‘Diversity’... was the latest in a long line of reports that have exposed ‘the huge absence of the voices of people of colour in literature as practitioners, publishers and festival curators’. Evaristo’s point is that despite these important arguments, nothing really shifts. The perennial problem with the operationalisation of diversity inside any organisation or industry is that such efforts are tokenistic and nothing more than lip-service. While an organisation would love to have more diversity, they are not necessarily willing to invest the economic resources needed to tackle this in a concerted fashion, or at least in a way that would mean giving up a position of privilege. This was something we were acutely aware of when we released our report into the world.
Yet the response to Rethinking ‘Diversity’... was incredibly positive, and a little overwhelming at times. It certainly did not feel superficial. Not that we expected backlash, but we certainly didn’t encounter any negative reactions (expressed publicly at least). At worst, our fear was that the report would simply be ignored. Again, this was not borne out, based on the media coverage and the response we received on social media. On publication we were invited to deliver a range of talks, whether formal presentations, or more interactive panel discussions, involving public and private audiences, in both corporate and activist settings. This included speaking to 100+ audiences at the London and Frankfurt Book Fairs, giving presentations to industry bodies like the Society of Authors, and meetings with the Arts Council and the executive board of a major publishing house. We did not encounter any hostility or defensiveness, particularly from the mostly white, middle-class audiences we were disseminating the research to. On nearly all occasions we felt that people were genuinely – rather than performatively – engaged with the issues at stake, even if they had not read the report.
Nevertheless, despite the positive response from publishers, we still could not shake our cynicism about whether our research could transcend tokenism and lead to actual meaningful change. Within the increasingly corporatised culture of publishing, based upon meeting targets and key performance indicators, fixing problems related to racial and other forms of social inequality is notoriously difficult. This explains why diversity initiatives focus on improvement in terms of increasing the number of people from marginalised backgrounds in an organisation, rather than involve a holistic approach that can more urgently address the complex forms of discrimination that such communities experience - the former relies on data that is easier to capture. Moreover, when the exercise of counting the number of black, brown and Asian bodies within a publishing house invariably produces negative results, the best publishers can do is to evidence action, whether it is internally to board members and shareholders, or externally to media and the public. This is where we worry about the reception to Rethinking ‘Diversity’.... While we are happy to see greater awareness of issues of diversity and inequality inside publishing, as well as greater transparency and accountability inside corporate organisations, more often than not, this manifests as tokenistic gestures towards the problem in a way that enhances the reputational brand of the house while keeping the status quo in place. To what extent then does our report become instrumentalised within a corporation’s own audit culture, used to evidence commitment if not actual change? That is, what if the primary purpose of publicly acknowledging Rethinking ‘Diversity’… was simply to appease corporate shareholders, as well as stakeholders and audiences? What if a visible engagement with the report, in both internal and external communication, becomes the end itself rather than the means to the end?
If that reading is too cynical for some, then we can at least express some sympathy for publishers. Quite simply, the racial inequality that characterises this sector is entrenched. It is a thick layer of sediment that constitutes the foundation of the modern publishing industry, part of the bigger structures of racism that undergird society in its entirety. How can we expect any individual publisher, no matter how well-meaning and motivated, to budge, let alone transform this? That is absolutely not to say that fighting racism is a futile enterprise. The opposite is (or indeed, has to be) true. But without letting anyone off the hook, this painful fact does explain why change in the publishing industry as Evaristo reminds us is so slow, even slower than the academic research process.
I am thinking these pessimistic thoughts while being encouraged to apply for a follow-up grant that seeks to evaluate the impact of Rethinking ‘Diversity’..., alluded to above. As I mentioned previously, one important measure in the evaluation of a research proposal is its potential impact upon society, rather than its purely intellectual value. While academics can be quite hostile to the impact agenda (which is interpreted as a further expression of the neoliberalisation/marketisation of higher education), there is a logic, that to my mind is justified, that research funded by the public needs to have a public value. But how to measure the impact of a piece of research that seeks to address racial inequalities? Or to put it slightly facetiously, how do we measure whether, following Rethinking ‘Diversity’..., the publishing industry has become less racist or not?
The point I am making here is not on the futility of conducting academic research on racial inequality. But rather I want to raise again the question of time that is a theme of this piece, and the curious rhythm of academic work and publicly-funded research. As stated, the research bid took four years to put together and a year to get the result. The eventual impact of the research though, if any, is surely going to take much longer to materialise. Stretched out over time, any change may only appear intangibly.
During the Q&A that followed a talk I was giving to a network of marketing staff who work in publishing, a passionate though slightly dismissive audience member made a demand: that rather than simply criticise the industry, I should instead focus on providing practical advice on how they can improve publishing’s diversity problem. This is a common scenario that colleagues and I encounter: when academics engage with industry, we are often told to focus less on critique and more on suggesting concrete forms of action. I consider this a classic deflection technique. All parties would enjoy an easy fix when it comes to diversity, but this is not going to happen considering the depth and embedded nature of racial inequality in society. Instead, undoing these dense racial knots entails carefully unpicking and examining every individual strand before we can start unravelling.
Rethinking ‘Diversity’..., we hope, started this process in a productive way. For instance, we implored publishers to shed their Eurocentric understandings of what black and Asian writing is. We urged them to afford the same creative freedoms to black and Asian authors as their white, middle-class counterparts to make publishing a more welcome space for people from marginalised backgrounds. We appealed that such efforts will lead to the fulfilment of a common goal: to establish a career in publishing as truly good work, not just for the privileged few, but for everyone who loves books and wants to contribute to book culture. In this regard I am sure our report had an impact on publishers – who if only for a moment, ingested some of these messages. But this work demands patience, despite the industry’s eagerness – genuine or otherwise – for a quick solution to its diversity problem.
Anamik Saha is a Professor in Race and Media in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. His research is on issues of race, culture and media, with a particular focus on creative and cultural industries and issues of ‘diversity’. He is the author of Race and the Cultural Industries (Polity, 2018), Race, Culture and Media (Sage, 2021) and the co-author of the AHRC-funded industry report Rethinking ‘Diversity’ in Publishing (with Dr Sandra van Lente, Goldsmiths Press, 2020). His research has featured across a range of media, including BBC Radio, The Guardian, TES and The New Statesman. He was included in the The Bookseller’s 2020 list of most influential people in the book trade. He is an editor of European Journal of Cultural Studies.