Well this is depressing...

By Abir

Here’s our topic for this week: Discuss diversity in the sense of the market. What do you want to see on bookshelves from black authors in 2020?

Sigh.

Where to start? I suppose with honesty.

My first reaction to seeing this week’s topic was to roll my eyes. It seems every so often there’s a burst of handwringing in the publishing industry and the wider media about the lack of diversity, and good white people ask ‘What can we do? How do we fix this?’ and we get a bunch of well-meaning and often wrong-headed gestures (Black Frankenstein for f*!@’s sake – seriously?), and then people get scared by the backlash or just bored and go back to whatever it is they were championing or publishing before. So please forgive me if I’m slightly sceptical about the topic. What’s more, I have a problem with the question itself, but bare with me, I’ll get to that.

Let’s deal with the easy part of the question first:

Discuss diversity in the sense of the market

I’m going to talk about the UK market, because that’s the one I know best, but I fear the same holds in North America too.

As far as I can tell, on both sides of the Atlantic, the publishing industry at almost all levels appears to be staffed and run by white, upper-middle class people, drawn from a very narrow strata of society. And the same goes for authors that are published.

From the youngest interns at the literary agents responsible for sifting through the slush piles, to the agents themselves who act as gatekeepers to the industry, on to the ranks of the publishers – from the nice people in marketing, to the lovely ones in design, to the editors and the bosses – the vast majority of these people are great, good-natured, upper-middle class white people, who are well-meaning but tend to live in a bubble and often haven’t much of a clue how to deal with working-class white issues and books, let alone those written by ethnic minorities.

I spent twenty years of my life working in high finance in the city of London, a place not particularly known for its ethical standards and certainly not short of sociopaths in positions of power, but I’ll tell you something – the degree of diversity you’ll see there (and have done since the late 1980s) puts the supposedly liberal and progressive publishing industry to shame.

Why? I don’t have an answer, but it strikes me that until the advent of Amazon and e-books, the publishing industry was quite safe and cosy, with a stable market of older white, middle-aged readers and saw no real reason to change or to appeal to other groups.

Are things changing? I think (and hope) that they are, and I think the crime and mystery genre is in the vanguard of that change. When I was first published five years ago, there were no British Asians being published in the genre. Since then, it seems we are up to about ten authors, with a few more published each year. The numbers are still a drop in the ocean but it feels like a sustainable change is occurring. 

I’ve read the posts by my fellow bloggers on this topic, and one of the recurring themes was a desire to read more about different cultures and heritages. That is most laudable, but with respect, I’m going to take issue with this point – not in terms of the individuals who express it, but with the general theme and tone. That’s because I’ve heard it before. I’ve been hearing it for years, from individual writers, readers, agents, editors and CEOs of the odd publishing house or two. And yet, nothing really changes. Why? Because I think, when it comes down to it, you either don’t really mean it, or as an industry you don’t have the guts to take a risk and follow through on your good intentions. The industry is extremely conservative For years, non-white, non-middle class writers have been told by agents and editors – ‘we’re looking for the next new thing’, when what they actually mean is ‘we’re looking for the next new thing which is pretty much the same as the last thing that worked for us.’

And that’s why we have a deluge of psychological thrillers, each with interchangeable covers and many of which have a title with the word ‘girl’ in it. 

And you know why? Because that’s what the paying punters want. Publishing is a business. They need to sell books. The problem is, no one from their narrow middle class white background has figured out how to widen the market to cater to the wider public. When they do try, they often do it so cack-handedly (American Dirt, anyone?) that they then take fright and go back into their shells. It’s often one step forward, one step back.

Right, so that’s my view on the subject. You may disagree, but I owe you my honest opinion.

As for the second part of the question: What do I want to see on bookshelves from black authors?

I’m sorry. I have a problem with the question. The absurdity of it can be seen by changing ‘black’ to ‘white’ in the question.

Black authors can write about whatever they want to write about. If it’s good, I’ll read it.

Update:

So I've slept on yesterday's post and have woken up a bit less frustrated by the world. Yesterday was a bit of a rant, and in the interests of fairness, I feel I should point out some of the positive developments, as well as making suggestions about how things might improve. Otherwise, I'm not really helping the situation.

Firstly, I have to say that things in the industry, at least on this side of the pond, seem to changing for the better, though slowly. One thing that stunned me this week was the remarkable own goal of the books released for Black History Month with 'black' characters such as black Romeo and Juliet, black Frankenstein's monster etc. What shocks me most is that a room full of people must have sat down and, with the best of intentions, decided that was a good idea Then the machinery of a whole industry went into operation and a lot of money was spent to create these books. I can't help thinking that maybe if there were even two people of colour involved in those meetings that they would have piped up and pointed out what a monumentally ill-thought out idea it was. So the first thing the industry needs to do is recruit people who can point these things out. If a few people of colour had been involved in that decision process, the publishers could have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars and a tonne of bad publicity.

In fairness, some of the large publishing houses have amended their recruitment policies, doing away with unpaid internships (which effectively priced out most people without a rich daddy or mummy from entering the industry), and some, like Penguin Random House have instigated 'blind' application processes. This is a good start. For the publishing industry to flourish, it needs to reflect the society it purports to serve.

The second issue is that of who  is actually published. I have to acknowledge the strides being made by publishers in the UK to publish more 'non-traditional' voices. In 2017/18 Penguin Random House started their Write Now programme, offering mentorships and publishing contracts to writers from ethnic minorities, working class and LGBTQ+ backgrounds. I've been lucky enough to be involved with this programme and the first fruits of it are coming through now. Other publishers are also creating similar schemes.

My fear though, and I hope that I'm proved wrong, is that these initiatives remain niche endeavours rather than reaching mainstream audiences...which brings me to my third point - Readership

Part of the issue, in the UK at least, is increasing the levels of reading among non middle class people. I saw a statistic a few years a go that said that one in two British Asians had never entered a bookshop, I don't know how such things are measured, but anecdotally, that feels true to me. What's more surprising is that British Asian kids use libraries in greater numbers than any other youth demographic. But something happens that means these youngsters don't become adult readers. That is as much an issue for British Asian communities as it is for the publishing industry, but I feel that until we can increase the number of ethnic minorities and working class people who feel comfortable going into bookshops and libraries, and reading the sort of books that reflect their experiences, non-white, non-middle class writers will always be at risk of being niche.

So there you go. And you thought I didn't do nuance.