by Jay Hartman
If there’s one good thing that’s come out of the last year or so, it’s a heightened awareness for the recognition of diversity in all aspects of our modern society. Whether it’s a fight for racial equality in the justice system, equal pay for equal work for women, or ensuring that Asian-Americans are not terrorized by misguided people looking to place the entire responsibility of a worldwide pandemic on their heads, the world is becoming more aware of the need for diverse representation.
That being said, publishing has always been a bit of an odd duck when it comes to openly displaying diversity. Having been a Waldenbooks store manager in the mid-90s, I can tell you that it was an incredible struggle to establish specific sections in the store for African-American, Asian-American, Native-American, and LGBTQIA+ literature. It was a constant battle with home office to allocate square footage in the store to these sections, as there was a belief that the books simply wouldn’t sell. It was a battle I was able to win, and the books sold like hotcakes.
The modern era, however, is a little different. Where we used to have bookstores that specialized in literature for marginalized groups (because the big chains wouldn’t carry the titles), there are far fewer now than there used to be. I worked at The Open Book in downtown Sacramento (sadly, closed now) and that was my first exposure to an LGBTQIA+ bookstore. Sure, there are still important outposts such as The Lit. Bar in Bronx, New York that specializes in African-American literature or Women and Children First in Chicago, Illinois, but the days of retailers providing curated offerings for specific diverse groups has drastically deteriorated. With the advent of online shopping, etailers are trying to be everything to everyone, and books by diverse authors show up only if it’s a special month and a sale is plastered on a homepage.
There are some people who argue that’s the whole point of diversity awareness. Why separate books into narrow niches and channels if the intention is to join all readers as one? The answer is simple: because given the opportunity, it’s a lot easier to hide minority works from the masses and focus on a bunch of white men who can bring in sales and keep the doors open. A look at The New York Times bestseller list confirms this. As of the writing of this article, five of the top ten titles are by white men. Only one is by a woman of color, and it’s a single poem (Amanda Gorman). Many of the names that appear in the top ten are the same tired names that have appeared there for decades. If bookstores and etailers really worked on selling diversity, wouldn’t bestseller lists reflect that more?
Bookstores can’t shoulder all of the responsibility, however. Readers need to demonstrate they have an interest in diverse material. Authors need to be loud and proud about the demographics they represent and demand to be heard, seen, and read. Publishers must do a better job of ensuring their catalogs are well-balanced to include people from all walks of life and with varying voices.
As a publisher, I can tell you that in some ways it can be difficult to know if I’m working with an author who comes from a minority background. That’s simply not a question you ask of an author, as the focus should always be on the quality of the work. However, there’s an obligation on submission calls to ensure you are reaching as wide a pool of authors as you can so those voices make it to the editor’s desk. Publishing strictly on a person’s skin color or gender identity is not what publishing should be, but neither should we be ignoring these important voices and authentic experiences. I’ve never met the majority of my authors after eleven years in the publishing business, and I can probably count on one hand the number of authors whose picture I’ve seen. That doesn’t excuse me, however, for doing everything in my power to make sure my catalog represents a wide swath of people.
Is our current catalog as diverse as it possibly could be? Nope. However, in recent submission calls I’ve made it clear in our guidelines we’re looking for submissions by/for/about people of color and other marginalized folks (disabled, LGBTQIA+, elderly, etc.). My hope is that this will encourage more of these authors to come our way and make their voices heard.
That being said, it isn’t about publishing titles with minority characters just for the sake of jumping on a political bandwagon that happens to be hot or “woke” at the moment. Just as much damage can be done to the progress of getting these voices heard and read by publishing inauthentic material as by not publishing it in the first place. A white woman attempting to write African-American characters just isn’t going to ring true no matter how good a writer she is. Or, in the case of Amélie Wen Zhao, an Asian author trying to write about slavery (the book was canceled by the publisher before it ever came out, due to severe backlash from beta readers).
As an openly gay man, I’ve always taken issue with the sheer number of straight women who write gay fiction/gay romance/gay erotica. You can identify these authors because their name typically is a man’s name made feminine by the addition of a vowel (Jaye instead of Jay). These books find gay men reduced to nothing but stereotypes. The guy is either super flamboyant or hypermasculine. Somebody is always in the closet and unable to deal with it. Everyone is a sports star or a fireman or some alpha-male profession. There’s little attention given to actual relationship development or the concept of love, and way too much emphasis is put on physicality and sex. Basically, I rarely find myself represented within the pages of what passes for gay literature. The whole point of a great read is to find a character you identify with. I’ve found that the only gay lit I go back to are the authentic ones, written by actual gay men. Neil Plakcy, Dorien Grey, Victor Banis, and so many others don’t get the visibility they deserve but do the job of accurately representing their minority to the public.
Authentic, realistic, loud, proud, marginalized, underrepresented, unheard, passed over, buried-in-the-back-of-the-shelf authors. These are the folks that need to be brought to the forefront of the publishing movement in the 21st century. Until that happens, diversity in publishing remains nothing more than a catchphrase of the moment.
Jay A. Hartman founded Untreed Reads to promote eBooks, with an emphasis on independent authors and publishers. He’s written about the eBook industry for fifteen years, and previously served as the content editor for KnowBetter.com, one of the internet’s oldest sites reporting on ebooks and epublishing.
Jay,
I think there is much more acceptance of diversity in literature than ever before and it’s a good thing.
Thanks for sharing your perspective, and for doing all you can to support the publication of diverse voices.
I love that you fought for the sections to promote literature that promotes a particular type of character, be it LGBTQIA or Asian-Americans or another underrepresented group, and that your efforts paid off in sales. It proved your point: the books had apparently been there already, mixed in with all the other books, not found by readers. But once they were categorized and displayed, readers found them.
My newest story includes gay and lesbian characters. I fear people will think I made those choices to be trendy, but they were dictated by the plot and other writing decisions. I used a sensitivity reader to ensure I didn’t mess up. I hope people find the characters believable and compelling.
Good post, Jay!
It’s irony of our age that those who call for diversity and representation today are the ones who call for suppressing books.
During the 1950s and ’60s, there was a sustained drive to liberate speech. Now, it’s moving in the opposite direction, and to see authors approving of it today would make the people who fought for free speech — Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and the book and magazine publishers who risked jail for publishing books like “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “Howl,” and “Lolita,” wonder why they bothered.
When I read the author’s assertion that “A white woman attempting to write African-American characters just isn’t going to ring true no matter how good a writer she is,” I’m reminded of what Theodore Dalrymple wrote about “Rahila Khan,” whose stories about British Asian teens led to a publishing contract with feminist Virago Press, until it was discovered that Khan was really Rev. Toby Forward, a Church of England vicar who ministered in London’s Asian neighborhoods:
“Academics and intellectuals found the affair painful to elucidate. If it was true that the Balkanization of literature was justified by the supposition that only people who belongs to a certain category of people could truly understand, write about, interpret, and sympathize with the experiences of people in that same category, so that, for example, only women could write about women for women, and only blacks about blacks for blacks (the very careers of many academics now depending upon such a supposition), how is it possible that a Church of England vicar had been able, actually without much difficulty, to persuade a feminist publishing house that he wrote as a woman, and as a Muslim woman of Indian subcontinental origin at that?
“Was he not in fact telling us, as presumably a good Christian should, that mankind is essentially one, and that if we make a sufficient effort we too can enter into the worlds of others who are in many ways different from ourselves?
“Was he not implying that the traditional view of literature, that it expresses the universal in the particular, was not only morally and religiously superior, but empirically a more accurate description of it as an enterprise than the view of literature as a series of stockades, from which groups of the embittered and enraged endlessly fired arrows at one another without ever quite achieving victory?”