Sarah Enni: The publishing industry in the U.S. as it looks today is actually pretty recent. I mean, you know, on a “Guternberg Press” kind of scale.

Random House and Simon & Schuster were founded in the 1920’s, and Penguin Books came along in 1935. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (which was eventually folded into Macmillan) wasn’t created until 1946.

So who were the people in the early-to-mid 20th century who founded and worked for the burgeoning U.S. publishing industry?

Mike Shatzkin: Entitled people.

Sarah Enni: That’s Mike Shatzkin, Founder & CEO of The Idea Logical Company and a book publishing industry expert and consultant, as well as co-author of The Book Business, among many other books.

And, Mike says, back in the sixties…

Mike Shatzkin: The country is going to hell because making money is too many people's primary concern. And book publishing has never had that affliction. That being said, what it meant was that starting salaries were very low and when I graduated from college in 1969, the sixties and seventies, the girl from Sarah Lawrence or Vassar, was expected that she was subsidized somewhat by her parents so she could take a job working in a book publishing company for a very small amount of money and still survive. And someone who was looking at a job as a way to start making a living, wouldn't be interested. So there was a kind of a self-select at both ends.

Sarah Enni: And of course,

Mike Shatzkin: It certainly helped to have a really good college on your resume, and it really, really, helped to have connections.

Sarah Enni: So the people who populated publishing were wealthy, went to prestigious educational institutions, and could afford to take tiny salaries in an industry steeped in a romantic notion of itself.

Mike Shatzkin: So there's always been a kind of a filter, a screen, which was societal and cultural and entitled.

Sarah Enni: I’m Sarah Enni, host and creator of First Draft, and this is Track Changes, a special series all about everything you don’t know you don’t know about publishing.

After nationwide protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd this summer, almost every industry has been facing a public reckoning with how it created and perpetuates institutionalized racism.

Of course, that includes publishing. We got into this somewhat in our episode about advances, when we discussed the #PublishingPaidMe hashtag, and how it revealed the gaping disparity between what authors of color, and particularly Black authors, make in contrast to their white peers.

In today’s episode of Track Changes, we’re gonna look at inequality in publishing. How we got here, how bad it is, and what’s being done -- or can be done -- to make it better.

There are three major factors I want to focus on, inflection points, if you will, that contribute to perpetuating inequality in traditional publishing: The history and reality of employment practices within the publishing houses themselves; acquisitions meetings; and the corporate hegemony of bookselling in the U.S.

So the ‘60s and ‘70s set the scene for an industry built on a privileged (and very White) class of people who could afford to take low paying jobs in publishing.

As corporatization overwhelmed the industry in the ‘80s and ‘90s, publishing houses merged, until we got to the landscape we see today: five major publishing houses, owned by international corporations, and a smattering of independent presses. Fewer jobs, and still low-paying because the positions are highly competitive. There are more than enough book lovers with stars in their eyes and trust funds at their backs to fill these roles.

Mike Shatzkin: The job is still a glamour job and people want it. And there is the law of supply and demand. Publishers will raise what they pay when they need to raise what they pay to get people they think are qualified to do the jobs, to do the jobs. And as long as they can find people who with good intellects, and good life habits, who are willing to work for the salaries they pay, they're not much inclined to raise the salaries.

Sarah Enni: And that low pay is a huge barrier

Nicole Johnson: One of the things we found in sort of the challenges to folks getting into the industry, one was finances.

Sarah Enni: That’s Nicole Johnson, Executive Director of We Need Diverse Books, a non-profit grassroots organization that advocates for changes in the publishing industry.

Nicole Johnson: Most of publishing is anchored in New York. So it's a very expensive city to live in. There's a prevalence of unpaid internships across the industry, right? So you have to be able to afford to get to New York, live in New York, free, like unpaid! Who can do that? Right? Who can do that? Someone with privilege, someone with access to resources, someone who's perhaps living off their families trust money, or someone who didn't have to pay for college so they could save up, and so there's all these financial barriers.

Sarah Enni: And those financial barriers are rooted in racism.

Jalissa Marcelle Corrie: And when it comes to systemic institutional racism as a Black woman who's financially privileged, there's not many that I see that are like me, who can come from a place of financial privilege and be able to work in publishing.

Sarah Enni: That’s Jalissa Marcelle Corrie, Marketing & Publicity Manager at Lee & Low Books, the largest multicultural children's book publisher in the country, and one of the few minority-owned publishing companies in the U.S. Jalissa is also a planning committee member of People of Color in Publishing, and is a writer herself.

Jalissa Marcelle Corrie: There are few Black and Brown folks who are able to have the financial privilege to be able to work in the city, but it's a much larger issue than people really do understand. And that definitely affects how many Black, Indigenous, People of Color can actually join publishing.

Sarah Enni: And geography affects other marginalized groups as well.

Jalissa Marcelle Corrie: That also creates this inaccessibility for people who have physical disabilities because New York City is notorious for being inaccessible.

Sarah Enni: What’s the actual impact of all these barriers to entry? How unequal is publishing, really? Well, thanks to Jalissa’s employer, Lee & Low Books, we actually have numbers for this.

Jalissa Marcelle Corrie: The diversity baseline survey what it is, is a survey that looks at diversity within the publishing industry.

Sarah Enni: And in 2019, they published the results of their second survey, which focused on race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability.

Jalissa Marcelle Corrie: We wanted to get more of a sense of what the publishing industry looked like because there were a lot of conversations swirling around, especially in children's publishing, regarding the lack of diversity with the books that are published. And of course when we discuss this, we think, "Well, this can also do with the gatekeepers who are publishing these books.”

Sarah Enni: Last year’s survey found that 76 percent of publishing staff, review journal staff, and literary agents are White. The industry is also overwhelmingly heterosexual: 81 percent of publishing staff identified as straight or heterosexual.

Publishing is about 74 percent cis women and 23 percent cis men. However, 38 percent of executives and board members identify as cis men, which reflects the reality that, even in women-dominated industries, men still ascend more easily to positions of power.

The Lee & Low 2019 survey showed that not much had changed since their initial survey in 2015. But some things were changing for the better. There’s now more diversity at the top: with 78 percent of people in the executive level identifying as White, a drop from 86 percent in the inaugural 2015 survey.

And the intern class is significantly more diverse than the industry as a whole: Of the interns surveyed in 2019, 49 percent identify as Black, Indiginous, or a Person of Color; 49 percent are on the LGBTQIA spectrum; and 22 percent identify as having a disability.

However, publishing internships are often unpaid, or paid unequal to the challenge of living in New York City.

Jalissa Marcelle Corrie: If publishing offers just unpaid internships, or literally barely any paid internships, how can you really expect someone to be able to, again, move out to one of the most expensive cities in the United States, to be able to pay rent, to buy food, to have just regular amenities, and utilities, and not be paid? How can someone sustain that? We really need to pay our interns for the work that they do.

Sarah Enni: We Need Diverse Books has created a grant program to supplement income for publishing interns. Here’s Nicole again:

Nicole Johnson: We partner primarily with publishers and literary agencies who hire the interns, and then the interns, once they are hired, we consider them for a grant. And anyone who partners with us, they commit to paying a living wage to the intern, and at a minimum number of hours per week so that our grant truly is supplemental. It's not their own sort of earnings for the summer, but it is sort of supplemental to whatever they are earning in their internship.

Sarah Enni: But even with more financial breathing room, it’s not a guarantee that interns will be retained and promoted. Because another factor in the lack of diversity in publishing is that these jobs are scarce, and once people get them, they don’t leave.

Mike Shatzkin: There are five big companies that are certainly more than half of the commercial book business. And they have characteristics. And the main characteristic is that if you have a job at one of them, you don't give it up cause you're not gonna get a better one somewhere else. So there's very little movement at the top

Sarah Enni: Recently, though, there have been some shifts. In the wake of many prominent leaders in the industry dying or announcing retirement, some major publishing houses have hired people of color---in some cases, from outside the book industry---to fill those roles.

One very prominent example: After the death of Carolyn Reidy, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster, in May, the publisher hired former New York Times editor and administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes Dana Canedy as the new publisher of its namesake imprint.

Canedy is the first Black person to lead a major publishing house.

Jalissa Marcelle Corrie: I'm sometimes not that hopeful, but I'm hoping because of the current protests, the current calls, more pressure, that things will actually change.

Sarah Enni: Something else shifted in the industry in the ‘80s and ‘90s, in that flurry of mergers and acquisitions that corporatized publishing: the advent of acquisitions meetings.

We talked about acquisitions in a previous episode of Track Changes--it’s the term used for the regular meetings of publishing department heads, where they decide what books to buy, and for how much.

Arthur Levine: This was like a little rip in the seam of what publishing had been, that gradually was torn open.

Sarah Enni: That’s Arthur Levine, who for 23 years was the publisher of Arthur A. Levine Books at Scholastic. During that time he edited a couple of things you might have heard of—The Golden Compass? Harry Potter? Yeah. This fall, Arthur is launching his own publishing company: Levine Querido.

Arthur says that when he started in the industry, in the early ‘80s, things worked differently.

Arthur Levine: The way that it worked, for the most part, was that an editor would fall in love with a project and then would go to his or her publisher, and that publisher would say, "I agree, let's do this." Boom! And it would happen. And then the company would figure out the best way to sell and market the book to make that book a success.

Sarah Enni: Of course, editors having more autonomy in acquiring projects did not mean that every book was a success. But Arthur says that when a purchasing decision is driven by an editor, there’s a higher likelihood that the company will publish a broader range of books that now, under the acquisitions-by-committee model, are seen as risks to the bottom line.

Arthur Levine: At an acquisitions meeting, what it is, is the editor is a supplicant. So the editor may find a book that they love, but they're thinking, "Can I get it through the acquisitions meeting?" And so you might have people reading something that they love, but they think, "Well, I can never get this through, so I'm not gonna bother."

Sarah Enni: Why would they be told “no” in an acquisitions meeting? Well, there could be many reasons, including quality of the work. But chief among the considerations is whether the math adds up on that book’s Profit & Loss statement. Here’s Jalissa again:

Jalissa Marcelle Corrie: So essentially these are, well with a debut author, they're kind of like a guess of how much they think they can make off this book based on comp titles, based on the author's track record if they've published other books, or sales record, I should say. Based off things like that.

Sarah Enni: In some ways it makes sense to want to apply data from similar books published in the past to books a publisher is considering acquiring.

Jalissa Marcelle Corrie: But if it's something that has not really been done before, I'm not sure exactly how they can compare it. And there are so many stories by POC authors that have been yet to be explored.

Arthur Levine: Racism really comes in here because that's, that's part of the block. Racism, homophobia, antisemitism, even in a room of Jews, you know, you can have people saying, "Well, you know, you think that you can really sell 7,500 copies of that book? Is there that much of a Jewish market?"

Sarah Enni: So if you’re an acquiring editor at a publisher owned by a massive corporation, you’re risk-averse because you’re watching the bottom line, and you’re in a room of mostly white, straight, cis-gendered, able-bodied publishing professionals, making decisions based on information gathered from decades of publishing books mostly from white, straight, cis-gendered, able-bodied authors, about mostly white, straight, cis-gendered, able-bodied characters… Well?

Jalissa Marcelle Corrie: At the end of the day, what I'm saying is it revolves around their bias sometimes, when it comes to these type of books that have not been published before. And when someone has that type of bias, say, and everyone has biases so I'm not saying that it's only like White gatekeepers who have this bias and no one else does, but the thing is when it's dominantly White gatekeepers, then mostly their biases are the ones that are gonna take up the space.

Whereas if it's more inclusive, then we'll have people who can offer more insight and could actually explain or, open someone's eyes to the fact that there's a bigger audience than you think, you just might not see them.

Sarah Enni: And that means when the publishing house isn’t inclusive and there’s only one type of voice in the room advocating for books…

Jalissa Marcelle Corrie: That's when you see lower advances. That's when you see lower marketing budgets.

Sarah Enni: Arthur says acquisitions meetings are not incentivized to find new, unusual, or challenging art.

Arthur Levine: There is an incentive to be safe, there's an incentive to be conservative, and there's an incentive to suppress. I think, in all my years in publishing, the most common word I heard was comfort. "I'm comfortable with that. Mmm, I'd be more comfortable at this lower projected rate of sale. I'd be more comfortable with this lower advance." Whatever. Yes, of course, you know, so if comfort is the idea, then it produces a certain number of results.

Sarah Enni: And what the P&L statement is trying to measure, the probability that a book will be successful? Well, Arthur says the publishing history just doesn’t have a history of making accurate predictions.

Arthur Levine: As we all know, nobody can tell when a book will succeed or not succeed.

Sarah Enni: And a detailed post-mortem on what worked, or didn’t, and why, is the exception and not the rule.

Arthur Levine: Instead we fall back on our flawed and mostly unexamined sense of what has happened. "Oh yeah, look, we had a book like that and it didn't do well." Well now wait a minute. Did we ever stop and have a meeting where we said, "Why didn't that do well? What happened? Was it the book? Was it the cover? Was it the lack of marketing and publicity?” There's a lot of reasons a book doesn't do well. There's actually a lot of reasons a book does do well. We're often, publishers, as clueless about why a book did well as we are about why it didn't do well.

Sarah Enni: There’s another major bottleneck in the industry that perpetuates systemic inequality--book sellers.

Okay. Once again, a lightning-fast broad overview of bookselling in the last 50 or so years.

In the late ‘70s, just about every bookstore was independent. All over the country, bookstores reflected the desires of their customers, and made purchasing decisions accordingly.

In the ‘80s, with the rise of the suburbs, came mall-based bookstore chains like B. Dalton and Waldenbooks. And in the ‘90s, Barnes & Noble was on the forefront of big-box chain expansion, and they acted like Amazon before Amazon was Amazon. Barnes & Noble slashed book prices to lows its competitors could not match and it put independent booksellers out of business all across the United States.

But then, in 1994: Amazon. Jeff Bezos launched Amazon with the goal to become the "everything store." Bezos decided to start with books because of the massive inventory. Amazon was willing to lose money on every book sale for years in an effort to bring people to its website, where they would buy other, higher-margin items. Come for The Da Vinci Code, leave with 25 pounds of cat litter.

It, uh… worked.

In 2004, Amazon reached 20 percent market share for books in the U.S., and the bankruptcies of major book chains followed: Borders, Crown Books, Book World, and more. The number of independent booksellers in the United States dropped 40% from 1995 to 2000. Today Amazon has 50% or more of the U.S. print book market, and at least three quarters of publishers' ebook sales.

But Barnes & Noble, has survived. It still operates more than 600 stores across the country. And that means Barnes & Noble has incredible purchasing power. And the people who decide what books Barnes & Noble buys? Up until now, it was just a handful of high-ranking employees in its New York headquarters. Some of them have worked for the company for decades. So, you know, for the last 30 years one person decided what literary fiction novels were in a Barnes & Nobel, all over the country. That’s not great.

Arthur Levine: That's the danger of having any one player dominate, then that player's opinions and demands become what everybody does. As opposed to a plethora of independents, they all had different ideas, they didn't have one monolithic idea of what they liked.

Sarah Enni: But, things are changing. Because, after years of flailing, in 2019, Barnes & Noble was sold to hedge fund Elliott Advisors, who named their new CEO: James Daunt, the man who single-handedly turned around U.K. bookstore chain Waterstones.

And Daunt’s approach to bookselling is a decentralized one, as he explained to NPR:

James Daunt: I don't think of myself remotely as being a chain bookseller. I'm an independent bookseller who just happens to be running a chain at the moment.

Sarah Enni: Daunt’s strategy for Barnes & Noble will echo what he did for Waterstones: give regional and individual bookstore managers the power to act more like an indie, and stock inventory that appeals to their individual store’s customers.

James Daunt: The soul of the store needs to reflect the community in which it is. And by soul, I mean first and foremost, how the booksellers and the staff within the store deport themselves and interact with their customers, but also which books they choose, how they choose to display them, how they create the store. And you can - and I know from the Waterstones experience - you can create different varieties.

Sarah Enni: He’s making good on that philosophy: in June, Barnes & Noble fired a handful of buyers in its corporate office, including the individuals who purchased literary fiction, sci-fi and fantasy novels, and graphic novels, all of whom had been with the company for a minimum of 25 years.

Mike Shatzkin: It will result in Barnes & Noble having, across the chain, a bigger spread of titles than they have now.

Sarah Enni: Publishing professionals who want to see a more diverse array of titles in the marketplace are cautiously optimistic about what the shift at Barnes & Noble could mean.

Arthur Levine: I'm rooting for him. I’m rooting for James Daunt.

Sarah Enni: The changes at Barnes & Noble also come at a time when – at least before the COVID pandemic -- independent bookstores were seeing a renaissance. The American Booksellers Association, a trade group for independent bookstores, has reported growth for 10 consecutive years,

Of course, the ongoing pandemic is a challenge for all kinds of small businesses, including bookstores. So, shop local everyone.

Arthur Levine: Look, you gotta support your local independents. Because the future of not only equitable inclusive literature, but all literature, hangs on this. We must be able to find our readers in a variety of ways, with a variety of people who have a variety of skills at reaching a variety of different people. So a diversity of booksellers, you get a diversity of books.

Sarah Enni: So, inequality was baked into publishing from its beginning. And that story sounds… kind of familiar.

Nicole Johnson: The founding of publishing is a little bit like founding of our country. Right? The same profile of people. And so that's what we're up against.

Sarah Enni: The publishing industry in the U.S. was built within the same framework as everything else in the U.S., a framework that protects existing privilege, and perpetuates inequality and injustice.

Nicole Johnson: Publishing, which is a part of media and public discourse was also used to promote a certain way of thinking about America. A certain way of thinking about this country.

Sarah Enni: That being said, books are unique. And that’s why you’re listening to this, right? Because you think books have the power to change a life, and the world? Well, if we really believe that, we have our work cut out for us. And now is the time to commit to it.

Nicole Johnson: Folks have definitely note noted that there's something different about the protests that are happening right now. There's something different about the call for Black Lives Matter. It just, there's something different happening right now.

I think that's an indication that the more mainstream public is desiring to understand, like, “What is this moment about? What am I not getting? Will you help me see the connections? I will try. I will move.” And that's very hopeful.

Sarah Enni: On a personal level, Nicole says there are some things every book lover can do to encourage systemic change.

Nicole Johnson: And for a parent that might be for the first time looking at your bookshelves and saying, “Oh my gosh, wait, there's something missing in my catalog right now, this isn't gonna work. I gotta change this.”

Sarah Enni: And when it comes to the publishing industry, new hires, new imprints, and new initiatives are one thing. But Nicole says, publishing houses need to respect the voices that are already there, too.

Nicole Johnson: Even though there's a low percentage of diverse folks in the industry, they are there, right? And so it's way past time for those with authority to respond to them.

Sarah Enni: Ultimately, this work is hard. But it’s work that must be done.

Nicole Johnson: There will be some loss, right? There will be some grief to losing the old ways. And that, I think, is what we're really up against. We're up against people's emotional connection to the way things are and the way they used to, quote unquote, used to be. And letting go of that, demanding and asking and advocating for people to let go of that, is incredibly hard, but it has to be done.

Sarah Enni: You can find MIke Shatzkin at IDEALOG.COM. We Need Diverse Books at DIVERSEBOOKS.ORG. Jalissa Marcelle Corrie at jmarcellecorrie.com and Lee & Low Books at LEEANDLOW.COM. And Arthur Levine and Levine Querido at LEVINEQUERIDO.COM

As always, the show notes for this episode will have links to everything talked about, as well as more resources.

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Track Changes is produced by me, Sarah Enni, and Hayley Hershman. Zan Romanoff is our story editor. And Julie Anderson provides transcripts for every episode. The theme music is by Dan Bailey, and the logo was designed by Collin Keith.

Discussed in this episode:

The Track Changes episode about Advances
#PublishingPaidMe
We Need Diverse Books
The Lee & Low Books Diversity Baseline Survey 2015
The Lee & Low Books Diversity Baseline Survey 2019
P&L Statements
Dana Canedy, new publisher of Simon & Schuster
We talked about acquisitions in the Track Changes Selling Your Book (Part 2) episode
Barnes & Noble selling to Elliott Advisors
James Daunt, audio from this interview he did with NPR in October, 2019
Waterstones
The American Booksellers Association

More Information:

“People of Color to Publishing: We’re Not Okay,” in Publisher’s Weekly
“A Conflicted Cultural Force’: What It’s Like to Be Black in Publishing,” in The New York Times
“In Publishing, ‘Everything Is Up for Change” in The New York Times