ACT 2: Problematic Characters, The Publishing Industry, and Why We’re Back Here Again

NoWelcome to Five On Fridays, my weekly straight-no-chaser newsletter where I help demystify the publishing industry for new writers and early-career authors. Let’s jump right in.

Last week I wrote about the publishing scandal in which an author wrote a problematic character, readers called her out, and the publisher pulled the planned series. I outlined the problems surrounding the dustup here. If you haven’t already, take a few minutes to read that before diving into today’s post. 

Disclaimer: While this is a five-point post because, you know, it says it has to be, right in the newsletter’s title, it’s really a single point that took so much time to research and write (It’s 8:44 p.m. on Thursday and I haven’t even started my incessant rounds of proofreading 😫), I ended up splitting it into five points. Turns out I can’t solve all the world’s publishing problems in a three-part, five-point newsletter series: I’m a wordsmith, not a magician. 

Fun and joke aside (as Jamaicans say after stating something that probably was no fun at all and that they have no intention of setting aside), I’m not arrogant enough to think I have all or even any of the answers to what plagues the publishing industry. I may not even have the answers to all the questions I posed last week. The fact is, many publishing professionals have tried before me, and many are still trying to do the work now. My agent is one such person. She’s a thirty-year industry veteran who’s been there, done that, and has the receipts to prove it. She’s experienced the publishing cycles firsthand: the calls for structural changes to a system that favors a select, chosen few; the public appeals for change; and the deflating feeling of realizing that publishing is right back here again—painstakingly plucking needles from a haystack full of needles instead of building a better haystack. So here are my thoughts on how publishing professionals, writers, and readers can help build that better haystack. 

Clearly define the problem

You can’t fix what you refuse to name. There isn’t just one action or inaction, one person or decision that leads to an author publishing a book that includes problematic characters, lines, and stances. If it were about a single book, author, or publisher, this kind of thing wouldn’t keep happening every few months. And it keeps happening because when it comes to issues of race, ethnicity, and identity, the industry and book world have a representation problem. The US currently looks like this:

• The non-white population is 41.6% and growing 

• College educated Black women read more than all groups (of any race) 

• More than 13 % of US adults identify as LGBTQI (23% of Gen Z)

• And 13.4% of US residents reported having a disability.

Yet the industry looks like this:

• 72.5% of publishing, review journal, and literary agency staff are white

• Asian/Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander make up 7.8% of the workforce, Black/African - 5.3%, American Indian/Alaskan Native/First Nations/Native American - 0.1%

• 68.7% of publishing staff identify as straight or heterosexual

• 16.2% identify as having some kind of disability.

For more statistics on the makeup of the publishing industry, you can review the latest Lee & Low Diversity Baseline Survey Results here.

White, straight, abled people read white, straight, abled people’s books

Simply stated, publishing doesn’t have enough people in decision-making roles to direct the creation and publishing of stories that represent almost half the US population. White, straight, abled people—in large—read about other white, straight, abled people. The staff of literary agencies and publishing houses are these people, and they read, represent, and publish what they’ve always read, represented, and published. When we acknowledge this, we realize it’s not hard to understand why change has been so painstakingly slow. People gravitate to sameness, to what they know and like. The industry has remained the same because its players have remained the same. If the industry wants to change, its players must change. The question is, does the industry really want to change or does it just want to talk about change? I share more on this in my last point.

People read what they’re exposed to

People of color, the disabled, and LGBTQI people in the US who love to read have always read widely. We’ve had to. From elementary school to high school, from writing workshops to MFAs, books by white authors have historically been the default. Absent were the Sandra Kitts and Beverly Jenkinses from my school libraries, so I had to get my romance fix from Jane Austen and Judy Blume, as did thousands of other Black women of my generation and older, because we read what we were exposed to. By doing so, we learned to enjoy the depth and breadth of works that come from a different perspective, one that also showed us the universality of human emotion.

Now as an adult, I still love Jane Austen and Judy Blume, but I also adore Beverly Jenkins and Tia Williams, Abraham Verghese, and Angie Kim. My online library loan shelf is a tapestry of authors and books that shape my worldview for the better. What publisher wouldn’t benefit from a staff full of readers who embrace the tapestry of writers and perspectives that shape our world? A staff that would recognize seriously problematic themes and characters well before books got to the production stage. A staff that would allow themselves to be fully and completely taken in by books, characters, and settings that blessed and broadened their world view. 

If things ain’t broke, why fix them?

The problem is, publishing knows it’s broken, or at least it should know, but few industry professionals are willing to admit that they don’t read widely, that a lot of the time the reason they “can’t relate” to Black or Brown or disabled characters is not because of the author’s writing but because of their inability to see the complete humanness in people who don’t look like them. It’s not something most people want to acknowledge: that they participate in the othering of love, emotion, and humanness when the package it comes in looks different from theirs. And this, and the fact that publishers continue to turn record profits while kind-of-sort-of ignoring half the country’s population (not to mention the global population) sends a message that things ain't really broke, and if things ain't broke, why fix them? 

This is where readers outside the industry come in.

This is where the real power lies. 

More on this, next week.

That wraps up this week’s Five On Fridays. Thank you for subscribing and reading. If you found this newsletter helpful, please share it on social media and forward it to your writer friends. Happy writing!

-Grace