By Caillean Prochon
Every few years, the publishing industry rediscovers its diversity problem: another report circulates, there’s a flurry of headlines and, for a moment, it feels like the conversation is moving forward. And then things … continue mostly as they were.
Despite the awareness generated in recent years of the Anglophone publishing sectors being predominantly white, the industry continues to be overwhelmingly homogenous. The most recent numbers indicate that white employees account for almost three-quarters of the workforce in Australia and North America and 83% in the UK.
Why does it matter?
While the Anglophone publishing sectors are not the only large global publishing territories by any means, they still ‘[act] as a transit hub … the arbiter[s] of what is allowed to go beyond the confines of the local’. The power these sectors have consolidated in the past few decades has resulted in them absorbing most sales and audience reach globally, making them attractive to writers. What’s more, most prestigious literary prizes that bring authors widespread recognition are also specifically given to English-language books.
There are clear structural barriers that make it difficult for the industry itself to diversify in these Anglophone markets, and they begin with the significant obstacles for many aspiring professionals to even get their foot in the door. To create a more robust industry that reflects the globalised world and readership that is available to them, publishing must look within. The problems start with staff, who are not only over-educated for publishing jobs, they are usually privileged enough to get a head start without a decent salary.
Who gets to work in publishing?
The typical publishing career trajectory begins with a myriad of unpaid internships before years of punishingly low salaries. A Books+Publishing survey on employment in the Australian book industry revealed that 61% of employees believed that their earnings did not reflect their skills and experience, and 38% had ‘been asked to accept a lower wage’.
To add insult to injury, most Anglophone publishing jobs are concentrated in some of the world’s most expensive cities, such as London, New York and Sydney. Without enough economic support, many pursuing their dream careers in this industry will suffer financially—and this issue disproportionately affects those from racial minorities and lower socio-economic backgrounds. As Vox’s Constance Grady aptly summarises:
The people who work in publishing are the people who can afford to work in publishing, and mostly they are white people.
This has been reflected in a 2022 Australian Publishing Industry Workforce Survey on Diversity and Inclusion, which found that fewer that 1.0% of participants (989 in total) identified as Australian Aboriginal, South Sea Islander or Torres Strait Islander. While a follow-up survey is scheduled for this year (2026), a fundamental inequity in who gets to work in publishing and how those workers shape what gets published persists. With only certain types of people getting the work, in-house acquisition and decision-making is guided by that homogeneity, inevitably narrowing the range of perspectives that reach bookstore shelves.
Diversity on the page starts behind the scenes
The benefits of improving diversity in the industry, then, extend beyond the workforce to the authors and stories that end up in print. Publishers are, ultimately, the gatekeepers of literature; they have a unique power to choose whose voices are amplified, and, conversely, whose voices are excluded.
Stories outside the dominant Western cultural lens are often labelled as ‘niche’, even when they speak to millions of people from other cultures who might fall outside of the Anglophone sphere. This framing can influence acquisition decisions and lead to many manuscripts by Authors of Colour (AOCs) to be overlooked in favour of what in-house editors perceive as ‘mainstream’ selections.
Interestingly, a study from the UK discovered that, despite publishers agreeing with the importance of publishing more AOCs, they also often raised ‘concerns about their lack of “quality”’. This statement exposes Western publishing’s lack of investment when it comes to reaching various audiences through narratives that reflect the diverse cultures and storytelling traditions those readers come from.
Perpetuating the problem
These prejudices spread further than the initial decisions around whose voices to publish. The Anglophone market claims to be responding to ‘an increased passion and appetite for more diverse voices’, but this often results in AOCs being pigeonholed into writing books related to their race, instead of being given a space to explore a wide range of themes. When AOCs resist these expectations, or tell stories that don’t fit the mould imposed on them, they risk rejection from the largely white gatekeepers who claim they ‘didn’t connect’ with the work. In doing so, the industry conditions AOCs to believe that this ‘flattened, self-conscious diversity’ may be their only opportunity for mainstream success.
Books are already lacking in the representation of diverse racial identities; compounding this with inauthentic experiences and reductive stereotypes is detrimental. Besides, writing about race shouldn’t be a responsibility thrust on AOCs. They have other stories to share, and they should be free to write about the complexities of identity without these limitations.
These expectations have led to a lack of trust between publishers and First Nations and People of Colour (FNPOC) writers. When asked about how she worked to overcome the hostility and build trust in her role as commissioning editor at Penguin Random House, Radhiah Chowdhury puts it bluntly:
However much goodwill there may be for a writer of colour, this ecosystem is not built for us [emphasis in original], and at some point in the life of a book, an FNPOC writer is going to come up against a wall of whiteness that will leave a mark. I guarantee it.
Her statement highlights the seemingly intractable nature of the issue of diversity in the publishing industry. What it also makes clear is the need for the ecosystem itself to be shaped for AOCs in meaningful ways, and the only way this can be achieved is by diversifying the industry’s decision-makers.
The importance of culturally compatible author–editor relationships
The industry’s lack of racial diversity in its staff ultimately means that many AOCs who pass the initial barrier of being commissioned will have their manuscripts edited by people who do not always have an intimate understanding of their particular cultural expression or experiences. Worse, editors may make decisions to conform a manuscript to match other texts that have found success in the market, stripping a diverse text of its place. This is not to imply that white editors can’t work with racially diverse authors, but we can’t plead ignorance to the potential drawbacks of complex cultural nuances being primarily interpreted through a white lens.
The main concern with cross-cultural writer–editor relationships is that they demand compromise, which often results in AOCs experiencing inappropriate and damaging editorial decisions at the hands of white editors. For instance, in her 1988 lecture, Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature, Toni Morrison professed her dissatisfaction with the editing of Sula (1974), describing the (reluctantly) revised opening as an unsatisfying compromise and an ‘embarrassing’ reminder of the concessions she made to white publishers and readers. Morrison identified the first few pages of her novel as a record of the strategies she was forced to resort to while attempting to ‘accommodate [merely] writing about, for, and out of black culture while accommodating and responding to mainstream “white” culture’.
Clearly, books written by AOCs that don’t receive proper support in publishing are therefore at risk of being handled in a culturally insensitive manner, potentially leading to misinterpretation, appropriation or censorship. As noted by Black&write! editor Grace Lucas-Pennington, ideally ‘someone with the same lived experience [emphasis in original]’ would edit the work of an AOC, as they can bring a much more significant level of insight, experience, authenticity and creativity to the relationship.
This sentiment is echoed in an essay by Random House’s One World editor-in-chief Chris Jackson about his experience as a Black man in the industry. He addresses the value of AOCs entrusting their works to publishers who can racially and culturally understand them by reflecting on the deeply trusting relationship he developed with Black author Ta-Nehisi Coates while editing his memoir:
[Coates] knew that I understood in an intimate way the human consequences of white supremacy. It allowed for a deep collaboration and, I think, a special book.
After all, diversity is a lived experience, not a trend; but it’s one that the current makeup of the Anglophone publishing industry, whose decisionmakers remain largely white and middle-class, is ill-equipped to accommodate. To develop a more inclusive and equitable industry that appropriately supports AOCs, publishing needs to turn its attention inward. Because, ultimately, to tell a range of quality diverse narratives and tell them in a way that does them justice, the teams working on them need to be equally as diverse.
Glimpses of hope for a more diverse industry
Despite the challenges, there are signs that the publishing landscape is still trying and shifting, if somewhat incrementally. Independent presses and bookshops, digital publishing platforms and online communities have made it easier for writers outside of mainstream Anglophone channels to reach the readers who will connect with their works. For instance, right here in Melbourne, you’ll find Amplify Bookstore, co-founded by two of GSP’s own alumni who wanted to make discovering books by and about racially diverse people more accessible to everyone.
After all, the world is filled with so many unique, important and diverse stories; so too, then, should our bookshelves.
Caillean is a final-year Master of Publishing and Communications student at the University of Melbourne, hoping to pursue a career in editing. She loves reading all kinds of crime fiction, magical realism and literary non-fiction novels.
Leave a Reply