Reading Between the Lines: Race, Equity, and Book Publishing
Rockelle Henderson President of Rock Inked Malaika Adero Publishing Consultant Cherise Fisher Elizabeth Méndez Berry One World Peter Hildick-Smith CEO of Codex Group
PEN America undertook this report to better understand why the debate over the lack of diversity in publishing has seemed to stagnate.
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PEN America
A Brief Overview of the Industry and the Publication Process

The American trade publishing industry consists of a patchwork of presses—from PRH, the largest, which publishes over 15,000 print titles a year, to micro-presses that publish only a couple a year. Trade publishers acquire, edit, produce, and distribute works of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and journalism. Trade books, the largest publishing category, are intended for a general audience and are usually sold in bookstores and through other retail booksellers. Other publishing categories include academic, professional, and specialty. While children’s and young-adult books may have some different conventions, they are often considered part of the trade publishing industry.

The Big Five trade publishers were known as the Big Six until 2013, when Penguin and Random House merged. In 2020, PRH announced plans to buy Simon & Schuster for more than $2 billion; the Justice Department has sued to stop the merger, citing antitrust concerns. If the merger goes through, the moniker will become the Big Four. The industry’s center of gravity is in New York City, where all of the Big Five and many other publishers are based.

The Big Five account for an estimated 80 percent or more of the domestic trade book market, with PRH books alone comprising roughly 37 percent. Within the Big Five, each conglomerate operates numerous “imprints”—literary brands that make relatively independent decisions in acquiring books. PRH, for example, owns about 275 imprints, including Riverhead, Vintage, Viking, One World, Doubleday, and Pantheon, each of which has its own editorial team and sensibility. Hachette Book Group owns Basic Books, Grand Central Publishing, BoldType, Little Brown, and more. Amistad, an imprint known for focusing on work by Black writers, is an imprint of HarperCollins, as is Ecco. Simon & Schuster’s imprints include Atria, Scribner, and Avid Reader Press, while Macmillan’s include Flatiron Books, Henry Holt, and Farrar Straus and Giroux. In all, the Big Five have an estimated 500-plus imprints, many of which were once autonomous companies. Agents can submit a manuscript for consideration to multiple imprints within a publishing house, and imprints can bid against one another as long as a different publisher is also in the running.

In contrast to the Big Five, independent publishers are not part of a large conglomerate. They tend to be much smaller and include the likes of Grove Atlantic, Graywolf, Beacon, New Press, Akashic, Feminist Press, and Catapult. With fewer resources, independent and small presses offer lower advances and slimmer marketing and publicity budgets. They are seen within the industry as taking greater creative risks and being less profit-focused, with some of them embracing a nonprofit model. While independent and Big Five publishers often act as competitors, they also have collaborative relationships, as major publishers frequently operate as distributors for one another and for books published by their indie counterparts.

Though every publisher has its own processes, most houses have editorial, marketing, publicity, sales, and production departments. Other departments include art and design, contracts and legal, digital production, finance, and subsidiary rights.

The Publication Process

The first step of the process happens outside the publishing houses: when a writer with a manuscript or a book proposal queries an agent, or an agent queries a writer whom they hope to represent. Once they sign a representation agreement, the agent, who has developed relationships with editors at various houses, pitches the book project to editors.

If an editor is interested in acquiring a book, they—often with the sales director—create a profit-and-loss projection that can include information such as production and manufacturing costs, royalty rate, formats, expected price, and, perhaps most important, expected sales. This sales projection is typically based on comparative titles (“comps”), previously published books that are similar to the proposed project and likely to appeal to the same book-buying audience. The final decision on whether to acquire is typically made through a committee that includes editorial, publicity, marketing, sales, and sometimes other departments, depending on the house.

The advance is the amount the author is paid to write the book (with the agent taking a cut, usually 15 percent). It is based in part on sales projections, which in turn are based on the comp titles. As the word suggests, an advance is not simply a lump-sum payment. It is a preliminary payment of the author’s predicted future earnings—that is to say, the royalties from sales, share of any licensing agreements, and any other profit the author is are expected to make on the book. Advances are typically paid out in three or four installments: the first payment upon signing the contract, the second payment when the full manuscript is delivered, and subsequent payments when the book is published (including publication in different formats, i.e. hardcover and paperback). A writer starts receiving royalties on copies sold only once they “earn out,” meaning they have sold enough copies that their total royalties (and other earnings) exceed their advance.

Marketing and publicity departments work together to ensure that the book finds an audience. Generally, marketing works on positioning a book: What genre is it? What social media campaigns should they run? What kind of advertising will the publisher run and on which platforms? How should the book be described and tagged for search engines? Publicists are responsible for soliciting “earned” media coverage (as opposed to advertising) of a book. They ensure that the book is reviewed and that the author is interviewed or featured in print or on radio, podcasts, or television. Publicists also plan and execute book tours, readings, and other events.

With the marketing department, the salespeople are often responsible for managing direct relationships with bookstores and booksellers. Sales reps are a direct link to buyers—bookstores, other businesses, libraries, schools—and are responsible for selling the book to these purchasers.

For each publishing “season”—often spring, summer, and fall—a house has an internal “launch” of its new books, during which editors present them to marketing and publicity teams and to national sales reps, aiming to get them excited about promoting the latest titles. Internal launches of a book take place about a year before it is set to be published. After the launch, publishing houses host sales conferences, where marketing and publicity present a selection of the biggest upcoming titles—and associated highlights and tactics—to all the sales field reps.

The marketing and publicity budgets are set during meetings that take place shortly after the launch presentations. Staff from editorial, marketing, and publicity are likely to be present. Also present for these deliberations might be sales managers who work with booksellers (representing, for example, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Costco, and independent distributors). They consider how many copies were purchased from distributors in the past for similar books and discuss sales projections, leading to decisions on how much to spend to push a particular book to the market.

The number of copies the publisher plans to publish—the so-called announced first print run (AFP), or announced market distribution (AMD)—is a key indicator of how big the house expects the book to be, and therefore how much of an investment it makes in marketing. If a book receives good early buzz, the AFP may increase and the associated marketing and publicity budgets may rise. The budget size also ties into the size of the author’s advance—a higher advance generally demands a higher budget to earn back that money.

Distribution is broadly divided into print and e-book arms. Typically, big publishers possess in-house distribution services with their own sales representatives and warehouses. Most small and medium-sized publishers contract with a book distributor, which agrees to get their books to market (bookstores, book chains, online booksellers, and book wholesalers) in exchange for a percentage of sales.

One of the distributor’s main roles is to handle advanced sales of a book to bookstores and libraries before it’s published. Distributors also commonly provide services including marketing, sales, logistics, shipping, order fulfillment, warehousing, and returns. Traditionally, when a book comes off the printer, it is sent to an established book distributor that provides warehousing for the book before it is sold to various stores in the book trade or to a wholesaler (such as Ingram, Baker & Taylor, or Greenleaf), which can also fulfill book orders from bookstores and libraries. There are several companies that operate purely as book distributors. Three of them—the Independent Publishers Group, Ingram Publishers Service, and National Book Network—collectively represent 900 small publishers. But small publishers frequently work with one of the Big Five publishers to distribute and sometimes market their titles to bookstores and other sellers.

Case Study – (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race

Yaba Blay, a Ghanaian-American academic, published her book (1)ne Drop twice: She self-published it in 2013, then republished it through an established publisher in 2020. Befitting the book’s subtitle—Shifting the Lens on Race—her experience with this book illustrates both blind spots and progress as publishers continue to evaluate books through the prism of white readership.

In 2013, Blay created an online community around a collection of portraits and essays exploring Black identity. The project was featured on CNN, involved high-profile journalist Soledad O’Brien, and attracted an enthusiastic audience, so she decided to turn it into a book. An agent reached out to Blay, promising interest from publishing houses, and she agreed to draft a proposal. “We got feedback, probably from a dozen or so publishers, and the vibe was definitely of hesitation and uncertainty,” Blay said. Ultimately, she feels that publishers “weren’t willing to take a risk”—and that even with proven appeal, to them “the book represented a risk.”

So Blay self-published the book through Kickstarter. Over the years, as the print run ran out, people regularly reached out to her asking how they could get a copies, which sometimes sold for upwards of $900 from independent booksellers. The book went on to inspire a CNN series, Who is Black in America? In 2020, facing a new wave of interest, Blay worked with agent Tanya McKinnon to republish it with the independent house Beacon Publishing, where it sold (under the similar title “One Drop”) out of its first print run in two days. Asked why she believed publishers were so leery despite demonstrated success, Blay said:

“My audience, when I wrote that book, was Black people. This is a conversation for and about Black people for us to be discussing our racial identity and issues of skin color politics . . . This is very much a reiteration of gatekeeping, that there are people in a position to tell us what we are allowed to speak about, what is a necessary conversation for us to be having. And much of that is motivated by capitalism. It’s not about the value of the conversation as much as it is about the literal monetary value that comes with it. And honestly, they’re thinking about white people. If you walk in with the idea that Black people don’t buy books— i.e., Black people don’t read, which is highly problematic in and of itself—then how is this book going to appeal to a larger white audience? Because that’s how we’re going to make our money . . . The folks who do the gatekeeping, and who get to decide what a necessary conversation is, it’s very much guided by a white supremacist lens—one that idealizes white perspectives and white value systems. And if white people don’t want to talk about it, then it must not be important.”

Blay has responded to (1)ne Drop’s recent success with mixed emotions. She is grateful to her publisher but feels that the book’s sudden popularity after its second publication in 2021—years after it was first published—shows that the publishing industry appears to be willing to confront race and racism only when white audiences are ready to do so. “I’m not going to sit here and praise the publishing industry, as if they somehow finally came to the light,” she said. “Coming to the light means you clearly understand the need for the conversation irrespective of the money that it might bring. I know it’s still a numbers game, I know it’s still about money. It’s not about the content, it’s about the moment. In this moment, white folks are willing to talk about racism. I’m glad so many white folks love it and are getting something from it. Great, but I didn’t write it for them. I wrote it for us.” Ultimately, Blay is concerned that the publishing industry’s investment in Black voices in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement is not the narrative of racial progress that others wish it to be: “You’re still communicating that our lives actually don’t matter, because when we write about our lives, you only want us to write about them insofar as white people are interested in them.”