Has the DEI Backlash Come for Publishing?

In July 2020, Lisa Lucas was hired as the publisher of Pantheon and Schocken Books, prestigious imprints of Penguin Random House. She was the first person of color to hold the post. Black Lives Matter was resurgent after the murder of George Floyd. Demand for books by Black authors had spiked. Publishing employees had organized a day of action to protest the industry’s ongoing “role in systemic racism.” Publishers, compelled to act, released statements, hired more diverse staff, and acquired books by writers of color. Two years later, Lucas anchored a feature essay in The New York Times about the changes in the industry. Maya Mavjee, Lucas’s boss’s boss, was quoted as saying, “It’s extraordinary how much she’s managed to achieve in such a short time.” But on May 20, 2024, Lucas was let go. The move, Mavjee wrote in a memo to employees, was “necessary for our future growth” (at the same time, Knopf’s publisher, Reagan Arthur, was also laid off).

To many in publishing, Lucas’s rise and fall has become the most revealing example of how quickly efforts at diversity in publishing can be rolled back in the name of economic realities. The TV writer and novelist Kashana Cauley responded on Bluesky to Lucas’s ouster that it was “like watching a serial killer work. The George Floyd era is over and it’s amazing how many people don’t want us around.” Lucas herself posted on X, “The only hard part is what I meant … to Black writers.”  

The gains in diversity in recent years were real, and unprecedented. One of us—Richard—published a study in 2020, “Just How White Is the Book Industry?,” showing how many more white authors of fiction than authors of color have been given opportunities by major publishers since 1950. (The study looks at adult fiction, excluding children’s books and young-adult novels.) The final year of the study, 2018, was one of the best for authors of color, who wrote 11 percent of the books published that year. We have now replicated this survey for 2019 through 2023, looking at fiction published by Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan (four of the Big Five; Hachette was excluded from the previous study, so we excluded it here too). To identify the racial identities of the authors of these novels, we worked alongside four research assistants, reading through biographies, interviews, and social-media posts. Each author was reviewed independently by two researchers. We also split off Black writers from all other writers of color (Indigenous, Asian, Latino, mixed race, multiracial, and biracial).

After examining a total of 1,730 novels written by 1,158 unique authors, we found that nonwhite writers of fiction more than doubled their share of published works in five years. Works by white writers dropped from 88 percent to 75 percent. This proportionality still falls short of reflecting the general population, but it is by far the biggest such change in U.S. literary history. Although these findings point to significant gains, they also demand that we reckon with what appears now to be the beginning of their reversal—and contemplate what can be done to avoid a seemingly inevitable cycle of retrenchment following any progress.

Publishing has long been a white business. In 1950, Zora Neale Hurston wrote “What White Publishers Won’t Print,” about the limited range of representation allowed for Black writers and their characters. After a small effort at diversification in the late ’60s and early ’70s, following the civil-rights movement, the status quo was restored; in 1981, Mel Watkins wrote in The New York Times that “not only are publishers not taking black writers on their ‘own terms,’ increasingly they are no longer taking them at all.” Publishers Weekly asked in 1994, “Will an overwhelmingly white publishing industry remain a metaphorical house without doors, attracting neither minority workers to their employ nor minority audiences to their products?” The following year, the author and editor James Ledbetter wrote “The Unbearable Whiteness of Publishing” for The Village Voice. Notwithstanding a very gradual expansion of nonwhite writers on publishers’ lists, little altered this status quo from 1995 to 2020.

Before the summer of 2020, literary agents describe difficulty placing work by nonwhite writers. Editors would offer stock phrases such as I just wouldn’t really know how to break this out widely, which the agent Soumeya Bendimerad Roberts told us “spoke to discomfort, or a lack of institutional knowledge, about how to publish authors of color.” Industry consensus recognized white women from the ages of 35 to 60 as publishing’s primary market, which offered an alibi—often tacit, coded in professional pablum—for rejecting work by nonwhite writers. When Roberts successfully sold books by authors of color, she focused on “editorial strengths” and, crucially, deployed comparative titles, or comps, by successful white writers.

Comps are powerful in publishing. Publishers use them to better gauge the value of a prospective acquisition: Which titles from the past few years does it most resemble? Agents choose comps carefully because of the weight they’re given when making a deal. The ubiquity of comps by white authors sustains white dominance and compels nonwhite writers to either play up marketable ethnic expectations or match a white standard. One study showed that from 2013 to 2019, more than 95 percent of the 500 most-used comps were by white authors. The paucity of nonwhite comps means there are far fewer paths by which a nonwhite writer can present a convincing case to an acquiring editor.

[Read: The paradox of diversity trainings]

Amber Oliver, who worked as an editor at Harper, thought at first that she had difficulty acquiring books by writers of color because she was an inexperienced assistant editor. “But,” she told us, “after having been there over the years, trying to buy books that I knew were good and that I knew had a solid readership, that I had the comps for, I was still getting pushback.” Her colleagues would say, “I just don’t see it” or “There’s already a book out there like this”—reasoning that felt to Oliver like a racial double standard. “How many books in this industry by white men are about the same thing that they continue to publish with no issues? Why can’t that be the same for everyone?” In a PEN America report on diversity in publishing, Jenny Xu, an editor at Atria Books, calls this the “one is enough rule,” described in the article as “the belief that books by authors of similar background that follow a similar theme or format are simply different versions of the same story—and that audiences are hungry for only one such story at a time.”

Beginning in the summer of 2020, editors started to have a much easier time placing and acquiring books by nonwhite writers. “The biggest change was just an eagerness,” Roberts said, “and an awareness of a market for writers of color.” The comedian, actor, and writer Phoebe Robinson launched Tiny Reparations Books—dedicated to addressing the lack of diversity in publishing—in partnership with Plume, a division of Penguin Random House, in July 2020, and hired Oliver in August of that year. “They just really trusted me to do the job,” said Oliver, who is now at Bloomsbury. “They gave me free rein to trust my taste and go after the projects that I thought were great.” At Tiny Reparations, she acquired fiction by Black authors, such as Kai Harris’s What the Fireflies Knew, LaToya Watkins’s Perish, and Janelle M. Williams’s Gone Like Yesterday.

Our data show that a broad range of imprints and editors supported the push for diversity—in terms of sheer numbers, the mainstream publishing imprints William Morrow, Riverhead Books, and Simon & Schuster led in putting out books by Black authors, alongside the Black-led imprints 37 Ink, Amistad, and Tiny Reparations.

Historically, what has been especially pernicious are the limitations publishers have placed on the kinds of stories Black writers in particular are permitted to publish. This is what Zora Neale Hurston wrote about in that 1950 essay, criticizing the simplistic stereotypes writers were coerced to perpetuate. Percival Everett satirized the enduring situation—the requirement for Black writers to write what white publishers considered to be “Black” books—in his 2001 novel Erasure, adapted by Cord Jefferson into the film American Fiction in 2023. Ironically, American Fiction critiqued the industry in its most diverse year to date, and at a moment of change on this particular front.

In recent decades, Black writers have largely been published in genres such as the historical novel, especially the neo-slave narrative (Charles Johnson, Edward P. Jones, Toni Morrison); the multigenerational saga (Yaa Gyasi, Gayl Jones, Alice Walker); romance, in various flavors (E. Lynn Harris, Terry McMillan, Sister Souljah); and satire (Paul Beatty, Mat Johnson, Colson Whitehead). These genres continue to thrive in work by Brit Bennett, Esi Edugyan, Sadeqa Johnson, Tara M. Stringfellow, Charmaine Wilkerson, and many others. But more room has opened for Black writers to work in genres such as horror (Megan Giddings, Bethany Morrow), suspense and thriller (Remi Adeleke, Connie Briscoe, Wanda M. Morris), fantasy (C. L. Clark, Marlon James), and science fiction (Maurice Broaddus, Temi Oh). Black women have taken up racial satire and made it specific to media industries (Zakiya Dalila Harris, Raven Leilani). And Black writers have taken up minor genres previously almost exclusive to white writers, such as the campus novel (J K Chukwu, Brandon Taylor), the recovery novel (Helen Elaine Lee), and the rock-and-roll novel (Jeff Boyd, Dawnie Walton).

The industry’s increased appetite for racially diverse stories does not, by itself, solve the persistent dilemma nonwhite writers face—what Ismail Muhammad in a New York Times Magazine article has called “the Representation Trap.” “A lot of editorial considerations were couched in a conversation about the author’s identity,” Roberts told us. “It’s a vulnerable position.” Representation sells, or at least that’s the idea. When the industry is overwhelmingly white, when it conceives of its audience as principally white, when whiteness is embedded in its institutional workings, overcoming what Muhammad, drawing on a famous formulation by W. E. B. Du Bois, calls “the double consciousness that white supremacy imposes on the Black writer’s psyche” is a struggle. But the expansion of the space for nonwhite writers in the literary field has made it easier. “There is a long way to go,” Oliver said. “But there are definitely more opportunities. You could now do a slice-of-life narrative, whereas in before times, people might say, ‘Oh, is that important enough?’ Why do books by people of color always have to be important?”

The question now—made urgent by the dismissal of Lucas, followed a few weeks later by Hachette’s laying off of Tracy Sherrod, who had been another of publishing’s very few high-profile Black women—is whether the moment will last. We have good reason to think it won’t. Two previous cycles left little changed. The first, the post-civil-rights-movement effort in the late 1960s, slowed considerably by the mid-’70s, leading, finally, to the departure of key figures such as Marie Brown from Doubleday in 1981 and Toni Morrison from Random House in 1983. The second began in the late ’90s and petered out in the mid-2000s. Initial enthusiasm leads to a spate of hires and acquisitions of books by more diverse writers. But, as we learned through our historical research and our discussions with people in the field, those hires receive too little support and endure discrimination, and many leave—if they’re not ousted first. Publishers announce the acquisitions brought in by editorial with fanfare. But publishers then fail to provide adequate investment in marketing, publicity, and sales; the titles underperform and, set up to fail, provide publishers with an excuse to disinvest. Looking to past eras of diversification in publishing, we find that the turning point comes about four years into the cycle, which is exactly where we are.

Lucas and Sherrod aren’t the only Black staffers to quit or be let go this time around. Dana Canedy, who was hired in 2020 as the publisher of Simon & Schuster, left after two years. LaSharah Bunting left her position as an executive editor at Simon & Schuster, also after two years. Anthony Key, the director of multicultural marketing at Penguin Random House, moved to BET Media Group. Jennifer Baker was let go from her position as a senior editor at Amistad, about which she tweeted, “I’m mostly dismayed at how the authors I worked with have been disregarded.” In February, The New York Times reported that the effort to diversify the ranks of those working in publishing has moved much slower than many had hoped, quoting a report that showed that the share of publishing positions occupied by white employees had dropped only modestly, from 76 percent in 2019 to 72.5 percent in 2023.

[Read: American Fiction is more than a racial satire]

Our data offer one big reason to hope that this time might be different: the volume. Previous cycles did not see nearly as large a burst in the sheer number of titles by writers of color as we have in the past few years. But publishing a wave of nonwhite writers is, in the grand scheme of things, relatively easy; reforming the industry so that it can support those writers and make the wave more than a passing one is hard. Already, initial sales figures have been disappointing, “leading certain publishers to conclude that the market was saturated,” according to the Times. Our research and interviews lead us to believe that the market is saturated only if one defines the market as white women from 35 to 60. Publishing has failed to invest in the infrastructure needed to discover and develop the latent readership for these books. And many argue that the industry itself still isn’t supportive of people of color in its ranks.

“The whisper network is still full of stories of people who haven’t confronted their institutional biases, and those people can be very, very harmful for authors of color,” Roberts said. Diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts have their limits. The DEI lead at a major publishing house told PEN, “I can do microaggression training until the end of the day,” but “that’s not really going to change the actual representation.” They contended that what will bring change is “making serious concessions within the traditional budgets,” especially when it comes to marketing, publicity, and sales. Regina Brooks, the president of Serendipity Literary Agency, speaking of the underperformance of many of the first books acquired in 2020 and 2021, told the Times that there was nothing wrong with the books themselves: “They were just books that the publishing industry didn’t have the internal structure to sell.”

The industry needs to hire more nonwhite staffers in marketing, publicity, and sales. Oliver said that the lack of representation in these departments “means that they cannot reach the readers that the book needs to go to unless they’re being directed by someone from that community.” All too often, Oliver has found herself the “one Black editor” with “a team of white people” around her. This can lead to situations like the one experienced by one of Roberts’s authors, who “went on a book tour, and aside from the launch, where she requested the bookseller, all of the audiences and booksellers were white.”

That book tour points to a deeper systemic problem. Because publishers have long assumed that white women are their primary market, investment in building other readerships has been inhibited. They have seldom carried out the kinds of market research, for example, that would improve their ability to discover books for readers of different backgrounds. Industry assumptions and the lack of research are exacerbated by infrastructural segregation such that, for example, Circana BookScan, the main source for sales figures, undercounts Black book consumers because many of them buy books from places that escape BookScan’s reach. Many people we spoke with for this article believe that there is a latent but untapped audience for books by writers of color. There are hundreds of African American book clubs in the United States. The Asian American Book Club, a national organization, launched in February. The industry needs to invest in research and build relationships with bookstores, libraries, schools, and reading groups in Black communities.

Creating a world in which writers of color thrive ought to be embraced as a long-term project. Many people on the ground are working toward such a world. But it won’t happen unless executives follow suit. We have good reason to suspect that publishing has reached a high-water mark for Black representation. But this doesn’t have to be the limit. We believe that performing data audits like ours is a powerful way to hold publishers to account, not only to readers and workers but to themselves: to keep them from repeating the cycles of the past by seeing beyond the shortsighted demands of short-term financial growth toward a more flourishing literary culture for all.

Additional research by Nia Judelson, Dez Miller, Matthew Miller, and Em Nordling.