Every industry has been reckoning with its racism lately — including scrapbooking — and as a vaguely aspiring writer, I’ve been following the publishing reckoning, which is mainly about racism masked in data. Industry racism doesn’t manifest as “Black authors can’t write” so much as in the more insidious “Black authors don’t sell.”
This pervasive belief is rooted in a Catch-22, which author Lamar Giles explains here:
So — Black authors often get low book advances. Roxane Gay got a $15K deal for Bad Feminist, which went on to become a New York Times bestseller. Jesmyn Ward, won a National Book Award for Salvage the Bones in 2011 and still struggled to get $100K for her next novel. It would be bad satire if it wasn’t true!
It’s hard for Black authors to break out of this cycle not just because it… is a cycle, because they can’t argue directly with the person saying “Your books don’t sell.” Instead, they have to shift that person’s perception of a decentralized, Hydra authority (“The Market”) that no one can actually see or talk to. Publishing people can only imagine it and gather data about what it buys.
The data makes things Real, but it also has a blinkered quality, because The Market can only buy things publishing houses have already approved and invested in. I mean, a publishing house has to buy a book before it even reaches the market. And then, as Giles notes, if the publishing house invests extra, and gives the book a marketing budget, that book is more likely take off.
This all makes it hard to prove publishing houses wrong, unless they overestimated you. I mean, who is this guy who got an $800K advance? Not a famous person! So, that seems like overspending in hindsight. But underspending can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, turning a viable book into a dud.
Then, going forward, that aura of dud-ness taints all books “like” it. Publishing is obsessed with “comps,” short for “comparable titles”— “profitable books similar to yours that can help support the idea that your project can find an audience and succeed in the marketplace,” according to a random blog called Career Authors. If a book seems comparable to past blockbusters, like Harry Potter or whatever, it gets big money; if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.
An author’s race isn’t the only (or even a) thing that makes a book “like” another book, but Giles’ thread suggests that Black authors often get lumped together under the umbrella of “Black books.”
The sales rep comment below, highlighted by author Amer Anwar, also suggests the publishing industry struggles to see books by Black authors as “like” books by white authors, even when they’re literally the same genre.
So if Black authors’ books become their own de facto genre, and publishing houses tend to lowball them because they’re “like” past underfunded projects, giving Black writers low advances (and pigeonholing them into writing about… knives?) becomes normal. It’s just good data analysis. It’s not publishing that’s racist — it’s the market, unfortunately. Right?
It’s a nice story, but I don’t know that it’s true, because publishing reaches a market that looks eerily like its industry insiders. It’s almost like the marketers in publishing — who are 77 percent white — only know how to market to… people exactly like themselves. They’re experts in automarketing?
From a Politico story about how Trump’s election shook up the publishing industry:
The New York publishing industry has long been presided over by cadres of Ivy League exports, self-proclaimed aesthetes and offspring of the literati. In other words, the exact opposite of what we now think of as “Trump voters.” And their audience is no more diverse. Veteran publisher Adam Bellow, son of Nobel laureate Saul Bellow and current head of All Points Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press, believes that readers of literary fiction—the kind of work that merits academic or artistic praise—comprise about 3 percent of the population. “They are educated, they skew liberal and urban and coastal, and they like to read books that reflect their experience, their lifestyle and their problems,” he said.
(Does this 3 percent of the population really like to read books that reflect their experience? Or do marketers in publishing only know how to market books that reflect their experience? Another question.)
Anyway. I think it’s not that Black authors’ books can’t sell; it’s that marketing teams in publishing only know how to sell literary fiction — or maybe any book? — to an audience “no more diverse” than they are: white, coastal, liberal and self-involved.
So basically, they know how to execute marketing campaigns that look like this:
If a Black author isn’t writing primarily to that crowd, whatever marketing budget they get might get spent ineffectively, and end up looking like a bad investment.
This feels like another key piece of the cycle Giles describes up top, and its persistence.
Some publicity companies specialize in cracking the cycle open, though. Kima Jones, for instance, runs Jack Jones Literary Arts, and works as a publicist for writers who have been historically underrepresented in publishing. As she told NPR:
I want to affirm the work of writers that have the burden of feeling like a publisher doesn't know how to market them, how to talk about them, how to ‘find their audience’… That's the writer I'm interested in.
Ultimately, though, the problem Jones is tackling extends way beyond publishing. Automarketing is everywhere! It’s why international advertising campaigns can lead to disasters — where “Got Milk?” becomes, in translation in Mexico, “Are you lactating?” — and it’s why I’m constantly surprised some people truly hate New Girl. (I recently saw a tweet, now deleted, about wanting to push Jess Day into traffic?!)
It’s hard to really, completely understand you aren’t the soul of The Market, I think — even (especially?) when you work in marketing. But no one is!