Diversity

Hachette Book Group released their fourth annual update on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, with data from 2022. In 2022, 36.4 percent of the company’s workforce was made up of BIPOC employees, an increase in representation in “nearly every publishing group and non-publishing division.” Within that, 4.2 percent of staff are Black, 21.4 percent are Hispanic/Latinx, 7.4 percent are Asian, and 3.1 percent are two or more races. Among new hires, 61 percent identify as BIPOC, up from 54 percent in 2021. Diversity at the VP level was stagnant at 17.9 percent, and declined at the director level to 21.6 […]

PRH released their third annual workforce demographics report, showing flat or modest gains in diversity since last year. “At Penguin Random House, we strive to create books for everyone; having a workforce that represents the society we live in goes hand-in-hand with achieving this goal,” the report says. Among all non-warehouse employees, 71 percent are white, 10 percent are Asian, 9 percent are Latino, 6 percent are Black, and 3 percent are two or more races. American Indian, MENA, and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander combined total 1.08 percent. This is a 1 percent increase in Black staff and a […]

Last week Pen America released Reading Between the Lines: Race, Equity, and Book Publishing, a report on racial and ethnic diversity in the industry—”acute and urgent, if not the sole, areas of under-representation”—compiled from publicly-available data, information from publishers, and interviews with more than 60 authors and publishing professionals. The report explains the complexities in the movement for greater diversity and addresses what makes publishing both the same as and different from other industries. It touches on the gold rush of publishers looking for books by Black authors in the wake of 2020’s protests, why comps aren’t sufficient to determine […]

On July 25, Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro convened a meeting with executives at Penguin Random House about Latino underrepresentation in publishing. The conversation, which also included Latino authors and agents, was roughly an hour long, and topics ranged from “lackluster recruitment of Latino authors,” to lower marketing budgets for their books, to the publisher learning to be “more intentional about building partnerships with Latino organizations to attract and elevate talent at all levels.” Castro told PL that the meeting has been in the works for almost a year. A report he commissioned in 2021 showed that “publishing is the worst […]