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 […]
Diversity
Brown and Lucas Address Black Women In Publishing Panel
Digital Book World convened in New York starting on Monday. In a panel called Black Women in Publishing, Hachette Nashville publicity director Laini Brown and Pantheon svp and publisher Lisa Lucas both said they would recommend publishing as a career to anyone who wanted to break into it. Brown said that it’s an industry where you can learn a lot about a lot of different topics, and Lucas said that people should know that there are many types of jobs in publishing outside of editorial, and that publishing is “a great living.” “As much as we complain about money and […]
Literary Arts Emergency Fund Report: Nonprofits and Publishers Are Underfunded, Provide Great Value
The Literary Arts Emergency Fund has released a report on the “state of the literary arts field in the U.S,” concluding that nonprofits and publishers are underfunded, yet provide great value to the literary world. The organization–made up of the Academy of American Poets, the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses, and the National Book Foundation–collaborated with marketing research firm WolfBrown to analyze 2021 applications to the Fund. Backed by the Mellon Foundation, the fund distributed $7.8 million to 376 nonprofit literary arts organizations in two cycles. The study included 410 nonprofit literary organizations and publishers that applied to the […]
PRH Makes Diversity Gains in Entry Levels, Backslides in Management
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 […]
Pen America Addresses Complexities of Diversity Initiatives, Offers Recommendations
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 […]
Congressman Joaquin Castro Meets With PRH About Latino Representation
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 […]