Diversity Firings: Scapegoating Diversity Hires for Publishing Industry Failures

​A recent New York Times article states, “Lisa Lucas was among the big hires meant to shake up the industry. Her departure, alongside other prominent Black editors and executives, has led some to question publishers’ pledge to diversify.”

Elevated from the National Book Foundation to Heading a Major Publishing Division

Penguin Random House picked Lisa, the Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, to head two of their imprints: Pantheon and Schocken. They expected her to be able to make those imprints profitable with little to no training or experience selling books.

They hired her because she was considered - as an administrator of the National Book Awards - to be a “tastemaker and rising talent, and as someone who could help discover and champion writers of color.”

Lisa did what they asked of her. She discovered and championed writers of color. She did not, however, fulfill the unspoken mandate: make those writers profitable. As she put it in the article:

“…not one mainstream publisher has come up with a long-term plan to capture minority dollars…It’s hard to be reminded by an entire industry that investments in your people will not be made, and that when investments are made, they’re provisional.”

Buried later down in the article is a clue as to what is driving the publishing industry’s behavior toward the “minority” executives they hired: “Publishers’ appetite for books about race and racism has waned after sales for some of the titles they rushed to acquire failed to meet expectations.”

It’s Not a Minority Problem. It’s a Publishing Industry Problem.

This is not a minority problem. This is a publishing industry problem. The truth is that not one mainstream publisher has come up with a long-term plan to capture reader (not just minority) dollars. Seven out of ten books they publish don’t ever earn more than it costs them to produce.

This is why publishing house after publishing house is closing its doors. The industry’s dwindled down from dozens of large publishing houses in the 1950s to our current state of “The Big 5.” And, given Amazon’s dominance in book selling, it might as well be “The Big One.”

There’s a simple reason for this: The publishing industry is not operated by people who understand what motivates a reader to buy a book as opposed to watching a movie or playing a game. Most of the people in leadership have no business (or leadership) training. They don’t always know how to identify who the primary target audience is for their fiction books.

That’s why they rely so heavily on genre and struggle to see past it. Because they don’t know how to identify their target audience, they don’t know what market forces to look for in order to anticipate what titles are most likely to catch hold of the public’s imagination so they can get ahead of the game.

They can’t take a title and build a solid marketing strategy around it that goes far beyond that book to create a much larger social impact with a much bigger impact on the bottom line.

They’re essentially left throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it sticks. And as of late, not much of it is sticking.

What the Publishing Industry Needs

The publishing industry needs more authorpreneurs. It needs to pluck its executives from the ranks of indie authors and publishers who know how to sell their books because they’ve had to learn the hard way. They’ve got the experience and the Moxy it takes to make it despite the odds stacked against them.

This is in part because the sales aren’t taking place in traditional bookstores where they’re tracked and measured in the systems traditional publishers love to use, but, instead, in the back of hotel conference rooms, from the trunks of cars, or on independent websites. That’s where award-winning author and publisher Joylynn M. Ross made many of her direct-to-consumer sales.

Rather than hiring “tastemakers,” they need to hire people like Joylynn, who is also the CEO of an author assistance and literary service provider firm. Joylynn is an underground publishing guru known for teaching literary artists how to Act Like an Author, Think Like a Business. Joylynn, a Black woman and indie national-best-selling author, is someone who has represented authors for over $2.5 million dollars in book contracts, rights, royalties, and sales. She teaches authors the skills they need to build profitable businesses around their titles.

Before bootstrapping her six-figure business, she spent ten years as acquisitions editor for New York Times bestselling author Carl Webber’s Urban Christian imprint, distributed by Kensington Publishing Corp. She took her skills and made a name for herself in an industry that tends to ignore or neglect independently published works.

And there are plenty of Joylynn M. Ross’s out there, such as Shawanda Williams of Black Odyssey Media. Black men and women who have worked inside of, apart from, and alongside the traditional publishing industry who can bring that entrepreneurial spirit and expertise to the table, helping publishing companies turn their bottom lines from red to Black.

The Keys to Publishing Industry Success

There are five keys to turning the Publishing Industry around and making it profitable:

1. Hire the right people for the job or give those you hire the right training to do their jobs.

Hire people with proven track records of building literary and financial literary success or else bring in those people to train the people you hire so they’re equipped to do the job you’ve assigned them to do. Joylynn’s brand, Path To Publishing, offers literary success training.

2. Build blueprints for making profits that go well beyond the book.

Well-written books are so much more than entertainment and educational tools. They are vehicles for exploration of topics of universal interest to every human being, such as personal and social identity, mental health, and interpersonal relationships. The book can be the beginning of what is done to address those things but should not be the end of it. I discuss this a bit further in depth in a YouTube video.

3. Stop pandering to what you think people want and take a stand for what you believe matters.

The publishing industry didn’t hire women like Lisa because they cared about the diversity issue. They hired them to pander to what they thought the public wanted and it backfired on them.

One of the biggest problems the publishing industry faces is that nobody – and I do mean nobody – outside of the publishing industry cares about the publishers. The brands don’t mean anything. They all basically do the same things and operate the same way.

That’s what happens when you try to be what you think other people want you to be. You end up being just one more face in the crowd. Each publishing house and its imprints should mean something and should be tailored to attracting a specific audience. If John Q. Public, when stopped on the street and asked about it, can’t identify what your brand is or represents after being told the name – you’ve failed your job.

4. Learn to be Magnetic Thought Leaders.

A true sign of failed leadership is firing people for your own failures and blaming them for not building up your bottom line rather than looking at your own leadership to see where you failed them. If your people aren’t doing what you want them to do or they aren’t going in the right direction, it’s your job as a leader to figure out why that is and get them motivated to move in the right direction.

The publishing industry is losing editors right, left, and center because it’s demanding too much of their editors and giving them too little in return. That’s a failure of leadership, not a failure of editors.

The publishing industry is losing profits right, left, and center because it’s failing to lead the readers to their books. That’s because it’s not listening to its readership long enough to figure out what matters to those readers before choosing the next title.

Your readers don’t need “tastemakers.” They need someone to understand their tastes better than they do and provide what will truly satisfy their hungers.

That’s the job of a leader. And when you do your job right as a leader, your ideal audience won’t just come to you, they will become loyal to you. They will want to tell everyone about what you’ve done for them. They become an unpaid sales force.

You will spend less on advertising, reduce your turnover, and get much higher quality work from those who latch onto and support your vision. You’ll also make a much bigger impact with far less effort.

Joylynn’s Business-to-Business brand, Path To Connections™, offers that Magnetic Thought Leadership Training.

5. Learn to B.E. S.E.E.N.

Diverse books are going to meet bias. That’s one of the things that they are specifically written to do: challenge bias in society. That’s also one reason they are harder to sell.

Don’t blame the audience for not buying them. Challenging biases tends to make people uncomfortable or even angry. Most people read books to escape from the situations in life that make them uncomfortable or that trigger their anger. Instead, provide people the tools and training they need to explore their biases in a safe, forgiving environment.

Joylynn’s PTP Press brand offers B.E. S.E.E.N. Bias Education and Techniques, a training that explores bias and its underlying causes, the impact bias has on relationships, and the techniques that can be used to understand or overcome these natural biases, or challenge and eliminate the dangerous or unhealthy ones.

The training was developed around the IBPA, Independent Book Publishers Association, Benjamin Franklin award-winning novel by Nikki T. Anthony, The Price We Pay. That story explores the experiences of a teenage Black girl who discovers that things aren’t always as black and white as they seem when she encounters the challenges of recognizing and overcoming bias: her own and those of others.

It is harder to market diverse books for the reasons stated above, but it’s worth the work involved because it makes a bigger and more lasting social impact when the work is done. It’s also far more profitable in the long run, though it can take longer for the profits to show themselves.

The Bottom Line for the Publishing Industry

If my critique sounds harsh, know that it comes from a place of love. Ink runs in my veins, absorbed from my mother’s fingertips as she read while I was in the womb. Books were the eighth sacrament in our Catholic home, treasured gifts, and cherished friends.

What’s happening to the publishing industry hurts to see, especially when the simple solutions are staring the publishing industry in the face but keep being overlooked due to their own biases.

If I sound biased toward Joylynn and her brands, it’s because I’m her partner in Path To Connections, her Chief Acquisitions Editor for PTP Press, and the Director of Program Development and Coordination for Path To Publishing. It’s been our work together to address racial divides and overcome social challenges that’s produced these trainings.