"Scholastic is the largest publisher and distributor of children’s books in the United States. They are the only point of reference many kids get for the world, especially in rural areas, so the messages they send with their books shape a lot of worldviews. This makes the lack of representation in Scholastic’s body of work especially devastating."
- Zoe Jung, 10th Grade
- Zoe Jung, 10th Grade
Racism has historically been and continues to be a problem throughout the publishing industry. This is an especially troubling trend because publishing has a direct connection to people’s minds. It starts with an inadequate amount of people of color working in the industry — as editors, publishers, and agents, or as executives and reviewers. That inadequacy sets up the whole system to mirror it.
The Diversity Baseline Survey by Lee & Low Books was conducted in 2015 and again in 2020 to measure race, gender, sexual orientation, and ability diversity in publishing staff. 79% of people responding to the 2015 survey identified as white. The 2020 survey came back 76% white. This would show a change, but the 2020 survey also had a sample size more than double that of the 2015 survey. As Lee & Low Books writes in a breakdown of the numbers, the amount of difference in sample size between surveys renders the change statistically insignificant.
When publishing itself is overwhelmingly white, it favors white authors. The individuals within the industry don’t even have to consciously discriminate, and in many cases they don’t; the system does it for them. Black fantasy author L. L. Mckinney started a hashtag called #publishingpaidme to show the difference in advance payments between Black and white authors. Notably, award-winning science fiction author N. K. Jemisin revealed that she made less than $50,000 in advances for each of her books, an incredibly low amount compared to white science fiction authors. This is despite her being the first author to win three consecutive Hugo Awards and the first to win the Best Novel Hugo Award for all three books in a trilogy.
This is systemic racism. To clarify: advances are not total earnings for a book. They are payments made before a book is completed. The money is taken out of future book earnings, called royalties. The amount of money in the advance is based on the publisher’s prediction of how well the book will sell. This is where racism comes in. Jemisin said on Twitter, “some hard facts go into this guess: the author’s previous sales, for one. Sales of comparable books by comparable authors. But here’s where the hard facts start to slip and other factors start to slip in. Like, who are my comparable authors?”
“Comp Titles” are one of the big factors in determining advances. These are “comparable” or “comparative” books that have already been published and sold well, sometimes with a particular audience. When looking at a pitch or manuscript and deciding whether to pick it up and how much of an advance to put out, publishers see if there are any comp titles that seem similar enough to the pitch to help predict how it’ll sell. It’s not just the books themselves; the author is part of the package, too. Laura B. McGrath ran a data analysis of race in the comp titles used most frequently between 2013 and 2019, and found that 478 out of 500 were written by white authors. Since publishers compare similar authors, and since race is often used as a means of determining similarity, this is a self-sustaining barrier keeping authors of color from being paid well and published. Advances aren’t everything, but they do show the value a publisher places on a pitch or manuscript, and from the chronic underpaying of Black authors and other authors of color it’s easy to wonder how many of them simply don’t get published in the first place.
The answer is many. To get the data, Richard Jean So and Gus Wezerek collected an array of about 8,000 books published between 1950 and 2018 by any of the four biggest publishing companies at the time. With other researchers, they were able to identify the race of the authors of about 7,000 books. Out of these 3,471 authors, 95% were white.
When publishers lack authors of color, the books they publish lack characters of color. This is especially measurable in children’s publishing. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) is a research library and study focusing on children’s and young adult literature. In 2017, they received about 3,700 books, and only about 25% had significant characters or content of color.
The #StepUpScholastic campaign was organized in 2016 by American Indians in Children’s Literature, Ferguson Response Network, and Teaching for Change. Scholastic is the largest publisher and distributor of children’s books in the United States. They are the only point of reference many kids get for the world, especially in rural areas, so the messages they send with their books shape a lot of worldviews. This makes the lack of representation in Scholastic’s body of work especially devastating.
#StepUpScholastic was started in response to the lack of genuine diversity in the Scholastic book catalog. Some of the books they publish fit into the trope of “brown-skinned child of unspecified ethnicity” as described on the CCBC’s 2017 statistics report, some of them are actually about children of color whose cultures are included, but most of them only have white characters or non-human characters with no race. When kids only see white characters in books, it shapes how they see themselves and each other. Leslie Mac, founder of the Ferguson Response Network, summed this up by tweeting that, “exposing white children to accurate depictions of PoC can lead to adults that see PoC as fully formed 3 dimensional ppl… this contributes to their sense of self & well being in the world.” It’s especially important to have diverse representation in children’s books, because childhood is a crucial age for development.
Publishing doesn’t just lack characters of color. There’s also the issue of books that spread racism. Scholastic is notorious for publishing racist books. They have received criticism in recent years for books such as President Donald Trump and The Adventures of Ook and Gluk, which glorified Donald Trump and perpetuated racist tropes about Asians, respectively. As books are written and enter into circulation, people read them. If a book has been picked up by a white publisher, revised by a white editor, reviewed by white reviewers and written by a white author, it could be racist or it could just be another white book. If it promotes harmful ideas, some people might notice and make an effort to not internalize them. Not everyone has critical thinking or reading comprehension, though, especially when the book in question is just the most recent in an endless cycle of white books. Especially when the readers belong to Scholastic’s intended audience, which is children.
It’s not all bad. The industry has improved in recent years. In 2016, Scholastic began partnering with a nonprofit organization called We Need Diverse Books in an attempt to diversify its catalog. The percentage of children’s books by or about people of color per year has gone up from just 10% in 2013 to 31% in 2018, and more than 35% in 2020. People are working for change. We just need to work a little harder.
Article Sources:
Corrie, Jalissa
“The Diversity Gap in Children’s Book Publishing, 2018”
Lee & Low Books Blog
May 10, 2018
Flood, Alison
“#Publishingpaidme: authors share advances to expose racial disparities”
The Guardian
June 8, 2020
Jung, Mike
“WNDB and Scholastic Announce New Partnership”
We Need Diverse Books
March 1, 2016
McGrath, Laura B.
“Comping White”
Los Angeles Review of Books
January 21, 2019
Romero, Shelley and Adriana M. Martinez Figueroa
“‘The Unbearable Whiteness of Publishing’ Revisited”
Publishers Weekly
January 29, 2021
So, Richard Jean and Wezerek, Gus
“Just How White Is the Book Industry?”
The New York Times
December 11, 2020
Tyner, Madeline
“CCBC 2017 Multicultural Statistics”
CCBlogC
February 22, 2018
“Books by and/or about Black, Indigenous and People of Color 2018”
Cooperative Children’s Book Center, School of Education, University of Wisconsin/Madison
April 16, 2021
Cooperative Children's Book Center
“#StepUpScholastic Twitter Chat”
Teaching For Change
March 2, 2016
“#StepUpScholastic for ALL children”
The Action Network
Accessed on October 22, 2021
“Where Is the Diversity in Publishing? The 2019 Diversity Baseline Survey 2019”
Lee & Low Books Blog
January 28, 2020
The Diversity Baseline Survey by Lee & Low Books was conducted in 2015 and again in 2020 to measure race, gender, sexual orientation, and ability diversity in publishing staff. 79% of people responding to the 2015 survey identified as white. The 2020 survey came back 76% white. This would show a change, but the 2020 survey also had a sample size more than double that of the 2015 survey. As Lee & Low Books writes in a breakdown of the numbers, the amount of difference in sample size between surveys renders the change statistically insignificant.
When publishing itself is overwhelmingly white, it favors white authors. The individuals within the industry don’t even have to consciously discriminate, and in many cases they don’t; the system does it for them. Black fantasy author L. L. Mckinney started a hashtag called #publishingpaidme to show the difference in advance payments between Black and white authors. Notably, award-winning science fiction author N. K. Jemisin revealed that she made less than $50,000 in advances for each of her books, an incredibly low amount compared to white science fiction authors. This is despite her being the first author to win three consecutive Hugo Awards and the first to win the Best Novel Hugo Award for all three books in a trilogy.
This is systemic racism. To clarify: advances are not total earnings for a book. They are payments made before a book is completed. The money is taken out of future book earnings, called royalties. The amount of money in the advance is based on the publisher’s prediction of how well the book will sell. This is where racism comes in. Jemisin said on Twitter, “some hard facts go into this guess: the author’s previous sales, for one. Sales of comparable books by comparable authors. But here’s where the hard facts start to slip and other factors start to slip in. Like, who are my comparable authors?”
“Comp Titles” are one of the big factors in determining advances. These are “comparable” or “comparative” books that have already been published and sold well, sometimes with a particular audience. When looking at a pitch or manuscript and deciding whether to pick it up and how much of an advance to put out, publishers see if there are any comp titles that seem similar enough to the pitch to help predict how it’ll sell. It’s not just the books themselves; the author is part of the package, too. Laura B. McGrath ran a data analysis of race in the comp titles used most frequently between 2013 and 2019, and found that 478 out of 500 were written by white authors. Since publishers compare similar authors, and since race is often used as a means of determining similarity, this is a self-sustaining barrier keeping authors of color from being paid well and published. Advances aren’t everything, but they do show the value a publisher places on a pitch or manuscript, and from the chronic underpaying of Black authors and other authors of color it’s easy to wonder how many of them simply don’t get published in the first place.
The answer is many. To get the data, Richard Jean So and Gus Wezerek collected an array of about 8,000 books published between 1950 and 2018 by any of the four biggest publishing companies at the time. With other researchers, they were able to identify the race of the authors of about 7,000 books. Out of these 3,471 authors, 95% were white.
When publishers lack authors of color, the books they publish lack characters of color. This is especially measurable in children’s publishing. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) is a research library and study focusing on children’s and young adult literature. In 2017, they received about 3,700 books, and only about 25% had significant characters or content of color.
The #StepUpScholastic campaign was organized in 2016 by American Indians in Children’s Literature, Ferguson Response Network, and Teaching for Change. Scholastic is the largest publisher and distributor of children’s books in the United States. They are the only point of reference many kids get for the world, especially in rural areas, so the messages they send with their books shape a lot of worldviews. This makes the lack of representation in Scholastic’s body of work especially devastating.
#StepUpScholastic was started in response to the lack of genuine diversity in the Scholastic book catalog. Some of the books they publish fit into the trope of “brown-skinned child of unspecified ethnicity” as described on the CCBC’s 2017 statistics report, some of them are actually about children of color whose cultures are included, but most of them only have white characters or non-human characters with no race. When kids only see white characters in books, it shapes how they see themselves and each other. Leslie Mac, founder of the Ferguson Response Network, summed this up by tweeting that, “exposing white children to accurate depictions of PoC can lead to adults that see PoC as fully formed 3 dimensional ppl… this contributes to their sense of self & well being in the world.” It’s especially important to have diverse representation in children’s books, because childhood is a crucial age for development.
Publishing doesn’t just lack characters of color. There’s also the issue of books that spread racism. Scholastic is notorious for publishing racist books. They have received criticism in recent years for books such as President Donald Trump and The Adventures of Ook and Gluk, which glorified Donald Trump and perpetuated racist tropes about Asians, respectively. As books are written and enter into circulation, people read them. If a book has been picked up by a white publisher, revised by a white editor, reviewed by white reviewers and written by a white author, it could be racist or it could just be another white book. If it promotes harmful ideas, some people might notice and make an effort to not internalize them. Not everyone has critical thinking or reading comprehension, though, especially when the book in question is just the most recent in an endless cycle of white books. Especially when the readers belong to Scholastic’s intended audience, which is children.
It’s not all bad. The industry has improved in recent years. In 2016, Scholastic began partnering with a nonprofit organization called We Need Diverse Books in an attempt to diversify its catalog. The percentage of children’s books by or about people of color per year has gone up from just 10% in 2013 to 31% in 2018, and more than 35% in 2020. People are working for change. We just need to work a little harder.
Article Sources:
Corrie, Jalissa
“The Diversity Gap in Children’s Book Publishing, 2018”
Lee & Low Books Blog
May 10, 2018
Flood, Alison
“#Publishingpaidme: authors share advances to expose racial disparities”
The Guardian
June 8, 2020
Jung, Mike
“WNDB and Scholastic Announce New Partnership”
We Need Diverse Books
March 1, 2016
McGrath, Laura B.
“Comping White”
Los Angeles Review of Books
January 21, 2019
Romero, Shelley and Adriana M. Martinez Figueroa
“‘The Unbearable Whiteness of Publishing’ Revisited”
Publishers Weekly
January 29, 2021
So, Richard Jean and Wezerek, Gus
“Just How White Is the Book Industry?”
The New York Times
December 11, 2020
Tyner, Madeline
“CCBC 2017 Multicultural Statistics”
CCBlogC
February 22, 2018
“Books by and/or about Black, Indigenous and People of Color 2018”
Cooperative Children’s Book Center, School of Education, University of Wisconsin/Madison
April 16, 2021
Cooperative Children's Book Center
“#StepUpScholastic Twitter Chat”
Teaching For Change
March 2, 2016
“#StepUpScholastic for ALL children”
The Action Network
Accessed on October 22, 2021
“Where Is the Diversity in Publishing? The 2019 Diversity Baseline Survey 2019”
Lee & Low Books Blog
January 28, 2020
