Wednesday, June 22, 2022

22: Lisa Lucas



Inside the Push to Diversify the Book Business For generations, America’s major publishers focused almost entirely on white readers. Now a new cadre of executives like Lisa Lucas is trying to open up the industry. ........ The musician at the center of the novel is racially mixed, and the world he inhabits is rich with every kind of diversity: social, economic, racial, ethnic. ....... “I’m an unmarried Black woman,” she told me during one of the many conversations we had over the past nine months. “Over 40. Who does not live in a convent. These stories matter to me.” ......... This is pretty much how book publishing has worked for generations. The stronger the emotional connection an editor has to a manuscript, the more likely she is to publish the book. ........ Editors often justify their purchases by talking about how much they “love” a manuscript. In this way, book publishing is like the real estate market but with offer prices conditioned on the approval of a book publisher, not a bank. ......... Lucas is the first Black publisher in Pantheon’s 80-year history and one of the few to ever hold such a post at Penguin Random House U.S., the umbrella company that contains Pantheon as well as dozens of other imprints. When “Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm” went to auction, Lucas offered a winning bid in the mid-six figures. The price reflected her hopes for the book’s commercial appeal. .......... During the national protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, book publishing came under scrutiny for its history of undervaluing and ignoring Black editors. That June more than 1,000 publishing professionals signed up to participate in a “day of action” to protest, among other things, the industry’s “failure to hire and retain a significant number of Black employees.” ........... “I was used to being one of very few people of color in the room, but I had rarely had the experience of being the only one in certain rooms until I worked in publishing.” ......... two waves of previous efforts to diversify the industry created little lasting change. ...... For decades publishing insiders have wrung their hands over the ways in which television, video games and the internet have eaten into their profits, while ignoring the ways in which their own business practices have limited the audience for their products. ...... demographically these graduates look different than they did in the 1970s — they are more likely to be women and to be Black, Asian or Latino — and by neglecting to build an audience among them, publishers may have lost millions of customers. ........ an industry culture that still struggles to overcome the clubby, white elitism it was born in. ........... For much of its history, book publishing, especially literary book publishing, was an industry built and run by rich, white men. ......... Until the 1960s, American literature was shaped by the fact that Black authors needed white publishers to achieve national recognition. .......... both the poet Langston Hughes and the novelist Nella Larsen got book deals in the 1920s with the help of Blanche Knopf, an editor at the prestigious publishing house Alfred A. Knopf. After that, you could always point to a few great Black authors published by New York houses. Yet white editors didn’t necessarily think of themselves as serving Black readers. .......... “There is a subgenre of essay in the African American literary tradition, that can loosely be called What White Publishers Won’t Print,” Henry Louis Gates Jr., a professor of English at Harvard, said. Both James Weldon Johnson and Zora Neale Hurston wrote essays with that title, more or less. Gates said, “There is a consciousness from almost 100 years ago among Black writers about the racial limitations and biases of the American publishing industry.” Richard Wright, whose 1940 novel “Native Son” sold 215,000 copies in three weeks, for example, still saw half of his 1945 memoir “Black Boy” expurgated to please the Book-of-the-Month Club, which catered to an audience of white middle-class readers. ............ Among the ranks of these new hires was the future Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, who worked in a scholastic division of Random House while writing her first novel, “The Bluest Eye.” .......... But none of these companies had the funds to underwrite splashy marketing campaigns and national tours — the kinds of investments that help catapult books onto best-seller lists. ......... Marie Brown told me that during the 1970s, a colleague at Doubleday advised her that “the Black thing is over.” If she wanted to make it as a trade-book editor, she needed to buy manuscripts of “universal” interest. ....... After Morrison moved to Random House’s trade imprint, she assembled “The Black Book,” a landmark anthology of Black historical documents. Random House balked at publishing it. “It just looked to them like a disaster,” Morrison told Hilton Als in a 2003 New Yorker profile. “They didn’t know how to sell it.” But the anthology became a national best seller in 1974. And in 1976, when Doubleday published Alex Haley’s “Roots,” a historical novel that it bought in embryonic form during the 1960s, it spent 22 weeks at the top of the New York Times best-seller list. ............. Even after witnessing these blockbusters, book publishers still seemed to struggle to see Black Americans as a significant consumer market. Gates told me that Random House’s hire of Morrison was “probably the single most important moment in the transformation of the relationship of Black writers to white publishers.” ........... When Morrison left Random House in 1983, the company’s publication of Black authors plummeted. ........ Often when she brought up a book by a Black author, someone would say some version of, “Oh, these Black books just don’t sell.” When Adero pointed to Davis’s sales or to those of the filmmaker Spike Lee, another one of her celebrity authors, she was informed that those were “not Black books.” .......... the turning point came in 1992, when three Black women — Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Terry McMillan — appeared on the New York Times best-seller list at the same time. In their wake, many other Black writers — among them, Walter Mosley, E. Lynn Harris, Zane and Edward P. Jones — had huge sales. ............ she herself sent hundreds of letters to bookstores and Black organizations across the country, offering to do readings and including pages from “Mama.” The response was overwhelming: She received so many invitations that she could not accept them all. Once, she walked into a bookstore in Atlanta and wept when she saw that the crowd waiting for her was standing-room-only. “Black people have always read,” she said. “They were waiting for something to read that they might be able to identify with, that’s all.” ......... Her father was a record producer, songwriter and guitarist who produced most of Madonna’s first album. Lucas earned a degree in literature at the University of Chicago. .......... During the uncertainty and isolation of the pandemic, many Americans turned to old-fashioned book reading in much the same way that some started baking bread. For the first time in 18 years, the number of print books sold in the United States rose for two consecutive years. ........... Sales were led by Barack Obama’s second memoir, “A Promised Land,” which sold more than three million copies in the United States in print, electronic and audio formats in its first month. ....... “The submission process, it was incredibly challenging,” one agent, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid hurting her authors, said of the pre-George Floyd years. “It’s basically white people looking for books about white people for white people.” ........ 89 percent of the fiction books published in 2018 by Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Macmillan and HarperCollins were written by white, non-Hispanic authors — a nearly exact reflection of the industry’s staff demographics the previous year. ........

by 2030 the collective economic power of Black consumers alone will be $1.7 trillion

......... One writer said he found it “jarring” to find out a character was Black on Page 3. ........ 63 of the story’s 9,075 words described a microaggression against a Black character. ............ One of Warrell’s most compelling characters is Koko, a teenager struggling to love herself and to understand her sexual impulses. Her white, blond mother seems to Koko like the epitome of American beauty, and her sexy, mixed-race father is mostly absent. ............ (Roughly nine million Americans self-identified as multiracial in 2013.) ......... Art Spiegelman’s visual retelling of the Holocaust, “Maus,” had recently been banned by a school board in Tennessee. In response, its national sales spiked. ............ Books can take years to develop from nascent proposal to full-grown manuscripts. Authors can take a decade of nurturing to hit their artistic stride. ....... At some point in their 20s or 30s, they committed to learning the art of making and selling books, and they knew that if they lost their jobs, they might never find another salaried position. .......... She was the only Black person in the store.

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