Why Representation Matters
Last week I sent an email about why inclusion matters to me, and how MSB is doing compared to the rest of the traditional publishing industry. (Check it out here.)
In case you missed it, traditional book publishers have a big problem.
Between 2019 and 2021, only 23.5% of authors, illustrators, and translators with book deals at Penguin Random House (the #1 publisher in the United States) identified as Black, Indigenous, and/or people of color.
Those numbers are disproportionate to the U.S. population as a whole, 60% of which identify as white and 40% as BIPOC. And that’s just racial and ethnic diversity. The report didn’t get into gender and sexual identities, ability or disability, or socioeconomic status.
I feel strongly that these numbers need to change, for two reasons.
First — your voice matters.
Research overwhelmingly shows that when we have diversity in basically anything — whether it’s business or books or friendships — we all benefit. A recent article from Marketwatch showed that companies with diverse staff earn 19% higher revenue and are 70% more likely to capture new markets than organizations who do not actively recruit and support talent from diverse identities. From a purely business perspective, publishers are missing out by not offering book deals to a wide array of folks.
Second — what’s available to read matters.
In 1990, a professor named Rudine Sims Bishop published an article called “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors” that explained how people of all ages see themselves (mirrors), understand others (windows) and can imagine themselves in worlds outside of their own (sliding glass doors) in books.
To simplify her findings — a lot — mirrors help us understand ourselves, windows help us have empathy and understanding toward people who are not like us, and sliding glass doors encapsulate the magic of reading by bringing us into another person’s mind, world, and perspective.
The reason I do this work today is because I fell in love with reading and writing at an early age thanks to my hometown’s public library. Words empower and inspire me. I saw people and characters like me in the books I read as a child, as a teen, and as an adult.
But that doesn’t happen for all children. In fact, according to the National Education Association, children in 2015 were almost five times more likely to encounter a talking truck or a dinosaur in the pages of a book than a Hispanic character.
As entrepreneurs and readers, we need to care about what and who gets published because when more diverse voices are represented, the quality of what we read and what we learn improves, too. You are reading this email because you are an entrepreneur or an expert who wants to write a how-to book — and that’s awesome. My team and I are here to help you — and everyone else who shares your dream and ambition — get a book deal with a major publisher.
Not only does a focus on equity level the playing field for all entrepreneurs and experts, but it improves what we have access to in our own lives as readers. Whether you head to the bookstore because you want to buy a vacation read or improve an area of your life, everyone needs more mirrors, windows, and sliding doors.
