Can Books Start a New Chapter?
Excellent cover story in Sunday’s NYT Magazine. “Can Books Start a New Chapter? For generations, America’s major publishers focused almost entirely on white readers. Now an effort is underway to open up the industry.”
This is not a new topic...far from it! Remember all the chatter about “reading widely” in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder? But this is one of the most thorough, detailed, and plainspoken pieces I’ve read about the topic. Meaning, I think anyone would be hard-pressed to disagree with its logic — from both a business and social perspective.
It opens with writer Marcela Valdes describing how “captivated” Lisa Lucas, Publisher at Panthenon (an imprint of Knopf Doubleday), was reading the unpublished manuscript for Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm, by Laura Warrell. “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. To Lucas, it felt like the real world.” She wanted Panthenon to acquire it.
Here we go, according to Valdes: “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, the more likely that its publication rights will be sold at auction, which drives up their price. These decisions are influenced by practical considerations. Does the book have an audience? Does the author have a reputation? Can the publisher afford the rights? But they are also swayed by more romantic factors. 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.” Dingdingding.
And it goes from there.
Look up this piece for more info about Lucas’ role, other publishing professionals’ (including the late Toni Morrison’s) efforts to diversify the industry; a history of “Black literature” and publishers’ notions about what Black readers want to read; and, well, a good history of the industry in general. Bar none, one of the best things I’ve read in a long time.
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