Yes, We’re Living Through a Backlash in Book Publishing

The Ingredients That Comprise the Stew of Our Current Moment

back·lash
/ˈbakˌlaSH/
a strong and adverse reaction by a large number of people, especially to a social or political development.

I read the 15th-anniversary edition of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, by Susan Faludi, which came out in 2006. In 1991, when the book was first published, I was a high school sophomore, not sophisticated enough to grapple with the book’s messages—or its inherent consequences to me as a young woman growing up in the United States.

But by 2006, I was thirty—and I got the message loud and clear. I nodded along and underlined passages. The gist of the book, in case you haven’t read it or don’t remember, was her identification of a media-driven “backlash” that was targeting and blaming second-wave feminism for women’s problems, many of which she argued were created to keep women in their place/roll back the clock. Faludi identified backlashes as historical trends that resort to “blaming the victim” for the illusory problems that arise out of their own advances. In other words, advancement results in backlash by groups of people who have an invested stake in the status quo, and the people making the progress become the problem.

Faludi did not write about race in her book, but its ideas are 100% applicable to progress being made by racial and sexual minority groups, and a good book to read or re-read if you want to understand our current moment. Michele Goldberg wrote an opinion piece in the NYT last year (“America Is Triggered By Progress”), noting that “one of Faludi’s central insights was that backlashes rear up not when women have achieved equality but when they seem to be on the brink of achieving it.”

So let’s apply this to book publishing and DEI, right here and now. Four short years ago, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the racial reckoning that followed, book publishing made a commitment to hire more “diversely.” You heard heads of house talking about their commitments to do better. Every house and organization in the country was doing their due diligence on DEI training. Over the next couple years, major publishing houses and other literary institutions announced a series high-profile senior Black and Latinx editorial hires. The list below is taken verbatim from a PEN report called Reading Between the Lines: Race, Equity, and Book Publishing; the boldfaced names indicate people who’ve since left or been ousted, Lisa Lucas just last week.

• In April 2020, Nadxieli Nieto joined Flatiron as executive editor

• In July 2020, Lisa Lucas, was hired as publisher of Pantheon and Schocken Books, two PRH imprints

• In July 2020, Krishan Trotman, started a new Hachette imprint focused on underrepresented voices called Legacy Lit

• In September 2020, Jamia Wilson was named an executive editor at Random House

• In 2020 and 2021, Dana Canedy, LaSharah Bunting, and Aminda Marqués González joined Simon & Schuster, Canedy as senior vice president and publisher of the Simon & Schuster imprint; Bunting  as vice president and executive editor; Marqués González as a vice president and executive editor.

• In February 2021, Jennifer Baker joined Amistad Books, the HarperCollins imprint, as senior editor.

• In March 2021, Yahdon Israel joined Simon & Schuster as a senior editor.

• In August 2021, Denne Michele Norris was named editor-in-chief at Electric Literature.

• In December 2021, Adenike Olanrewaju joined HarperCollins as executive director.

• In February 2022, Milena Brown, formerly the associate director of marketing at Simon & Schuster, joined Doubleday, part of PRH, as marketing director

• In February 2022, Retha Powers joined Henry Holt & Co. as vice president and executive editor

• In July 2022, Carmen Giménez was named director of the independent Graywolf Press

For those keeping count, that’s fourteen hires and four dismissals. In other words, 28% within just a couple to few years of being hired.

When I heard that Lisa Lucas had been fired last week, then saw the immediate and swift stunned reaction by, well, everyone, I had my own series of speculations:

1. PRH paid a lot of money to get her. Their fault, not hers.

2. One of Lucas’s most high-profile acquisitions was Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain Gang All Stars. The book has sold 45,000 copies to date (according to Bookscan), undoubtedly good sales, even great—but Adjei-Brenyah renegotiated his advance on the heels of #PublishingPaidMe. If Lucas advocated for this increase, which she surely would have, and Adjei-Brenyah isn’t all that close to earning out, it could be a mark against her rather than a reason to celebrate.

3. I don’t personally know Lucas, but I do know she’s a strong, opinionated, and powerful woman, and I know that when working inside white male culture, that’s valued until it’s not. My guess is that Lucas was pushing, advocating, for the real and meaningful change she was brought into do. At first, this was probably celebrated, then only tolerated. Too much, too fast may have been the message she received. And if she didn’t heed it, she may have made some key enemies, or even just one, at the tippy-toppiest level, which is all it takes.

Pertinent to Speculation #3, my tipping point for leaving traditional publishing was over a book I wanted to acquire about trans families. I was curating Seal Press’s LGBTQ list at the time. I went to acquisitions, presented my case. I had a strong reputation and could pretty much bring in what I wanted, but the message after the meeting was loud and clear: acquire this book if you really want to, but if it fails, it’s on you.

I didn’t have the courage to take that chance. I wasn’t willing to put my job on the line for that book. Lisa Lucas may well have been more courageous than me. She may have gotten a similar message, maybe more than once, but forged on anyway.

This is admittedly conjecture, but what I do know is that the turnover rate on these diverse hires is startling. And there are reasons, which are systemic, and which we should find disturbing. People may be getting fired because they’re not a good “fit,” but that speaks to racial and sexual minorities entering into a monoculture in which a good fit is never going to be possible.  

Real change involves real listening. It means engaging in dialogue with those whose opinions and actions might rub you the wrong way and asking yourself why their opinions and actions rub you the wrong way. I have heard countless mostly white men, but some white women, too, saying that they can’t get published right now because the landscape is hostile to white authors. This is provably untrue, but this belief system and the articulation of it contributes to the backlash. Once the privileged class start feeling like the victim, and voicing discontent of said victimhood, we’ve got the ingredients for the stew of backlash readied for the pot.

Consider the firing of these high-profile Black editors as the carrots in our current stew. Book bans are the celery. The onions are cancelations, and cancel culture—which cuts both ways, unfortunately. The fallout from #OwnVoices (which quickly became weaponized by white writers and the industry as “woke culture” gone mad) is an example of a good idea that got crushed due to people projecting onto it more than it was ever meant to mean (read more here). Books are censored on the Left and the Right, though one could argue that the books being tagged as “problematic” on the Left are singled out for their racist, misogynistic, and homophobic depictions, whereas the books being targeted by the Right are ones that advocate for minority culture and rights (with anti-racist content, gay protagonists, and normalizing of the trans experience). Out of all this progress, “wokeness” has emerged as the accusation de jour, which works to blame the people pushing for progress (which you’ll recall, is the definition of backlash).

So, here we are. To me, Lisa Lucas’s dismissal is a big deal and we need to keep talking about it. This week on Write-minded, the podcast I cohost with Grant Faulkner, our guest is Dhonielle Clayton, bestselling author, COO of We Need Diverse Books, friend of Lucas’s. If you’re interested in the topics I’m writing about here, please listen to the show (which you can find wherever you listen to podcasts). Clayton is fighting the fight, names this moment for what it is, and calls out the haters—all much appreciated.

In book publishing, being part of the solution means changing the way you think about whose voices have the right to be heard. It means reading the works of all kinds of authors, especially people who don’t look like you or share your lived experience. It means caring about a high-profile firing, like Lisa Lucas’s. It means opening our eyes to the flame being turned up on the stew and taking measures to prevent it from boiling over.

Check out the resources offered at WeNeedDiverseBooks.com, and AuthorsAgainstBookBans.com to take some actions.

Further Reading:

Penguin Random House Dismisses Two of Its Top Publishers
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/20/books/booksupdate/knopf-doubleday-lisa-lucas-reagan-arthur.html

Publishing Pledged to Diversify. Change Has Been Slow.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/books/publishing-books-poc-dei.html

A reckoning long overdue: Dana Canedy and Lisa Lucas on their new positions in publishing
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2020-07-30/dana-canedy-and-lisa-lucas-new-publishers-in-conversation

Reading Between the Lines: Race, Equity, and Book Publishing
https://pen.org/report/race-equity-and-book-publishing/

Booklash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and the Language of Harm
https://pen.org/report/booklash/

Six Black Women Executives Left Positions In Hollywood Within Weeks—Yet the Industry Is Silent
https://www.ebony.com/six-black-women-executives-left-positions-in-hollywood-within-weeks-yet-the-industry-is-silent/

The Demise of #OwnVoices
https://quillandquire.com/omni/opinion-the-demise-of-ownvoices/