Five companies own the door. In 2020 they cracked it open. Then they closed it.
- W
- Jun 14
- 4 min read
In June 2020 the squares went up. Black tiles on corporate accounts, one after another, captioned solidarity. Five of those accounts belonged to the only companies that decide what America reads in print: Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Simon and Schuster. These companies have a huge impact on which stories by Black authors reach readers. They decide what gets printed, what gets paid for, and what gets carried at the front of the store. Not most of it. The spine of it. When people say “traditional publishing,” they are saying those five names whether they know it or not.
Six months later, Richard Jean So and Gus Wezerek published a count in The New York Times. They pulled the most widely read fiction from the major houses and asked a question that has a number for an answer: who wrote it. Of the 7,124 books where they could identify the author’s race, 95 percent were written by white people. In 2018, the most recent year they measured, white authors wrote 89 percent. That was after decades. That was the progress, in publishing Black authors in America, such progress is not nearly enough.
So when the same companies that posted those black squares printed their statements about racial justice, I read them the way you read a man you have caught lying before. The posture was familiar. The promises were loud. And L.L. McKinney, the author who started the hashtag #PublishingPaidMe, said the part the press releases would not: we don’t get that support until we start dying in the streets. As Black authors have seen time and again, public statements do not always translate into change.
What they bought in 2020
For about a year, the door opened. Publishing houses signed up Black authors they had passed on for years. They hired Black editors with names worth printing. Lisa Lucas, who had run the National Book Foundation, was named publisher of Pantheon and Schocken, the first Black woman to hold the job. Dana Canedy took over Simon and Schuster’s flagship imprint. The trade press called it a reckoning.
A reckoning settles a debt. This settled a news cycle.
In 2023, Lisa Lucas was laid off. The most visible Black publisher in the business, gone in a restructuring, three years after the headlines that hired her. The other editors brought in during the rush either left or found themselves alone again, the only one in the room, with no Black marketer, no Black publicist, no Black sales lead beside them. The Lee and Low Diversity Baseline Survey, the one count the industry runs on itself, found that same year that 72.5 percent of publishing staff were white and 5.3 percent were Black. That is the building that decides which stories by Black authors ultimately reach a reader.
How the door closes
It does not slam. A Black author gets a smaller advance, so the company has less of its own money at risk, so it spends less to market the book, so the book sells less, so the next advance comes in smaller still, so the author is told the numbers do not support a third book. Every step is defensible on a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was built by the same people who set the first advance. In this way, too many talented Black authors face barriers throughout the process.
#PublishingPaidMe showed the floor of it. Roxane Gay and Jesmyn Ward, both decorated, both bestselling, posted advances that debut white novelists could expect to match. Ward had a National Book Award on her shelf and still named a number that gave the game away. That is not a pipeline problem. That is the pipeline working as designed, especially for Black authors whose opportunities remain limited.
I stopped waiting at the door
I run Breaking Ranks Books out of Tampa. Also, I publish my own thrillers and my own advocacy work. No one sets my advance, because I am not waiting on one. I bet on myself, and I keep the relationship with the reader instead of renting it back from a corporation that was going to take a cut, take a year, and then tell me my audience was too narrow. This kind of independence is becoming more common among Black authors.
My audience is not narrow. It is veterans who do not see themselves anywhere in the genre, and Black readers who are tired of being a marketing category that shows up every June and disappears by August. Supporting work by Black authors is a way to expand the shelf for every reader who is searching for belonging.
The internet did one thing those five companies cannot undo. It let me reach my mother, my old self in uniform, and every reader like them without asking Penguin Random House for permission. The tools are not free and they are not easy. A backlist is slow. Finding a hundred true readers, then a thousand, is unglamorous work that takes years. But it is mine. No editor gets laid off out from under it. No restructuring decides I am no longer a priority, because I am the one setting the priorities. Many Black authors now take advantage of these new opportunities to reach readers directly.
What this asks of you
If you write, stop treating those five buildings as the only validation that counts. Learn the independent route before you spend three years in a query trench waiting on a gatekeeper who already told you, with a number, what your work is worth to them. This advice is especially important for emerging Black authors seeking a space in publishing.
If you read, understand that where you spend the twenty dollars is a vote. Buy the Black author. Buy the independent. But, buy the book in June, and buy the next one in November, after the campaign is over and the company has moved on and the writer is still at the desk.
They removed us from the pipeline quietly, on a spreadsheet, one defensible decision at a time. We can build another pipeline the same way. One book. One reader. One refusal to wait at a door that was never going to stay open. That, in the end, is how Black authors create their own space.
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