What Publishing Is Missing This Week

we need structural, not symbolic, change

I am making changes to this newsletter going forward—scroll to the bottom for that info.

Sprinkled through the twitter feed exploding with the more important events of the week have been some publishing-adjacent tweets about antiracist books, book reviews and coverage, and independent booksellers. Now is the time for me to stay in my lane, so I am going write about what I’ve seen this week vis a vis publishing,

• There are calls to buy books from black-owned bookstores. Excellent idea! But which books? Here are two titles that have been soaring due to events this week:How to Be An Antiracist published by One World, an independent press. So You Want To Talk about Race, published by Seal Press, which independent until 2016, when it was purchased by Hachette.

  If you are buying a book from a Black-owned bookstore, you are giving some profit to the store, some to the distributor (middle-man), and some the publisher (which then passes some of that to the author). So considering who published t…