It is currently five in the morning and I am sitting in my front room (living room for those of you not from the Chicago area), watching as the first good snowstorm of the year comes down. I should be asleep, but there is something so calming about watching a good storm for me. Which is lucky for you, because now I have time to write this blog I have been meaning to get out for weeks now.

I started working with Bindery for one reason: to help bring a very necessary disruption to the way publishing is done in America. And the more that I talk about this, the more I realize just how many of the people I share this community with just don't understand why that is so very necessary. So I want to talk about it. And I hope you will bare with me as we have this important, though potentially uncomfortable, conversation.

This industry, while amazing in a million ways, fails Black and brown authors almost as a rule. Even many of the authors who break through those barriers struggle to receive the same level of investment and effort that their white contemporaries receive. And this is especially true for Black authors. Especially Black women.

Over the years, I have become friends with many authors, at every level of success and access. And while I can point to plenty of Black and brown authors who have pushed past the barriers meant to keep them out, it has been my observation for years that even success looks different when the author in question has darker skin. There are wildly successful authors--authors who pack every event they attend--who struggle to get bookstores to feature their work. There are authors who have never had a book flop that have to fight to get new stories greenlit by the publishers they have already helped keep rich. And there are authors with dedicated built in audiences who are sent packing because a publisher has already worked with a Black or brown person with a similar voice and can't imagine readers having interest in a second.

This industry, despite all of its strengths, continues to see Black and brown voices as a threat to its bottom line. And while it is tempting to lay the blame for that at the feet of readers for not buying more Black and brown books, I think that is a faulty way to approach this. Because, from my perspective, the fault goes deeper than the choices of individual people. Like many of the other industries that work to strengthen capitalism's hold on the western world, publishing was designed to commodify the human experience and to undermine any threat to the systems of white supremacy and Patriarchy that keep it alive.

What do I mean by that?

While I see incredible value in the work that publishers do to bring art to us, if we want a better industry going forward, I believe we have to be honest about the way that major publishers have contributed to undermining the advancement of marginalized people. By design, capitalism is an economic system that is strengthened by inequality and, as a byproduct, threatened by any movement a society makes toward liberation. For it to be most effective, it requires that the few are able to exploit the labor of the many. And while we easily see that in many other industries, the arts sometimes try to trick us into thinking they are something different. But they aren't. Publishing houses, like all massive companies, become billion dollar companies through exploitative practices, even if the people working within them are leading with good intentions (as most of them are). And before you get angry and point toward all of the authors who have become millionaires through the efforts of their publishers, I want you to take a hard look at how publishing really works.

Publishing is a numbers game. Large presses put out large numbers of books in the hopes that a portion of them will do well enough to keep the company profitable despite the many books that either bare little financial fruit, or come in below their investment altogether. Does that make them inherently evil? Absolutely not. But it does give us information about their bottom line. While, in theory, it is in their best interest for every book to be profitable, their primary objective is the company's profitability, not the individual author's. Which means that it is not counter-productive to their bottom line to leave some--even many--authors behind.

Are you hearing me? Since 2020, major publishers have been promising us that they will fight for diversity. And while many of the editors and professionals who make up those companies care very deeply about keeping those promises, we need to be honest about why they have failed to do so, despite their best efforts. Because, as I keep repeating here, capitalism requires exploitation to function. (It is important to note that I am not suggesting that publishers don't intend to serve the Black and brown authors they publish. They do. Those authors earned their spot and those editors chose their books because they believed in them. We are discussing publishing's collective failure to deliver, not the validity of the authors being failed.)

I am not sharing any of this because I want you to view publishers as the enemy. Quite the opposite actually. I believe we can reimagine this industry and begin to strip it of its dependence on systems of oppression to function. I believe that by shifting the way we fight for change, we can demonstrate a way to engage with artists without reducing them to an investment we hope pans out.

That is the opportunity I saw in Bindery. An opportunity to work together to reimagine what partnering with authors can look like once we abandon goals and ideas that require us to leave people behind. And for me, that work starts with choosing to focus on the people who most often get lost in the industry as it is today: Black and brown authors.

So when I say I want to help disrupt the industry, that is what I mean. That is the work I am trying to accomplish. I am centering the voices that most threaten the underlying bigotry that holds this industry hostage and refusing to reduce them to an investment in a company that matters more to me than they do. Because, in my opinion, that is the only way we will ever be able to truly change the way things work.

And that is the work I am going to once again invite you to be a part of, because quite frankly, we can't do it without you. We are able to show up for authors as successfully as we have been because of you. It's as simple as that. Community is at the center of this work. As we sign authors and go about championing their stories, we are acutely aware that we are an indie publisher competing with billion dollar companies. And without the direct involvement of the communities we have so passionately built (YOU), we will not be successful. Which is why I talk about these goals so often and why I am constantly inviting you to make sure you are subscribed. The larger this community grows and the louder it becomes, the more we are able to accomplish and the more authors we are equipped to champion. This work matters and we need you for it to be as successful as it can be. So here is what I need from you:

If you are not already subscribed to this community, please take a few seconds to do so right now. If you are able to subscribe or upgrade to the $5 or $12 tier, please do. Those paid subscriptions directly help to fund our publishing projects and to make this work more sustainable. They matter very much, especially where we are as a community. Because my goal is to publish more books and to fight for more authors. And this is one of the primary ways we get there. But if that is out of the budget for you right now, please subscribe at the free tier. By doing so, you are adding your email to my mailing list, which means you will get access to all of my blogs, public updates and exclusive bookish content. Our free subscribers are still getting access to almost everything and are a huge part of every initiative to push these stories forward.

One of the primary reasons we have been able to succeed in the way that we have is because readers like yourself have helped us to make sure that every author we are fighting for has a built-in audience ready to push these stories and champion the authors who wrote them. And every single one of you matter to me and to the work we are doing together.

So thank you for being here. Thank you for believing in the work we are doing. Thank you for being a part of change.

I believe in us!