Some new year's resolutions for publishing. By Keren David

Over the last year I've heard a lot about how children's publishing is terribly, terribly white and awfully, awfully middle class, and really something should be done. But what? Oh, how difficult it is blah, blah, etc etc.

None of it is enough. None of it addresses the root problems. So, lovely publishers, wonderful agencies, I have some ideas.  I may well have said some of this before. But it needs saying all over again. 

1)  Get out of London. If publishers and agents have all their operations in London, they will only attract employees who can afford to live there. That's a very narrow group.  Move to Manchester. Set up an office in Newcastle. Let your editors work remotely from Swansea, St Ives and Aberdeen. An agent in Middlesborough can Skype an editor in Norwich, it's 2019, guys.

2) In all those places, actively seek talent. Run those creative writing courses than currently make you  vast amounts of money from Londoners,  but run them for half, a quarter of the price you charge at present. Make them available on the internet.  Nurture and encourage writers from all backgrounds. Open your ears to varied voices. Remember that not all readers are white and middle class. 

3) Publish books with diverse covers and diverse characters.  In your efforts to make these books universal, don't lose the authentic voice of the minority author. Don't make minority readers feel shut out of books that are supposedly for and about them. Learn about racism. Learn about tropes. Never fall back on lazy stereotypes. Never lecture your writers about their own cultures.


4) Don't be scared of intersectionality in your books. People have more than one label.

5) Think about how you pay your authors. For many of us, the vagueness of the three tranche system makes life impossible. How can you pay your rent when the money is paid 'on signature' ie six weeks after the author has waited by their letterbox for months, praying that today will bring the document they need to sign to unleash the money;then 'on delivery', ie six weeks after the author has stayed up all night for a week to write the thing for the deadline given in said contract, and 'on publication', which may well get changed by months.  
When I say six weeks, I might sometimes mean six months.. These casual arrangements make it impossible for many of us to be writers without a pretty much full time salary on the side. Writing gets pushed to the margins of our lives. Think about a single mother. How can she pay the rent if you're paying her whenever you fancy.

Which leads me neatly to:

6) Think about who you reward. When you sign a celebrity, someone who may well already be rich, and then make them richer by spending most of your marketing on their ghost-written books, you are not encouraging general reading. Neither are you encouraging talented writers from diverse backgrounds to believe that they can succeed in getting published. You create a model of success that can only be replicated by first becoming a celebrity. Books become off-shoots of a successful brand.Writers migrate to other fields. Quality plummets. Publishing chokes on its own vomit and dies. 

7) See those people who do successful things to encourage diverse writers? People like Leila Rasheed who set up Megaphone, people like David Stevens and Aimee Felone of Knights Of, to take just two examples. Talk to them. Copy them. Back their initiatives. 

8) Employ non-graduates. Employ graduates from new universities. Employ people who went to state schools. Don't allow your HR department to filter out everyone except 'the brightest and the best' before you even see them. Create apprenticeships. Mix up your internal structures. Examine everything you do, and change it. 

9) Spend money on people, not swanky buildings. 

10) Be proud of your authors. Show them off. Interview them, photograph them, film them. The internet is yours to exploit, but you don't seem to want to do that. Make celebrities, don't chase them. And let them be from all those places and classes and races and nationalities and genders and sexualities and bodies and spaces that we don't usually hear from.

And I promise you, it will pay off.