SYP Scotland Event Transcript: 20/20 Visibility in Publishing

Posted on July 1, 2020 in Scotland

On 28th June, chair Hope Ndaba was joined by Ever Dundas, Sha Nazir, Nathaniel Kunitsky and Eris Young. You can watch the panel here.

Hope: To everyone who’s with us now, how have you been coping with what people are calling our new normal?

Nathaniel: So I don’t officially work for a publishing house, I run my own imprint in my own time, so I don’t think it’s affected how we work as much because everybody works from home in their own time, but I think it definitely has put a bit of a stop on all of the print projects we were going to do this year. Just because a lot of our readers are creative people and we knew that if we launch a Kickstarter and we ask for quite a substantial amount of money, we just couldn’t face doing that because we were having financial troubles and everybody else was having quite a hard time at the beginning of this and continues to have it, so it just didn’t feel like the right time to do that. So we instead decided that we will continue making stuff but move towards a more digital approach so creating content online, commissioning essays and being able to continue paying our writers for their work, just in a more small scale operation for now than it used to be for us before. So I think it’s just delayed our plans at the moment, and kind of changed our outlook on what we can do with our website and other things that we use for Knight Errant. But it’s not been as much of a pressure to work from home because we’ve done that all the time anyway.

Hope: How about you, Eris?

Eris: I’m coming to this panel as an author, as Ever is as well, and it’s just like with coping, we’re all dealing with emotional trauma right now, and I think at the beginning there was a lot of sort of knotty discourse about ‘Oh I’m going to be so productive now that I’m at home all the time’ and it’s like ‘No’, absolutely not. It’s taken me several months to get to a point where I can work every day or every few days, and I think that being lenient to yourself is the thing. Maybe that’s a basic take but I think putting survival first, our industry has a bad habit about this about not putting yourself and your health first when it comes to doing work in publishing literature.

Hope: I definitely agree with that. And how about you Ever? I know that you also run Crip Collective which focuses on amplifying the voices of those who are disabled or with chronic illnesses in the publishing industry, so how have you all been coping. Have you been seeing any certain discourse that you’d say is harmful in a sense because a lot of you have had to work in different ways already and now you’re seeing options that you could have had being given out to everyone?

Ever: Yes, definitely. For me personally there’s not been a hugely massive change in the way I work as an author. I usually do my Zoom meetings through in the sitting room but today I wanted to make a point so I’m currently sitting probably very decadently on my bed. But this is actually where the magic happens. This is where I work either in or on my bed usually as a disabled person, I’ve got ME and fibromyalgia, and working from my bed just makes it easier. When lockdown happened, a lot of disabled and chronically ill people were already in lockdown or in semi-lockdown. Some people can be partially housebound and so on. For me I’m not normally completely housebound but I can be when I get flare- ups and things. But it was really strange to see the whole world suddenly come in to our world. All these things that affect disabled people like suddenly losing your job, financial precarity, being housebound – this is normal for a lot of us. People talked about in the pandemic suddenly living in a dystopia, but for us we’ve been living in a dystopia already. Particularly in the UK under the Tory government and their austerity policies, and their hideous campaign against disabled people, we’ve already been living in a dystopia, and then the pandemic came and suddenly everybody else is in a similar boat. It was strange to see that happen and in terms of access, again I think a lot of disabled and chronically ill people were understandably angry that all the things that we’d been asking for in terms of access and things being available online were suddenly very quickly, very easily implemented. So yeah a lot of us were very angry although obviously pleased. So there’s been various things that have just been an absolute joy to be able to access, various events that have gone online that we wouldn’t have been able to physically go to otherwise. I just quickly wanted to point out – I read an article yesterday by Neil Cooper in Bella Caledonia and he interviewed Mairead who has MS, and she said ‘this lockdown has been the first time I’ve actually felt included in society in a good while.’ Now if you take a minute to think about that, I mean that’s pretty damning, and that’s not just going to be her, it’s going to be thousands of disabled and chronically ill people feeling the same, it’s pretty damning that they’ve been locked out from society until lockdown, ironically. So it’s been great seeing lots of things happening becoming available that weren’t before, but what we need to make sure is that this keeps going, we can’t let it stop.

Hope: That’s so true, and I was wondering can you maybe touch on a few points on how going forwards all of us can be better supporters, not just in publishing but as a society as a whole, how we can make everyone feel included and actually make sure we’re acknowledging that we’re not all able bodied, we don’t all have the same energy to do what we think ‘normal people’ do. How can we make sure we’re all supporting disabled people and people with chronic illnesses as well?

Ever: Just have our backs and listen to us. We’ve been going on about these access issues for a very long time; we’ve been going on about the Tory government’s austerity problems for a very long time and we’ve been ignored. So please listen to us. Now that some of you are in a similar boat, as I was saying, as lockdown eases don’t forget about us, and don’t forget about what you’ve gone through. We need to go forward and take this as an opportunity to really push for access, and we need the support of ableds, we need the support of non-disabled people to really have our backs, we need to support each other. And I think in terms of the publishing industry I was going to say event access has definitely been a big bugbear. Event accessibility should be at the core of every event in publishing industry across the board, and not just event access, any kind of access should be at the core of what we do. So I’m going to keep pushing for that and as I said I need ableds to support us. I was going to talk a little bit maybe towards the end about more practical things that we all could do to support each other in the publishing industry. I’ll maybe leave it ‘til then.

Hope: Thank you so much for those words because I think it’s so important. I think at the beginning we all kind of saw tweets and posts from people feeling as if they can’t go on with live any more, finding it incredibly difficult. We all kind of ignored the fact that many of us have been living this life for almost all our lives not just a few months now. Now that we’ve discussed how things are changing, do we have any ideas on how we can go forwards, implement new processes, how we shouldn’t fall back into all ways. What are things each of you would like, to see changed, something really close to your heart, something that’s really been a peeve before, what would you like to see improved, going forwards. Nathaniel, would you like to start?

Nathaniel: I’ve suddenly got lots ready from what Ever was talking about in terms of accessibility because I feel like so many things like festivals, if we’re talking about publishing, even like when we do events, not Knight Errant but small presses, we’re so focused on doing events in a space, which ,makes sense if we’re working in a regional concept, but for example a lot of publishers are based in London, they do most of their events in London. That’s not a regional thing, it’s a London thing, and so many people are left out of it, and I think if a small press like us can start looking at ways we can do our events though most of our readers are based in Edinburgh, because we know that people, even if they live in Edinburgh doesn’t mean they can access all the things that are happening in Edinburgh as well. If we integrate that into our program, if we can do it with our zero resources, everyone else should try harder. There are so many festivals and events that people go to from all over the UK, for example the Bradford Lit Festival, not only people in Bradford go there, so the access shouldn’t be restricted to that cache of people. So it’s nice to see festivals trying because the bigger organisations have the resources to try out all the tech and see what works for them, so hopefully they’ll start doing that, but in terms of access I think, we’ll be looking into doing that as well for all our events in the future as well as obviously doing live events but looking at how we can improve the quality of digital events because people haven’t really tried to elevate it before, and now they’ve been forced to. We can see how well and how interesting events can be, so I feel like it’s also part of the whole idea of ‘who develops the technology and with whom in mind’. Basically we’ll try better, and if we can do it on our zero budget there’s no excuse for other bigger organisations not to do mirror events online, and they should stop thinking about it as an international thing or getting more people from across the world seeing the videos but also thinking of the people at home who can’t access their live events as well.

Eris: One of the things I’ve loved to see is Hachette have decided to establish some outside of London branches which is going to feed all the way into festivals and events and everything. I’d love if more publisher do that, and I would love to see events that are hybrid events. I think we can do in-person events that have a live stream component to it and a feedback so the audience can still ask questions, any audience members who can’t attend in person. I would love to see events that are both, and the same with panellists, having screens – I know that the Edinburgh International Festival have the resources to implement this. They could have somebody Zoom in or Skype in – there are some big established festivals who have the capacity to do this, and we’ve proved that they can do digital so I would love to see hybrid events. So when we’re able to go outside, people who can’t go outside don’t get that ‘oh sorry, your time is over’ you know, excluded.

Nathaniel: Also in terms of price, accessibility in terms of who can go and pay for events. Eris: Like the difference between the cost of a print book and an eBook.

Nathaniel: And also the fact that not everybody can come and live in Edinburgh for the duration of the festival or even going to visit and where you’re coming from can cost anywhere from £50 a day to £150 or more, so I think that’s a big consideration as well with all the rail fares getting more expensive and difficult for disabled people as well to actually use the transport.

Ever: We definitely need to think about on low income as well. I mean that usually is a crossover with disabled and chronically ill people but definitely people from poor and working class backgrounds. There has been slight improvements recently with a few events on the scene recently where they have the option to pay what you can.

Eris: Love pay what you can. And people usually DO pay as much as they can. They pay more than you expect.

Ever: Yeah definitely. So that’s great to see. But I was also thinking about, as well as events, writer development opportunities – I was reading an article recently about access and lockdown, and Penguin’s Right Now scheme is a scheme that is supposed to support under-represented writers, I think they support them over the year on various workshops. I was reading that they always wanted physical attendance at their workshops, and I just find that a bit baffling considering that disabled people are included in under-represented writers and there was someone interviewed saying that she could never apply before but she could now that there was a pandemic. And I just find that so frustrating – it just makes me so angry. Why was it not available before? But I’m glad it is now, and I hope it continues. I hope they don’t suddenly stop that availability so we just have to keep emphasising that it needs to continue, this level of access.

Nathaniel: I think it benefits everyone to understand that you can use what’s been available for so long to improve conditions for everyone, and especially people who have always been pushed out of opportunities. Hopefully people can have that cemented in their mind a bit more.

Eris: Yes, don’t forget.

Nathaniel: I was also thinking in terms of ‘Publishing Paid Me’, I know we’ve moved on to events more, but in terms of ‘Publishing Paid Me’ and accessibility there, when we were designing our website, we were redesigning it, and what you see now is just a first version, we’re launching a second one, and we were talking about how we have a person working with us who is a service designer, and she mentioned creating a workflow for what happens inside Knight Errant when we get a manuscript and when we’re working on a book. I thought that was a great idea, although I was a bit like ‘we do everything differently depending on the book’ but having read the publishing paid me thread and also Nikesh Shukla who was talking about – obviously this first discussion happening ages ago and Nikesh just mentioned sessions with writers of colour who approached him and asked all these questions, and a lot of them could easily be put into different categories of ‘publishing isn’t very transparent, I don’t know how it works’ ‘What happens, where do you start, do you use an agent?’ and that really pushed me into thinking we need to do one ASAP. For us, we’re tiny and our process would be very different because we rely a lot on doing crowdfunding projects and getting people to basically preorder, so it’s a bit different to traditional publishing, but we’re going to put that out there so it’s very clear how it works so they don’t have any allusions and it’s not murky and they don’t have to reach out to us and ask us ‘can you tell us how this works’ so that’s something that publishing should really start doing more. I think the mystique is not working in anybody’s favour except from the publisher who can then pull all kinds of bullshit if they want to. But that should keep them on track.

Hope: I love that you used the word mystique, because I always find a lot of the industry work under this secret society kind of way and it makes it so strange and hard to break into, and most of us who are marginalised have to carve our own spaces within the industry in order to be deemed as worthy, and have to fight for our place here, and someone will look at you and think ‘wow, maybe let’s put some money behind this’, which is incredibly frustrating. But since you’ve talked about Publishing Paid Me, maybe we can talk a bit about that as well. So it’s an offshoot of the Black Lives Matter movement of course and it was started in order to look at how white authors are paid incredibly vast amounts in terms of advances in comparison to black authors. Does anyone have any thoughts about that, were there any shocking tweets you saw? I saw some incredibly figures, as in dismal figures, for some authors.

Eris: I didn’t participate because I didn’t get an advance but something I would really love to see, and this touches on what Nathaniel was saying, is that I’d really love it if we could all in the industry and in general stop being so shy about our own income, where our income comes from, and what our expenses are, and be honest as an industry about the hidden costs of participating, like time and energy, initial investments. There are so many writers who are able to write because they don’t have to pay rent, they don’t have to work a day job, they have free time, and this is all a complex system and some people have additional expenses in one area and not in another. There are a lot of writers who are able to write because they have these resources that they’re stigmatised in talking about, that we’re not allowed to talk about. So I would love it if we were all able to be more open and transparent about both our processes as publishers, who makes what kind of money, and all these things that we push under the rug and don’t talk about.

Ever: I think we can be a bit British about money, and what we’re earning. About a year after, to mark the anniversary after my novel was out, I did write a blog post where I talked a bit about basically not earning a living from writing and having to look at the reality of it. And obviously that’s from a disabled author’s perspective, because I’m ill I’m unable to do the full time freelance hustle that a lot of writers do, so I can’t get a decent enough income, and I can’t do the part-time or full-time job to supplement my income because I’m ill, so there was that perspective I wanted to put forward in the blog. But, as Eris said, I think we need to be a bit more transparent than that as well. I don’t think I put any actual figures, like what I earned and how I earned it, and what my advance was, which was quite small. But I did want to talk a little bit about the reality of it. It’s true, we need to break through the mystique as you were saying, definitely.

Hope: Sha, thanks for joining us. Would you like to introduce yourself and what are your thoughts on #PublishingPaidMe

Sha: Hi everyone, sorry I’m a little bit late. I did actually watch the view from the public side earlier but I’ve now been technically added into the chat so that’s great. I’m Sha Nazir, I’m the publisher at BHP comics, and I also run a small agency as well, Nine Panels Agency, for books on graphic novelists. #PublishingPaidMe I thought was really interesting. I didn’t follow all of it because I don’t have very much time just due to Covid circumstances, it’s the way life is right now, but when I do I’ve seen some bits and pieces, and as with most of these things there’s lots going on, because there’s such disparity between what’s happening at the top and what’s happening at the bottom. The experiences of big publishers and how they should be responding to what they’re paying people versus what very small publishers are doing is very different, and sometimes you actually find that smaller publishers are actually paying slightly better or equally to larger publishers and that’s really disappointing. In terms of my own experience, it’s been up and down – I’ve written a couple of books where I got paid advances, I think I got paid £5000 for my first ever book, and then I had a 12% royalty off the back of it. But the publisher isn’t very great so they paid me a royalty the first year or two years and then just sort of stopped, and I still see the book out and about and just got to the stage where I just can’t be bothered addressing them to chase up that money. But it’s still physically out there, you see it in Waterstones and places. But that was very rare, to get that kind of money for something, but that was me pushing what I wanted because I kind of thought I wouldn’t get something off the back end anyway. From a publishing perspective, as a publisher, I make almost no money at all. So I think last year I made something around about £6000 as a publisher, and the previous three or four years I made pretty much close to zero. Most of my income comes from me being diverse in how I approach things so as well as trying to run a publishing company and trying to make it feed itself, I spend a lot of time also running an events company, my events company makes me money, I do graphic design and web design, and things like that which supplements. But there is no magic thing which allows me to make money from being a publisher, it’s just too difficult. And also just the responsibility, Nathaniel has done this exactly, the responsibility of being a publisher and knowing that you can’t have that money because you have to be able to pay all of your authors, and your authors make so little money in the first place. The system is set up in a way where it’s no unequal, booksellers take such a huge percentage of what money we should be having to pay our authors as well as being able to pay ourselves. That in itself is a big issue, but I would like to address as a whole industry, but we need to go away and basically go to booksellers and say ‘enough’s enough, we’re going to stop supplying you.’ Everyone’s got to stop supplying you.

Nathaniel: Some booksellers versus others though, in personal experience, in terms of the percent they take, I think some just say ‘we’re this big, taking your books is a favour to you’ and you’re basically giving the books away for free and waiting for months chasing up, trying to get your payments and getting your royalties to authors, so yeah, I feel you.

Sha: I’ve just seen a couple of questions there – in the UK, it’s normally about 50% that a bookseller will take, via distribution channel. But the other thing that I’ve learned the hard way is that you’ve then got the 50% being taken by the bookseller, your distributor probably takes about 10-12% based on distribution, storage, warehouse, commission, all these other things, and you can be left with sort of 38% return before you’ve taken off any of your costs. It’s crazy and in the USA it’s slightly different, I think the discount is 60% to Barnes and Noble. It’s really brutal, and I’m at a stage where I’m considering taking our books back out of America because we’re basically giving them away almost. It’s unsustainable.

Hope: That was really good, I’ve learned so much, I really didn’t know much about distribution, how you guys are having to handle quite brutal numbers, as a small press. So that’s really interesting, and on the flip side I wanted to mention, we were talking about how authors have these major gaps and disparities in their pay and I thought we’d touch briefly on the anonymous spreadsheet that was being passed around last week within the industry where professionals in publishing were inputting their salaries and the numbers were quite shocking. The spreadsheet itself is quite problematic in that it lacks regional representation so it is very London-centric. But there was a number for Luath press, someone works as an Editorial Assistant and input 11-13k as their salary, and I was wondering what everyone’s thoughts on this. Did anyone have a look on this spreadsheet?

Nathaniel: I’ve not been able to see the spreadsheet but I know the range you’re talking about because it was mentioned but I never got a link to it. I think one of the issues here is that there’s so many issues in publishing, as a small publisher, having been there for three years I don’t understand how publishing works, so some transparency would be good for people in publishing to actually know how everything links together and why there are so many links and does there have to be. But in terms of salaries I think people who go into publishing are often, if they’re from a background where they’ve been able to get a higher education, it’s almost like they hire over-educated people to do this job that’s not paid enough, most of the time you’re not being paid enough for the amount of time in and outside of work you spend doing the work. For authors, I don’t know how they can reflect the pay for the amount of skills and time that you spend on the job, but I think a starter would be to actually start paying people wages that reflect the living conditions in the area that people live in. £18000 is not a living wage in London, at all. I think they should start from there and then discuss the fact that people high above at director level are paid millions, literally, it’s not speculation, people are being paid millions in shares and actual wages and then you start thinking, well you’re saying that you’re not making a lot of money off of books, how can you afford to pay these people this much money, and why can’t it be distributed across the company is all you need is this wage to live on. I think it’s a problem when people earn quite a lot of money, they don’t actually know what it’s like to live rationing it, so they’re like ‘yeah, two grand, that should be enough living in London, I mean sure, I never look at my bank account’.

Hope: Last year it was reported that the industry brought into the UK billions in turnover, and I was going to touch on if there’s so much profit and money within the industry, why is it that we don’t see this reflected within the salaries of publishing professionals but also why aren’t authors being given the money they need to be able to write their books and actually make a living off of writing. What can we do to change this and what can we be doing to make sure people can live off of working for jobs they love.

Sha: I’ll start on this one, as a publisher it’s probably our responsibility to speak first. It feels like, from a publisher perspective, the end game is all about money. It’s all about bigger publishers making money. Whereas most people who are small publishers and most people who want to write books, and want to draw or make books in any kind of form, it’s a noble profession. Everyone wants to do it because they love books. So part of us, all of us, we’re all hindered by our own internal mechanism that wants us to make something, desperately make something, and the economics of it is always secondary. And in comics and graphic novels particular, this is everywhere. Nobody is really making money on an independent level, and even on Marvel and DC’s kind of level, they’re not really making money on some of their lower grade books. So that can be books that are in there that maybe just outside the top ten of their list. Because of the economics of what it physically costs to make one book at a time. I saw a tweet from somebody last week saying it would be great if we were all getting paid the value of the work we were doing. If I’m going to sweep the road for the day, pay me to do that job for the day. But making comics, my day rate as a designer is £450 a day, that’s what I charge. So that’s seven hours work, me sitting at my desk, doing graphic design for somebody. However, I will happily get paid £50 to draw one page of a comic, which takes me 8 hours – what is wrong with us? So internally you’ve got this whole thing going on, But back to her pint about what it would cost and being able to do afford to pay somebody for that book they’re making at that point, and to make a basic graphic novel which I think her book was something like 100 pages, the actual cost of just creative work was something like £42000. The average graphic novel probably only sells around 2000-3000 copies if it’s not a book that’s on a prize list or it’s not with a larger company. So to be able to recoup just the creative costs, not including booksellers, not including direct to market, just selling to people, you’ve got to sell something like 5500 copies. So the economics is really broken, and so that whole thing itself is hard. And from a larger publisher perspective, it’s all very well and good them saying ‘it would be great to have diversity’ and it would be great that authors can do more. Ultimately, they can do that. They have that responsibility. The arguments that we’re having with booksellers and the argument of us having better percentages, it’s actually the CEOS of Hachette and Penguin and all these large companies that should be at the table arguing all of our cases. They should be doing that, and it’s them that can action it. And it’s just, as Nathaniel said, it’s corporate greed, and it’s people not knowing the value of money, because you’ve already got lots of money, so you don’t know that £18000 is nothing for someone to live off.

Nathaniel: I’ll pitch in to what Sha said – I think publishing needs to start prioritising the people that work for it over the location as we’ve seen Hachette considering moving offices, I’ve seen a lot more jobs than I’ve ever seen in Jobs in Books and the Bookseller that are home-based, something that would be amazing living in Scotland where jobs in publishing come up really rarely, because I still need a job to keep myself running and keep Knight Errant running. I think prioritising people, prioritising the workforce, prioritising making sure that you’re not just hiring people from the degree in publishing or a Masters, people who have come from areas, different influences, hiring diversely and prioritising their wellbeing because the people in publishing make publishing happen as well as the authors and the books they commission, nad if you have diversity of people, who are happy, who are not struggling to feed themselves just because they have to live in London, I think that would be a much better industry altogether, and it’s the fact that the CEOs need to take a pay cut, because you can’t keep telling an industry that books aren’t making a lot of money but we’re also the lifeblood of culture, we have to do our thing because we keep the world running. And yet somehow the industry as a whole makes a huge turnover and can afford the London Book Fair and yet can’t pay it’s people. There’s too many contradictions and if the work force that has been mistreated walks out, there won’t be any books or any publishing done on the industry level, the indies will keep going and the independent authors will keep publishing, but that’s my take on that.

Ever: I think, where we’re talking about diversity and publishers paying lip service to diversity, the big publishers, I think it’s so disingenuous. What I want as well as us to talk more about disabled and chronically ill authors is the staff. We need to have these publishers hiring disabled and chronically ill staff, and trans staff, and black and people of colour, and from working class backgrounds and single parents, but you’re not going to get that if you can’t live on the wages. If people are coming from poor socio-economic backgrounds, they’re not going to have say their parents able to support them if they’re on low wages, or even in my case, I’m not struggling as much as most people would because my husband is working full time and is able to help us both. It’s not an ideal situation, I don’t like it, it’s not great, and the government benefits system isn’t really helping me, and it’s complicated, but I know I’m privileged in that I have my husband and he’s able to support me. I think things like, while they’re are uncomfortable to talk about, we should talk about them, I think it’s really important. I think the big publishers making noises about diversity but not doing anything to change the system just isn’t good enough. I think we need to get over this fetishisation of the CEOs, the directors getting these huge obscene wages, there’s just no need.

Nathaniel: It’s a bit like the Waterstones situation, where a few months ago there was this issue with the wages that still hasn’t been resolved, and yet they went and bought Barnes and Nobles in the States, and the CEO has this ridiculous annual pay, and I’m aware that profits and turnover are different, but based on the income that organisation have and how they keep harping on about there’s just not enough money, they’re just making it by, you start to wonder, but surely after you’ve done your accounts for the year and you have all this money left over, it can be invested somewhere else, not just put into pockets of people who sit on top.

Ever: The whole Waterstones thing and the way that played out really enraged me. I was so angry – you need to pay your staff proper wages.

Eris: In the theme of protecting staff, there’s this thing- I guess it touches on this Hachette employee boycott of JK Rowling which I think we were going to talk about at some point, but I just wanted to touch on it, because I want us as an industry to stop punching down, and stop protecting established wealthy money-making authors over authors who are marginalised, and that’s where this dichotomy comes from. You’re either marginalised, or you’re really wealthy and established because you’ve had the ability to establish yourself and get on bestseller lists, and that’s starting to change, but I really want the publishers – so Hachette made this statement that was really ambiguous like ‘we’re going to take it on a case-by-case basis, and if our employees don’t want to work on a book by a transphobe, then we’ll take it on a case-by-case basis’ and they didn’t say they would protect their staff. Nothing can change if the big publishers that have the power with established big Fives, the CEOs, they have power. I think they’re using it irresponsibly, they’re still protecting these money-making authors who are status quo. I don’t want publishing staff and marginalised authors to have to subsume their own morals for the sake of job security. And if the publishers are willing to take a stronger stance and say ‘no, we’re not going to stand for bigotry, we’re not going to stand for racism ,we’re going to call out our own established authors who have done blackface, who have said horrible things about trans people on the internet’. If they don’t take a stand against that then their employees aren’t going to feel comfortable doing the same thing and nothing is going to change.

Hope: I definitely agree with that, and I think a lot of people have put their job security at risk in order to speak out at what should be quite obvious really, for example we had the Booker drama this week, and it only took people being loud on twitter and certain publishers saying this person should not be allowed to even sit on the board and have such a high title and hold these views, but then why should a junior member of staff or people who aren’t directors should have to put their jobs on the line or be vocal in order for anything to be done. Why can’t the publishers take their own initiatives to say something about transphobes, or racism, or homophobia?

Nathaniel: In terms of the JK Rowling issue, I feel like we’re not yet at the place where people have seriously separated the fact that transphobia isn’t an opinion. It is an opinion in a general concept but some people think it’s acceptable to stash it away as ‘it’s just a difference of opinion’ because of the way it’s often articulated especially in feminist circles – you know ‘If they’re not coming at you with pitchforks and hatchets it’s okay, and it’s still a while to go until we get there. And the case with the Booker Prize is a case in point. People are less willing to let go of an author who has cemented herself in the consciousness of the country and culture than to acknowledge that transphobia is a thing and it’s as unacceptable as homophobia or racism and should be treated with the same kind of (severity). You can have that opinion, but keep that to yourself. You can’t…

Eris: With impunity treat other people.

Nathaniel: You can’t dish it out and not get any repercussions for it, especially when you’re harming people actively with that. If you’ve seen Disclosure on Netflix, a lot of people don’t know trans folk in real life, so they get a lot of their information from media, from Twitter, from films, and if all you see is trans women being represented by a male actor, then comes up to stage, and as he is a man, it cements this idea that all trans women are just men in disguise, and this provokes the homophobic and transphobic and misogynistic hate that happens on the streets to a lot of trans women of colour. Because it’s also compounded by racism.

Eris: Yeah, it comes down to putting money in the hands of people in the communities you’re representing.

Nathaniel: We need to change that dynamic and also make sure people like her [JK Rowling] are held responsible, that their opinions don’t just keep floating in the ether as an acceptable thing and also actual representation by people who are trying to write and talk about the issues as well.

Hope: Did anyone else have any thoughts? Does anyone have any closing thoughts in general on… something’s happening in the system, wheels are turning, and is anyone feeling hopeful that we’re finally going to see people put their money where their mouth is , and actually start doing things?

Eris: Ever wanted to talk about practical solutions.

Ever: Yeah, it’s kind of more about how we can support each other. I was thinking, in terms of panels, I remember a writer colleague Sandra Allen mentioned that they don’t do panels that are all white. And that hadn’t really occurred to me before as an author myself to think of that or to say that this is out of order so maybe that’s something that white people should think about, refuse to do all-white panels. Or men should refuse to do all male panels, which are very much the norm. There’s often all white male panels talking about diversity. We get that a lot. And I think as well for me as a disabled person, I think it would be hugely helpful for disabled people in the industry if abled authors refused to do events that were not accessible. I mean, sadly that means a lot of events but if we get that conversation going and it’s not just disabled people talking about it, we’d really appreciate that. And there’s lots of different aspects to accessibility so it’s not just about wheelchairs. The go-to place at the minute is the Lighthouse Books (in Edinburgh) webpage, they have a great page for accessibility at events so that’s a good place to start if you want to read up about it. Yeah, if abled authors could just have our backs and have each others backs, and just be honest about things… I was also thinking – for a long time my bookshelves are horribly white. They are. It’s almost sort of “canon” bookshelves, or what is seen as “canon”, I do realise that, and I think I need to make a proper change. I’ve kind of taken forays into changing it but it’s been half-hearted before, so I think to make proper change, I’m going to make a list of Black authors and writers of colour that I want to read and maybe read a certain number a year and champion the ones I love on social media. And that’s the kind of thing we can all get on board with. What do you guys think?

Eris: One of the things that I’ve seen in terms of practical help is that right now… so I’ve been helping out a good friend who’s been housebound, a trans friend, who’s now shielding, and one of the things that we both noticed is that the people who are helping others out are members of a community who are not necessarily the most resourced people connected to them but the people who are in their community. So myself and my trans friend – I mean, I have many trans friends, but this person, we’ve noticed that the people who are helping us out are other trans people and the people helping disabled people out are other disabled people, and what other allies need to do is to get off their ass. And this is starting, there are some cis people I’ve seen who are putting their money where their mouth is but I think once we can extend this network of support outside our own communities and where the resources lie, which is outside of our communities, that is going to be real change. So if you consider yourself an ally, think hard about how you can put money and resources and energy and time, and the ability to go outside, to good use.

Nathaniel: From a publishing perspective, for a wee while, when we started I thought that saying we’re open – which we were always open to submissions from marginalised writers – you quickly realise that it’s a faulty logic. Does that mean that by saying it before you weren’t? But also it’s putting the onus on the writers and the poets to reach out, to find you, to be like “yes, these people will take me” so we’ve been doing our best to kind of reach out to people ourselves, to work with networks – for example the Scottish BAME Network – finding out how we can help, how we can network with them, and then get in touch with writers that way. I feel like just because you’re open doesn’t mean that there’s trust in you yet. So small presses and publishers in general… I think this can be extrapolated to for example, not just saying “oh, well, we don’t get any submissions”. First of all, how can you tell? The person might not disclose their identity on their submission or their book. So I think you need to actively, purposefully query agents for specific … whether it’s the author’s experience or characters or narratives from such-and- such a background. I’m sure there’s ways to phrase it where you’re not saying “do you have any trans people on your list?” Do you have any trans authors? Do you have any books authored by trans people? There are ways to go about it where it isn’t token querying. It’s actually actively looking for it. And once agents start seeing that publishers are actively looking for certain stories, certain people, there might be an actual shift because right now, it’s very much like “well if you don’t have it to show, well there must be no Black British authors to publish, we take what is given”. And I think that’s a very passive position for a publisher to take and that’s how they get away with a lot of stuff. So as a small press we’re doing our best to reach out to people ourselves and I think that publishers and agents should do that more actively, both as call outs when agents ask for people to submit to them but also doing the footwork, reaching out to authors themselves to ask to represent them having read their work. And I know that that might not be the way of things because there are so many writers looking for representation but I think it might set a better example for others who keep saying they don’t get submissions from people and colour and LGBTQ+ authors.

Hope: Thank you guys. I think it’s time to move on to some questions. Someone has asked “Can you speak to change we can make to the publishing industry dynamics in Scotland specifically?”

Ever: In terms of disability, one small change that I’ve been trying to make. I set up Crip Collective in the absence of any kind of disability or chronic illness support in the industry. Like there was nothing. Tumbleweed. So I set that up as a kind of informal Facebook group – I know it’s not ideal but it’s there, I’m doing it voluntarily. I think there needs to be things that are much more formal. There needs to be paid staff, maybe somewhere like the Scottish Book Trust that deals primarily with accessibility. Also I’ve been going on a lot about event access. My colleague Julie Farrell and I are going to put together an event checklist and hope to get it rolled out to all organisations in the publishing industry across Scotland. It’s early days but that’s something we hope to get done and it should make a big difference, as well our fellow authors saying they won’t do events unless their accessible.

Sha: In Scotland specifically, echoing a lot of what everybody’s said there, there’s another thing that we’re missing, going back to what Nathaniel said earlier about how we manage diversity and how it’s managed within small and bigger presses. At the moment the onus feels very much on the small presses to be those diverse people, who are finding new people, who are chasing those voices, with our zero resources. This is the craziness of it all, we have zero resources and we’re doing all the legwork. And people who are sat in offices with 120 people and have so many resources are not doing it themselves and that in itself is really frustrating. But part of it for me – it isn’t just the individual elements, it’s the bigger picture. Because if I find someone with a different voice, we publish their book – great. That’s the first step, but beyond that, the next bit is about commercial and economics. This was talked about a lot in the diversity paper that was published last week (Redefining “Diversity” report) and it’s talking about how a lot of bigger publishers are fearful of publishing BAME voices for example because they don’t see them as commercially viable. As a small press, for example, we already have a struggle getting into bookstores to begin with. Then you publish a BAME author, or a book with a BAME voice, and the booksellers are the next gatekeeper, who are stopping us from getting that wider reach. Because for us to be able to reach those audiences they’ve got to go and physically put books on the shelves. And part of their issue is that they’re so kind of tied in… small indie bookshops are great allies to small indie presses, you become friends, you meet at book fairs, you do all that kind of stuff, they will put your books in place. But what you need are Waterstones, these bigger organisations that will put your books in lots of different places so the only way of spreading more new voices is to spread them and that seems to be the biggest issues is the distribution because of economics – as we found with COVID-19, economics are more important than people. And because of economic booksellers, particular mainstream booksellers, are frightened to put those things because they don’t think it’ll sell as well as something that has sold before. So the risk value is there, and that’s just really annoying more than anything. And that’s just a small big of a much bigger pie. And I think it would be great if Creative Scotland, if you’re listening, they should be commissioning a paper where 12 or 15 of us are sat around and we work out a way of how we can make those changes. Where the links are and where the breaks are, who’s the next gatekeeper. How can we action that? How can we change that?

Nathaniel: I think transparency from distributors would be great for publishers as well. Like maybe more of a cooperative approach rather than based on the fact that you could only sell a handful. But to get to the point where you get to the distributor, you need to persuade a whole host of indie bookshops to sell your book out of your own time and you might have three people on your team and you’re reaching out nationwide to people and then they’ll consider taking you on. I feel like there needs to be, as Sha said, in distribution especially a bit more room for people to get in and distribute the books to people who will most likely want to read them, you just haven’t reached them yet. So that’s a big problem as well. I think it would be great if Creative Scotland, all bodies who publish or help publishing, if they put their money where their mouth is because there’s a lot of talk about diversity but the publishing community is quite small so we know roughly who gets how much money and if they do and they’re not really putting it there as much as one would be expecting based on the successes of the local presses and writers from Scotland. It would be nice to have a conversation with them that doesn’t end with just “write your application, sure you’ll get it!” Also in terms of accessibility, I think a lot of the funding bodies as much as publishers need to be a bit more understanding about how complex the application processes are. I’m sure you’re aware that it can take like a week, or more months of trying, to put one together to then be told no with no feedback. From other places at least you get an email, something more would be great.

Hope: We’ve got time for one more question: someone has asked how can we ensure that people are being published not just because of their identity but also for their actual talent and also avoid the “they’ve only been chosen because they’re from this or from this”.

Sha: The only thing I’m going to say about this is whoever has asked this question, read the diversity report because it answers this in quite a succinct way and it poses the question of mediocrity, and points out that there are lots of white people who have made books that are terrible and they still get published more than anyone.

Nathaniel: Yeah, I think there are many books out there which I personally don’t think should have been published at this stage or maybe not at all.But here we are with big publishers, a lot of it is obviously subjective but a lot of it is-

Eris: getting published, getting accepted with no vetting.

Nathaniel: Yeah, and also it’s the whole genre versus market thing where publishers don’t really like to take bets so they see certain characteristics in a book that sells in a supermarket and they just put it out because that will make certain amount of money towards their annual turnover. So if we could print fewer classic reprints and more interesting or new.. – not just cash-making but again it goes back to the economy – maybe then we’ll have more space on the bookshelves for new books, new voices. I don’t think books are restricted by talent or identity, I don’t think that a book comes out just because of their identity. There are books that are not good that are written by LGBTQ+ authors – I’ve not read them all! -but until we get to the point where publishers are publishing equally bad white authors and authors of colour… We’re not quite at that stage where they’re just like “I don’t care what identity you are, let’s just publish you without question!” And equally some great books haven’t been published yet or were rejected but publishers’s reasons are quite nebulous. “We already have a trans author on our list”, for example.

Eris: Yeah, I’ve come across that. It was a few years ago but it was like “Oh we’ve already got one trans in this anthology so we’re not going to take your essay”. So don’t do that!

Hope: Thank you so much guys for what has been an informative, engaging and clear discussion!