Hachette launches audit into representation of authors, illustrators and editors

Hachette will audit its authors, illustrators, editors and translators following a call from the Black Writers’ Guild to be more representative.

A letter by Hachette c.e.o. David Shelley is being circulated to all the publisher’s content creators, published from January 2018 onwards. The initiative was prompted by an open letter to UK publishing from the Black Writers' Guild (BWG) published in The Bookseller last June, which called on the industry to “tackle the deep-rooted racial inequalities in the major corporate publishing companies and support grassroots Black literary communities such as booksellers, book clubs and the Black Writers’ Guild”.

Hachette subsequently formed an inclusivity workforce, led by Dialogue Books publisher Sharmaine Lovegrove and comprised of senior people from around the business, to work with the BWG last summer. The company is having regular conversations with the BWG and the audit is part of those.

In the letter emailed to the Hachette authors, illustrators and editors, Shelley writes: “I would like to ask for a few moments of your time to help us on our journey to improving representation at Hachette UK and in the publishing industry more widely. We have always encouraged open and transparent debate about representation in publishing, and the events around the world in the last year have brought even more urgency and immediacy to those conversations.

“The Black Writers’ Guild has rightly called upon our industry to hold itself to account. But the only way to make meaningful change is to start by taking stock and understanding where we are today. We cannot change what we do not measure and that’s why I’m writing to you now. We really want the books we publish to speak to the many communities of readers we serve and to help them unlock new worlds of ideas, learning, entertainment and opportunity. So, today we are launching a project to track the representation of our author base and how that mirrors our readers.”

The news comes shortly after The Bookseller’s “Black Issue”, guest-edited by Marianne Tatepo, founder of the Black Agents and Editors’ Group (BAE) and commissioning editor at Ebury (Lifestyle). A report in the magazine by Heather Marks revealed representation of authors of colour was on the rise but still patchy in the industry. Out of a total of 4,017 authors and illustrators featured across 33 catalogues from the UK’s “Big Five” and selected independent presses, 2.5% were Black British, when compared to the overall output.

Hachette is not the only publisher to have recently focused on this area. Last July, Penguin Random House revealed an “accelerated inclusion plan”, including a commitment on "radical and urgent action" to make its senior leadership teams representative of UK society. A series of targets and policies was established making hires and acquisitions representative of society by 2023, publishing ethnicity pay gap reports, rolling out mandatory inclusivity training for all employees and reviewing author advances and marketing spend.