BEA

I had the chance to go to BEA (Book Expo America) this week. This year's expo is in Chicago rather than New York, so I was able to go via my day job. I sat in on a few panels and one of them was about authorship in the digital age. The panelists, all authors themselves: Scott Turow, JA Konrath, and Barbara Freethy, held a really interesting discussion that covered topics like self-publishing and author's rights. I've been in publishing for more than ten years as a worker and a writer and it's been fascinating to watch the transitions that are still ongoing in the field. It is nice that in this day and age, you can get your work out there without having to go through a "traditional" publisher and/or agent because of the invention of ebooks and the various platforms that are around now and that's great. Still, just being at BEA showed me that there is still a huge lack of diversity in publishing. Yes, there are more opportunities for people (all kinds of people) to self-publish and/or publish with smaller, non-traditional publishers, but the people working in the field are still largely white and female, particularly in trade publishing. While walking around McCormick Place, viewing the booths of the different publishers, I could count the minority faces I saw on one hand. (Okay, maybe two hands.) Aside from the Asian publishers/distributors there, I didn't see many faces of color and it's really sad that in this year, 2016, publishing is still so homogeneous.