80 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ MARCH 8, 2021
Soapbox
“Publishers are not backing up their statements with financial investments in authors of color.”
Empty Promises
The owners of The Ripped Bodice
bookstore say diversity efforts in
romance publishing still lagBy Bea and Leah Koch
On June 1, 2020, seven
days after the death of
George Floyd, Harper-
Collins tweeted, “We stand
with all of our colleagues,
authors, readers, and part-
ners who experience racism
and oppression. Black
Stories Matter, Black Lives
Matter.” Across five
imprints, HarperCollins
released more than 1,000
romance titles in 2020, and
8% of those books were written by authors of color. This year
was the first time HarperCollins even acknowledged our
requests to participate in the report, but the new v-p for diver-
sity, equity, and inclusion declined to participate on behalf of
the company, so we once again collected the data by going
through the HarperCollins’s catalogs.
In 2020, only Carina, Forever Romance, Kensington, and
St. Martin’s had at least 15% of their romance titles written
by people of color. Berkley Books, the romance imprint of
Penguin Random House, had a steady increase in racial diversity
over four years, only to see a decrease in 2020.
Christian romance publisher Bethany House hasn’t published
a single romance written by a person of color in the past five
years. Montlake Romance, which is owned by Amazon
Publishing, is the only other publisher where the portion of its
romances written by authors of color has been 5% or less every
single year we have conducted the report.
The past 12 months have brought increased awareness to the
work done by people of color to show the impact racism and
white supremacy has had on all our institutions, including how
they affect book publishing. It has been our experience that the
publishing industry would prefer to have conversations about
diversifying the romance market behind closed doors. But
without public accountability, there has been very little incen-
tive for publishers to change. We believe that when you love
something, as we wholeheartedly love the romance genre,
having devoted our lives to its success, it is your duty to improve
it for those around you and the people who will come after you.
There has been some progress made in adding more diverse
authors of romance books, and we remain hopeful more will be
added—we can’t help but hope, after all, since romance is all
about believing in a happily ever after. But public statements
about being anti-racist will never be enough, especially when
you look at the numbers and see that publishers are not backing
up their statements with financial investments in authors of
color. We invite you to review the data in this year’s diversity
report and draw your own conclusions. ■In 2016, we had been open for one intense and educational year
as the only romance-focused bookstore in the country. After one
year of building a community of romance-loving customers, it
became abundantly clear to us that readers were looking for more
racial diversity in their romance novels. But when we told pub-
lishers this, they were quick to tell us two things: “diverse” books
didn’t sell well, and, at the same time, the problem wasn’t as big
as we were making it out to be and they were “going to do better.”A
t the time, there was already so much fantastic advocacy
work being done by authors and readers of color to
show publishers the market they were ignoring, and we
wanted to find a way to contribute something new to the con-
versation. We had a hunch that hard data would prove that even
as publishers promised over and over again that they were
“working on it,” the numbers would not reflect that. We
pledged to count the numbers of romance novels published by
major publishers in the U.S. each year, and then count the
number that were written by people of color. The “Ripped
Bodice State of Racial Diversity in Romance” report was born.
Last year was the fifth year we collected this data, giving us
an opportunity to carefully examine the authors publishers have
signed and published over the past five years. We encourage you
to view the full report (as well as those covering the previous
four years) at therippedbodicela.com. Looking at the data, we
see bright spots, but the overall trend is one of sluggish and
inconsistent commitment by publishers to publishing more
romance books by authors of color.
Kensington has consistently published the most books by
authors of color over the past five years. In an interview with PW
last year, commenting on the release of our fourth annual survey,
Kensington assistant editor Norma Perez-Hernandez said that
“the current numbers show we still have a long way to go.” It is
noteworthy to us that the publisher with the strongest track
record of publishing romances by diverse authors is able to pub-
licly recognize the work they still have to do, while the vast
majority of publishers—who publish a fraction of the number of
works by people of color compared to Kensington—are so assid-
uously absent from this conversation. Bea and Leah Koch are the owners of The Ripped Bodice bookstore in Los Angeles.Leah (l.) and Bea Koch