YOU NEED to create specific, unique marketing and publicity tactics for your writers who are not white in order to reach readers. If we don’t fundamentally believe that those nonwhite writers have something valuable to contribute; that the current system doesn’t serve them properly; that non-white readers are a valuable audience that we should be chasing; and that the current system does not serve those non-white readers properly, then we can’t argue about how to allocate dollars.
It’s such a complicated, nuanced system that is systemic in inequality, in bigotry, and in its oppression. And that plays out in the biases that we as individuals hold. One thing I think about often is how do you reach a Black audience in Canada? What magazine do you pitch a book to in order to reach Black Canadians? It’s not necessarily anybody’s fault that the Canadian media landscape is such that there is not a major Black-owned or even Black-focused magazine or media outlet.
So let’s say you are a publicist and you have a book by a Black writer. Ideally, you’d pitch it to a Black-focused magazine, but no such magazine of any prominence exists in Canada. But you only have Canadian rights for the book, so it doesn’t make any sense to pitch it to an Essence or an Ebony – except that’s what Black Canadians are reading. I’m inherently invested, but would a person who doesn’t value Black audiences consider that a problem that needs solving? Or would they say that there is no Black publication so I’m just going to stick with the publications we do have.