I want to talk about diversity in our catalog, and I want to do it without the corporate preamble that usually accompanies these conversations. No mission statement. No aspirational language about “amplifying underrepresented voices.” Not because those sentiments are wrong, but because I think the gap between what publishers say about diversity and what they actually do has become so wide that the language itself has lost meaning. If I’m going to talk about this, I’d rather be specific and honest, even if that means admitting things that are uncomfortable.

ScrollWorks Media is a small publisher. Our catalog has fewer than thirty titles. The decisions we make about who to publish are not made by committee, not filtered through a corporate diversity initiative, not checked against metrics by a DEI officer. They’re made by a small editorial team, mostly me and two senior editors, based on whether we believe a manuscript is extraordinary and whether we’re the right publisher for it.

This approach has produced a catalog that is, by some measures, diverse. We’ve published writers of different races, nationalities, genders, and class backgrounds. We’ve published books that engage with a range of cultural experiences. We’ve published work that would not have found a home at many larger houses because it didn’t fit neatly into a marketable category.

But I don’t think any of that happened because we had a diversity plan. It happened because we read widely, talked to many writers, and tried to stay open to work that surprised us. That’s the truth, and I share it not as self-congratulation but as an honest accounting of a process that is, by its nature, incomplete.

The problems with “diverse books” as a category

One of the things that bothers me about how the publishing industry talks about diversity is the way it flattens individual books into representative examples of identity categories. A novel by a Black writer becomes “a diverse book.” A memoir by a disabled writer becomes “a diverse perspective.” The book’s specific qualities, its prose, its structure, its argument, its emotional complexity, get subordinated to its demographic utility.

This is bad for writers and bad for readers. It’s bad for writers because it reduces their art to their identity, as if the only interesting thing about a novel by an Indigenous author is the fact that it was written by an Indigenous author. It’s bad for readers because it implies that the primary reason to read these books is obligation rather than pleasure, that you should read them because they’re “important” rather than because they’re good.

The best books we’ve published at ScrollWorks have not been “diverse books.” They’ve been books. David Okonkwo’s The Cartographer’s Dilemma is not on our list because David is a person of color. It’s on our list because it’s a brilliantly constructed, intellectually ambitious, emotionally resonant novel that happens to be written by a Nigerian-British author whose cultural background informs but does not define the work. If the only reason someone reads that book is to check a diversity box, they’re missing the point. They’re also missing a great novel.

I think we need a different framework for thinking about diversity in publishing, one that starts with the work itself rather than with the identity of the writer. Not because identity doesn’t matter (it does, obviously), but because leading with identity tends to produce shallow engagement rather than genuine literary connection.

What we actually mean when we say we want a diverse catalog

When I think about what I want our catalog to look like, the word that comes to mind isn’t “diverse” in the demographic sense. It’s something closer to “various.” I want books that come from different places in the human experience, that ask different questions, that sound different from one another. I want a catalog where no two books could be mistaken for each other, where each title occupies its own space and does something that none of the others do.

This kind of variety naturally leads to demographic diversity, because different life experiences produce different art. If you’re genuinely open to the full range of human expression, you will end up publishing writers from many backgrounds. But the openness has to be to the expression, not to the background. The moment you start acquiring books primarily because of who wrote them rather than because of what they wrote, you’ve lost the thread.

Compare two hypothetical acquisition scenarios. In the first, a publisher reads a manuscript by a Latina writer and thinks: “We need more Latina voices on our list. Let’s acquire this.” In the second, a publisher reads the same manuscript and thinks: “This book does something I’ve never seen before with language and family and place. I have to publish this.” Both scenarios might result in the same decision, but the reasoning behind them produces very different editorial relationships and very different books.

In the first scenario, the writer is a representative of her demographic. The editorial conversation will inevitably center on “authenticity” and “representation,” which are valid considerations but incomplete ones. In the second scenario, the writer is an artist. The editorial conversation will center on craft, vision, and how to make the book the best possible version of itself. The second conversation is more respectful, more productive, and more likely to result in a book that honors both the writer’s identity and their artistry.

The pipeline problem and what it really looks like

The publishing industry talks a lot about the “pipeline problem,” the idea that the lack of diversity in published books reflects a lack of diversity in submissions. This explanation is partly true and partly a convenient deflection.

It’s true that submissions to literary publishers do not perfectly reflect the demographic composition of the country. Certain communities are underrepresented in the MFA programs that feed the literary pipeline. Access to the time and financial resources needed to write a book-length manuscript is unevenly distributed. Knowledge of how the publishing industry works, including how to find an agent, how to write a query letter, and how to navigate the submission process, is concentrated among people who already have connections to the industry.

But the pipeline problem is also partly a creation of the industry itself. When publishers acquire and market books that center a narrow range of experiences, they signal to writers outside that range that their stories aren’t wanted. When bestseller lists and prize shortlists are dominated by writers from similar backgrounds, aspiring writers from other backgrounds reasonably conclude that the industry doesn’t have room for them. The pipeline isn’t just a neutral channel that brings manuscripts to publishers. It’s shaped by publishers’ past decisions, and those decisions have historically favored certain kinds of writers and certain kinds of stories.

At ScrollWorks, we’ve tried to address this by doing something very simple: reading submissions from everywhere. We accept unsolicited manuscripts, which many literary publishers don’t. We attend writers’ conferences outside the traditional literary fiction circuit. We’ve built relationships with writing programs at community colleges and historically Black colleges, not as a charity project but because good writing comes from everywhere and we’d be fools to limit our sources.

The results have been real. Some of the most exciting manuscripts we’ve received in the past two years have come through channels that didn’t exist for us before we made this effort. Not all of them were right for our list. But the ones that were have made our catalog richer and more interesting than it would have been if we’d relied solely on the traditional agent-to-editor pipeline.

Class, geography, and the diversities nobody talks about

Here’s something I think the publishing industry gets wrong in its diversity conversations: an almost exclusive focus on race and gender at the expense of other axes of difference, particularly class and geography.

The American publishing industry is concentrated in New York City, staffed overwhelmingly by people who attended elite colleges, and operates within a cultural framework that reflects the values and assumptions of the urban professional class. This means that even when publishers succeed in diversifying their catalogs by race and gender, the resulting books often come from writers who share the industry’s class background and geographical perspective.

A Black writer who went to Yale and lives in Brooklyn is diverse in one sense and not diverse in another. Their experience is genuinely different from that of their white colleagues, and that difference matters. But their experience is also quite different from that of a Black writer in rural Mississippi who didn’t go to college and works in a factory. The second writer’s perspective is almost entirely absent from mainstream literary publishing, not because their stories are less worthy but because the industry’s infrastructure, from MFA programs to literary agents to New York publishing offices, is not designed to find them.

I feel strongly that class diversity and geographic diversity are as important as racial and gender diversity in building a catalog that reflects the full range of human experience. James Whitfield’s Echoes of Iron is set in a working-class community and takes manual labor seriously as a subject. That book exists in our catalog partly because we value writing about work and working people, which is a form of diversity that doesn’t show up in most publishers’ demographic reports.

Elena Marsh’s Still Waters is set in a rural community that most New York publishers would consider “regional” (a word that, in publishing, is almost always a euphemism for “not commercially viable”). We didn’t see it that way. We saw a novel that engaged with a specific place so deeply that it became universal, and we published it because the writing demanded to be published.

What I’ve gotten wrong

Honesty requires me to admit the ways I’ve fallen short. I’ve made acquisitions where, in retrospect, my enthusiasm for the writer’s background influenced my evaluation of the writing itself. I published a book once that I championed partly because the author’s story was compelling and the book’s cultural perspective was underrepresented, even though the manuscript needed more editorial work than I acknowledged at the time. The book didn’t fail, exactly. But it wasn’t as good as it could have been, and I think the author deserved a more rigorous editorial process rather than a more forgiving one.

I’ve also been too cautious at times. I’ve hesitated to give notes on cultural material that I didn’t feel expert in, worrying that my feedback would be insensitive or overstepping. This caution was well-intentioned but ultimately unhelpful. An author who submits a manuscript to a publisher wants rigorous editing, not kid-glove treatment. Withholding honest feedback because you’re worried about cultural sensitivity is its own form of condescension.

I’ve learned, slowly, that the best approach is to be honest about what I know and what I don’t, to ask questions when I’m uncertain, and to trust that the authors I work with can handle direct feedback about their craft without interpreting it as a commentary on their identity. Most writers, in my experience, would rather be edited rigorously by someone who takes their work seriously than praised gently by someone who’s afraid of offending them.

Moving forward without a playbook

I don’t have a diversity plan for ScrollWorks, and I don’t intend to create one. This will sound wrong to some people, and I understand why. In an industry where institutional commitments to diversity have been repeatedly made and repeatedly broken, the absence of a formal plan might look like the absence of commitment.

But I think plans, in this context, can become substitutes for genuine engagement. A publisher with a diversity plan can point to the plan and say “we’re working on it” without actually changing anything. The plan becomes the performance. I’d rather skip the performance and focus on the practice: reading widely, staying open, interrogating my own biases, and making decisions that I can stand behind on both literary and ethical grounds.

The catalog is the record. It’s where our actual decisions live. Every book we publish is a statement about what we value, and the sum of those statements, over years and dozens of titles, paints a picture that is more honest than any mission statement could be.

When I look at our catalog, which includes Catherine Voss’s The Last Archive, David Okonkwo’s The Cartographer’s Dilemma, Elena Marsh’s Still Waters, and James Whitfield’s Echoes of Iron, I see books by writers with different backgrounds, different concerns, and different styles, united not by their demographics but by the quality and ambition of their work. That’s the diversity I care about: not a checklist of identities but a genuine range of artistic vision.

Is that enough? Probably not. Probably we could do more, reach further, push harder. But I think “probably not enough” is a more honest position than “we’ve solved it,” and I think ongoing, imperfect effort is more valuable than perfected language about commitments we haven’t tested yet.

We’ll keep reading, keep searching, keep publishing the work that moves us. The catalog will keep growing. And anyone who wants to judge our commitments can look at the books, because the books don’t lie.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. The books tell the story better than any policy ever could.