Luke Bateman landed a two-book deal with Atria after a month on BookTok.

For many of us in the publishing industry or the book community, it's news that feels simultaneously familiar and deflating. Bateman, a white Australian man with some very minor celebrity and no previously published work, sold his debut on spec to a major publisher.

This past weekend at BookNet Fest, on a panel about Disrupting Traditional Publishing Models, Matt Kaye, the CEO of Bindery, took a moment to remind us all that publishing is a system. I'd like to extend that reminder to you.

Publishing is a system. And the thing about systems is that they're built to produce consistent results. They are structured to promote certain behaviors, certain outcomes, and, yes, certain people.

To some, that can sound harsh, especially when we're talking about real people who, by all appearances, are simply taking the opportunities offered to them. Maybe you would do it, too, for a check. To others, it's easy to linger there on this one instance of the system working by design. But when we hyperfocus on individual stories, whether out of frustration or fascination, we risk missing the larger structure that enables them.

Luke Bateman is not the first, and he won't be the last.

Now, to be clear, this is not me asking you to put your outrage down. I'm always a little proud of us when we can still manage outrage and recognize it as care. Outrage means you're paying attention. It means you haven't numbed yourself into accepting this as inevitable.

I suppose, though, that I wanted to take this time to suggest that we don't stop at outrage. I've been making book content online for over a decade, and I know that outrage directed at individuals fades. It scrolls past. It tires easily.

And yet, the institution remains—quiet, adaptable, relentless.

Publishing as an Institution

Publishing is not merely a collection of editors with good taste, decision-makers championing art, or readers voting with their dollars, as much as we'd like that all to be true. It's an institution (like academia, the legal system, or the arts), and institutions, by definition, are systems of power. They are made up of policies, social norms, economic incentives, and historical legacies that reproduce specific outcomes over time. Publishing is an institution that has long defined whose stories are worth disseminating, whose voices are worth amplifying, and whose work is allowed to shape culture.

To understand publishing, you have to understand the foundation it was built on. Western publishing as it exists today emerged from elite literary and academic circles in Europe, designed to uphold the intellectual authority of a colonial ruling class. In both Britain and the U.S., publishing played an active role in reinforcing white, Eurocentric worldviews, producing missionary tracts, imperial adventure stories, pseudo-scientific works on race, and novels that depicted colonized people as savage, exotic, or peripheral.

This wasn't incidental. It was foundational. The ability to write, to be published, and even to read was historically guarded as a marker of whiteness and power. In the U.S., literacy was illegal for enslaved Black people. White enslavers understood that reading was a threat. After emancipation, Black writers were often denied access to publishing entirely or published only when their work reinforced white expectations of "respectability."

In the 20th century, publishing distribution followed the same racial and economic patterns as redlining. Major houses disproportionately marketed and stocked books in white, affluent neighborhoods, while Black and immigrant communities were routinely underserved. Presses and bookstores run by and for communities of color were marginalized, underfunded, or ignored by the mainstream. Even today, books by Black and Brown writers are often labeled "niche," "urban," or "multicultural," while white-authored books are treated as universal.

This is not just past, but also present. The Big Five publishers are all owned by multinational corporations, but their English-language publishing power is centralized in the United States and the United Kingdom. The agents, editors, publicists, and booksellers who shape the life of a book are still overwhelmingly white.

This is why we say publishing is not neutral. Even when today's players claim to value diversity, they are often operating within a system built to protect and reproduce white cultural dominance. The rules may not be written down in a style guide, but they're enforced all the same, and there is undeniable evidence this is true in everything from advances to bookstore placement and beyond.

Neutrality in publishing is a myth—one that is designed to obscure power.

The publishing machine is not built to reward talent in any consistent or equitable way. It's built to minimize risk. And as in any risk-averse industry, what gets elevated is the work that feels familiar. What's already been proven. The kinds of stories that have already sold, already trended, and already align with what marketing knows how to sell. That familiarity is deeply racialized and classed. It tracks with whiteness and with cultural proximity to dominant norms.

The result is not a meritocracy. It's a machine calibrated to prioritize profit under the guise of taste and to reward proximity to whiteness while insisting that it's simply responding to "the market." Markets are not natural phenomena. Markets are shaped by the very institutions that claim to be responding to them.

Publishing as a Business

Publishing is a business increasingly shaped by corporate consolidation. As much as many people inside the industry genuinely love books and believe in their power, they are operating within structures that prioritize return on investment above all else. Books are commodities. Editors might fall in love with a manuscript, but that love has to be converted into a P&L sheet.

This doesn't mean good books don't get published. Of course they do. But it does mean the system is structured to be more receptive to books that come with built-in markets or easily branded authors. That's part of why we've seen a rise in acquisitions that feel algorithmic: indie-to-traditional crossovers, viral fanfiction adaptations, influencer-authored novels, and, of course, BookTok breakouts.

In this environment, the internal supports that once helped sustain a wider range of authors are disappearing. Editorial departments are increasingly under-resourced, with editors juggling massive workloads and shrinking time for deep, developmental work.

At the same time, marketing and publicity budgets are narrowing, concentrated almost exclusively on lead titles and already-visible authors. Midlist authors are expected to do most of their own promotion, often with little direction or support. If a book doesn't "perform" in the first few weeks, it's often written off entirely.

More and more, authors are being asked to show up not just as writers but as marketers, publicists, content creators, community managers, and brand strategists.

This shift doesn't just change who gets published. It changes what kind of writing gets prioritized. It favors books that are hooky and easy to slot into a trend. It privileges authors who are already public-facing, already polished, already prepared to hustle. And it weeds out the weird, the quiet, the ambitious, the genre-defiant, the slow burn, the unbranded, the offline.

So when someone like Luke Bateman "breaks through" in this context, it's not surprising. He came prepackaged.

Again, none of this is new. But the velocity at which it's happening makes each new example feel like confirmation that the system is pulling tighter, not opening up.

Publishing's Present Is Shaping Its Future

That's why Bateman's deal or Silver Elite before it sparked such immediate and visceral reactions. Sure, they aren't surprising, but they are exhausting. And they also hint at what the industry is preparing to normalize and prioritize.

Perhaps some would call this alarmist, but it's hard not to see these as early indicators, particularly as we are headed into recession years under a fascist administration. It seems to me that publishing is testing the waters here, taking things that have always existed, like ghostwritten content, publisher IP, packaged novels, and pre-formed platforms, and seeing how far they can push that, with AI looming over all.

This shift is happening alongside a broader political and cultural rollback. DEI efforts are being defunded or rebranded out of existence. School districts are banning books that center Black, queer, and trans lives. Legislatures are restricting the very language and identities that once drove the industry to make promises about inclusion. The climate is regressive. It's hostile. And I don't have faith in publishing, the institution, to push back in any meaningful way.

So What Can We Do?

Many of you know that I've worked in HR for 13 years, much of that time dedicated to DEI. It was perhaps some of the most frustrating work of my life because, too often, people looked to DEI initiatives as magical fixes for problems that were pervasive, multi-layered, entrenched, and institutional. We are fighting a monster. A hydra. And there is no single solution.

Publishing's problems are structural, cultural, and economic, and they won't be undone by one viral campaign or one breakout book. But there are levers of pressure that can shift the weight. We must get used to all working in different areas, in our spheres of influence, and seeing that as working together. That's what this moment calls for: sustained and intentional resistance.

For all my fellow readers and content creators (and this is advice I'm taking for myself as well because I also have improvements to make):

• I need you to rethink your spending and book budget. If you're subscribed to a book box or a service that overwhelmingly prioritizes white authors, cancel it. Unsubscribe. Reallocate that money toward indie bookstores, small presses, or preorder campaigns for marginalized writers. If you have a book budget, set aside a portion specifically for books by authors of color. Basically, put your money where your mouth and your ethics are.
  

• Preorder marginalized authors. Especially debuts. There's been a lot of recent talk about how much preorders matter, but with so much of publishing investing in early sales numbers, and shelf space in bookstores becoming increasingly competitive, preorders are still an excellent way to signal interest.
  

• Request titles at your library. Library circulation numbers also speak to publishers.
  

• Leave reviews. Word of mouth still matters. Use your social platforms, no matter how small, to talk about books that won't land on the front table at Barnes & Noble.
  

• Support publishers outside of The Big Five. It takes a little more effort and research to seek out small and indie presses, but our The Big Five shouldn't have our business guaranteed if they aren't earning it.
  

• Talk about books by marginalized authors consistently, not just seasonally or reactively. I'm tired of feeling like people only talk about Black and Brown authors (for instance) when something bad happens or when they are relegated to separate lists. I want to see us everywhere all the time.
  

• Keep naming the pattern. Refuse to pretend that each new example is just an isolated glitch. It's not. It's a message about what this industry values. And unless we push back, it will only become more efficient at delivering more of the same.

These are all very straightforward action items, but I know that with so much going on and so much to fight for, it's easy to let the effort in our reading lives slip. Publishing trends move like a tide, and even the most conscientious reader is not immune.

I'd love it if you took some time today to commit to one of these immediate action items: 

• Share a recently released book by a BIPOC author that hasn't gotten enough attention. 

• Let the next book you buy be from a BIPOC author. Share the purchase on social media. 

• Request an upcoming title by a BIPOC author from your local library. 

• Write a review for a recently loved title by a BIPOC author. 
  

Feel free to tag me in any of these posts or use the hashtag #BooksWeBack.

We need less passive support, less empty outrage, and more action. We are trying to change a system. It will not change on its own.

♥️

Marines

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