DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot. Part 1 of 7: The Gatekeepers

Once upon a time, an aspiring fiction writer had a fighting chance. If you wrote a good story, polished your manuscript, and braved the slush pile, you might just get picked up. The system wasn’t perfect, but it was meritocratic enough that talent sometimes slipped through the cracks and found its way into print.

That world is gone.

Today, agents and editors, the self-appointed gatekeepers of publishing, increasingly use submission guidelines not as a way to filter for quality, but as ideological purity tests. Want to query an agent? You’d better make sure your story features “marginalized voices,” that your characters are “diverse,” and that your personal identity matches the preferred checklist. Otherwise, don’t bother. Some agencies explicitly state they will not consider manuscripts by authors from “overrepresented groups.” Some agents state baldly that they will not be able to represent white males. Others signal subtly or overtly that unless your work advances the current ideological line — the one centered on race, gender, or sexuality — they are not interested.

This isn’t just rumor. It’s been noticed by people inside the industry. In 2022, Joyce Carol Oates, no right-wing firebrand but one of America’s most respected novelists, said that a literary agent friend of hers couldn’t even get editors to look at debut novels by white male authors. “They are just not interested,” she wrote, calling the situation “heartbreaking.” Best-selling thriller author James Patterson said much the same: white male writers face a harder time breaking in, a trend he called “another form of racism.”

Mainstream media rushed to shut them down. CNN ran a feature insisting the data “disagrees.” Their proof? A Penguin Random House audit showing that between 2019 and 2021, 76 percent of their authors were white (only 34 percent were men, but they downplayed that). A New York Times study that found 95 percent of novels in major houses were by white people. “Not a thing,” industry insiders declared.

But look closer. Those numbers are backward-looking, reflecting backlist contracts and long-established names. They say nothing about what Oates and Patterson were pointing out: the front door is closing. How many of those 2019–2021 books were new debuts by white men, as opposed to reprints or ongoing series from long-successful authors? CNN didn’t ask, because the answer might have proved Oates right.

To read the full article on pjmedia.com, click here