State of the Nation: 2023

Black Writers’ Guild: Momentum builds success.

 As all creatives know, continued attempts at success become inevitably more difficult. Recreating a masterpiece can be like capturing lightning in a bottle — near impossible. So it is with great pride that we can say the Black Writers’ Guild has continued to strike gold, growing from strength to strength. 

In 2020, over 200 Black writers in the UK came together to demand the leading publishers address the alarming systemic inequality and gross under-representation of Black authors. We called on publishers to ensure an equal, sustainable, and profitable ecosystem for Black literary talent in British publishing. Two years ago, we gave an account of our activities; demonstrating what we can achieve when we commune together with one voice and goal. Today, we are providing another “State of the Nation” so to speak, detailing our progress, and forecasting some of the moves we are making in the future.

Ongoing partnership with the publishing industry

When we established ourselves as a guild, we matched key members of our organisation with CEOs of key publishers in the UK to form stakeholder groups, in order to address the issues set out in our founding letter. We are very pleased with the progress these partnerships have yielded. In particular we’re grateful to Hachette, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Bloomsbury, HarperCollins and Faber & Faber for their support and ongoing collaboration. We also look forward to expanding our partnerships to other publishers. 

One of the fundamental issues facing the publishing industry is lack of Black representation. While it appears that awareness of this issue is at a historic high, it’s difficult to acknowledge growth without measured results. There needs to be greater transparency and accountability. To aid in this endeavour, we created a ‘gold standard’ document to measure diversity within the industry, which we’ve presented to key publishers. Initial feedback has been encouraging and we are currently securing an agreement with the Publisher’s Association to roll this out to all its members. Once implemented, not only will this give the industry clear visibility into Black representation - allowing them to properly and accurately account for the Black talent it currently has - but will also enable it to make measurable commitments to improve where they are found wanting.  

Building for longevity through fundraising

The goals of the Black Writers’ Guild are not insignificant, but they are achievable and matched only by our commitment to meet them. We know that to keep building for the future, we need resources. As such, we have made fundraising a key priority be that through grant applications or our partnerships with the publishing industry. To date, publishers such as HarperCollins and Pan Macmillan have generously donated roughly £100,000 towards the efforts of the Black Writers' Guild on a rolling annual basis, with more fundraising efforts to come. We’ve talked about holding the publishing industry accountable; so too must we be accountable to and transparent with our members. Therefore, we will be providing a full overview of our accounts with members in due course. Please note the Black Writers’ Guild is still run by volunteers and doesn’t currently employ any salaried staff.

Giving back to the community

Our responsibility, first and foremost, is to Black writers. We pledged that no matter your background, experience, or genre of writing, we will represent and fight for you. We said we got you, and we meant it. To support Black writers through what might be a difficult time, we are proud to announce that we will be launching two hardship funds shortly and we’ll share details on our website. 

 This goes hand in hand with the rest of the support that we’ve provided our members over the past year, including: helping people get into jobs in publishing, hosting a ‘speed dating’ event with HarperCollins (with further publisher, film, and TV events to come), running an ‘ask me anything’ session with production executives at Netflix, and connecting TV writers with production companies. We also provide an advisory service for members on an as-needed basis.

 From the humble beginnings of a pandemic era zoom call which anticipated no more than 30 people, we’ve grown to a 520 member strong guild, and we were proud to host some of our members at our inaugural Black Writers’ Guild conference (you can view the pictures here). At the conference all members who desired them were provided new professional headshots. Information on the 2023 conference will be announced this month.

 The Black community has long shown the world what we can achieve together and the Black Writers’ Guild is an example of how we are driving impact in the publishing industry. There’s a well known African proverb that says: If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. We couldn’t have achieved all we have without the dedication, commitment, and support of you, the members. We can achieve so much more together, so we call on you writers — the romantics and poets, come with your beautifully crafted stories of love, joy, and pain. The humourists, the satirists, and the Kafkaesque writers — there’s space for your indomitable wit and unique views. Technologists, historians, economists, sociologists, and other experts in your field, come and share with us your understanding of the world based on truth and fact, and help us see clearly through the revisionist history of the world we’ve been taught. Chefs, teach us how to make delectable meals with ingredients and spices that introduce our taste buds to sensations that we could have only previously imagined. Children’s writers and illustrators: continue to nurture us and broaden our imagination.

Together, let’s drive this industry to be more equitable to and representative of all of us.

By Nels Abbey, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Symeon Brown, Sharmaine Lovegrove, Ore Williams, Elijah Lawal & Derek Owusu

The Black Writers’ Guild Executive Committee