Before and After Reflecting Realities: the research holding a mirror up to the UK publishing industry
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- 11 hours ago
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by Fen Coles - Letterbox Library
Reflecting Realities is the first UK study looking at diversity in children's literature; its aim is to quantify and evaluate the extent and quality of ethnic representation and diversity in children's publishing in the UK. The research was initiated, is spearheaded and the reports authored by Farrah Serroukh, Director of Research and Strategic Development at the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE). Letterbox Library sits on the Reflecting Realties steering group.
This comment piece was originally written in 2024 in response to the seventh issue of the Reflecting Realities report. A summary version appeared in the Reflecting Realities ‘takeover’ issue of the industry magazine, The Bookseller on 29th November 2024.
With the eighth Reflecting Realties report due out at the end of this week, it felt timey to publish this as part of our online blog series, giving us the opportunity to gauge what changes, if any, are highlighted by the latest research.
It is no exaggeration to say that the impact of the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education’s (CLPE) Reflecting Realities research for us as booksellers has been seismic.
Where’s Your Evidence?
Eleven years ago, Letterbox Library met with the CLPE to discuss our work. We soon realised that our understanding about inclusive books -from our perspective as booksellers, from theirs as a literacy charity- chimed perfectly. We both recognised the symbiosis between reading for pleasure and representative books as well as the key role inclusive literature can play in forming positive identities, leading in turn to educational attainment. We also both bemoaned the meagre offerings of UK publishers. From Letterbox Library’s earliest days, we had been lobbying UK publishers to address this need. Invariably this was met with hesitancy and almost always with questions about whether we could quantify the exact scale and nature of the problem. We knew from our customers, largely schools, that the demand was there, that a market was there. But beyond the anecdotal, we could only ever come back with figures from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC), University of Wisconsin’s, ‘Diversity Statistic’, a North American project which carried little weight with the UK industry. If only, we stressed to the CLPE, someone would initiate that research in the UK, then we could ‘evidence’ this knowledge. Critically, we would all have a foundation which would facilitate and grow our advocacy.
Before Reflecting Realities: tumbleweed
Letterbox Library was set up in 1983 to respond to parents and carers looking for books which represented their identities, families and communities. We soon morphed into an education supplier as schools heard of our work. With schools keen to reflect their classroom communities and engage a wide cross section of readers, the asks grew, becoming ever larger and ever more intersectional.
For us, there is a clear Before and After Reflecting Realities. During the Before, we scrabbled together UK books which met our criteria but we were forever forced to look abroad to reach the volume and the range we needed. We imported from the US primarily but also Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India. We never wanted to be so reliant on international publishers (and gaps remained, especially South Asian representations) but it was the only means of us stocking a significant number of books with characters of colour in which those characters also had true agency in the text.
When a lack of representation is marked, when demand is high and when the work of finding that representation is laborious, then merely plugging in the gaps is very seductive. It can so easily lead to collecting rather than selecting, shortcuts which risk short-changing readers or worse. Our team of independent reviewers (mostly educational professionals) kept us on our toes, making sure our imports would travel well, resonating with schools and relatable to young readers here. More importantly, whether evaluating imports or home-grown texts, they kept us focused on our aim of engaging readers through well crafted inclusive books, shunning tokenism and striving to never compromise on the quality of representation. This labour of selection- finding the books in the first place and filtering down to nuanced, skilfully written, illustrated and produced texts, left us with a meagre supply of books to stock.
After Reflecting Realities: greener pastures
The period since the Reflecting Realities research has been transformative for how we carry out our work and for the sorts of books we are now getting in to schools. Of course the UK publishing landscape had already started to shift (a history too detailed to summarise here) prior to this research. Just one sign of these steady steps is that our last significant bulk import from the US was 2011. But those increments were sloth-like, erratic and overall, tight-fisted. The CLPE’s Reflecting Realities reports kick-started and then, crucially, sustained a far more accelerated and focused opportunity for the publishing industry to evaluate its output and reckon with the creative possibilities, the economic potential as well as the ethical impulse to publish inclusively.
In terms of our own work, we were able to take those findings in to discussions with the 50+ publishers we buy from to better frame our market needs. We were no longer just reliant on anecdotal evidence from our school customers on the volume needed and on our reviewers’ feedback for the quality needed. It gave us a new confidence in our discussions with publishers, a new rigour to our case for representative books. Crucially, we were able to point to the thoughtful practical tips and ideas offered to the industry by the Reflecting Realities reports as each one delved in to the detail of how to tune up inclusive representation for excellence.
The publishing gaps were laid bare with the first Reflecting Realities report in 2017. At Letterbox Library, we witnessed a range of responses from the publishers we knew. Many saw a chance to grow their audiences, to bring in new voices and expand their content. Others were, let’s be honest, defensive, brought on by discomfort and, perhaps, an unfamiliar feeling of vulnerability. But, overall, there was an encouraging stutter and then a lurch forwards, an upwards trajectory which was, as acknowledged in later Reflecting Realities reports, further escalated by wider socio-political events (not least of which was the global Black Lives Matter movement). The percentage of children’s books with characters of colour rose from 4% to 30%. Perhaps most strikingly, books starring a protagonist of colour scaled up from 1% to 14%. The quantity of home grown children’s books now relevant to our work gave Letterbox Library a far bigger pool to choose from. The quality still varied. Interestingly our review team’s ‘approved’/not approved (for sale) proportion shifted only slightly, and only fairly recently, from 30%/70% to 35%/65%. But the books which did get through our reviewers also met a record approval rating- the bar had been raised. The industry was starting to meaningfully grasp the full creative scope and the common sense of publishing inclusively. All benefits which of course we could pass on to our end users- young people and children, the market we had never doubted.
A return to ‘multicultural wallpapering’?
For just over a year now we have, however, noticed a tilting off. Many of our publisher reps have gone quieter; there are fewer excited emails attaching advance manuscripts. Quarterly AI packs have grown but our pickings are getting meaner. Our unease is being echoed by other booksellers and literacy organisations. Newly ‘discovered’ and existing authors of colour we know seem, just recently, to be receiving an especially paltry share of marketing budgets; commissioned series are also being ended prematurely. And now, this latest CLPE report has evidenced this decline, cemented our concerns. The stats show, not just a decrease in ethnically representative literature, but a nose dive. The overall presence is less but of particular concern to us is the diminished space the characters are taking up: the proportion of protagonists of colour has plummeted from 14% back to 7%. We are having flashbacks of what Letterbox Library used to refer to as ‘multicultural wallpapering’, where characters of colour are confined to the background, serving only to tick a box or to make a title appear ‘contemporary’ or ‘urban’, where all the speaking parts have been reserved for white characters.
Trending Inclusion
The body of Reflecting Realities research is also a body of knowledge generously sharing the steps needed to improve representation. We acknowledge all that the industry has done so far. For us, and many other booksellers, the work done to explore the possibilities of inclusive publishing has made the children’s literary landscape feel more dynamic, inventive and, yes, more creative. We don’t see the sense of turning back on this. The case has been made. Perhaps we could turn this around: if this most recent narrowing of that landscape isn’t a temporary anomaly, if publishing houses are shrinking their inclusive output (deliberately, subconsciously) then perhaps we could ask them to reflect on and share with us what is their case for not persisting in this energetic enterprise? Because, surely, the argument isn’t that inclusive books are a publishing trend? Trends are for genres, surely. For formats, for literary conventions, for celebrity authors, for merchandise tie-ins. Surely not for representation itself. Surely not for identity, for belonging.
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