25 Trends in Publishing: Diverse Books

About the column: A handful of agents and interns who work with Cyle have learned the latest and (sometimes so, sometimes not so) greatest trends in publishing right now. Tune in each week to find out what’s trending, ranging from ABA to CBA, children’s to adult. The authors of these columns have included social media tags at the end to keep up with trends they are finding. They can also be found here. 

Trend #12 of 25: Diverse Books

Contributor: Hope Bolinger

For the most part, publishing hasn’t done the best at portraying characters and people who aren’t straight, white, and from a Western culture. Even as we peruse sections in the bookstores, most of the book covers contain white people from Western backgrounds. We’ll cover the shift from interest in publishing from Western to Eastern cultures in another post. (We’ll also cover another term #ownvoices in another post). But for now, we’ll talk about how publishing plans to diversify their lists.

This trend spans all genres.

Movements such as We Need Diverse Books seek to provide all readers, particularly children, with characters they can identify with. “Imagine a world in which all children can see themselves in the pages of a book,” reads the landing page of the website.

This trend spans all genres because all readers, nonfiction/fiction, children’s/adult, literary/commercial, want to read books with heroes that come from a similar background as they do. Background can indicate a number of areas from mental health to ethnicity to sexual orientation. But just about every publisher we’ve encountered at the agency wants books with more diverse casts.

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan, and Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi are excellent examples of diverse books. Plenty of other books can be found on Goodreads. Even a simple Google search can pull up diverse books that fare very well in the market.

If you do have a book with mostly white-washed characters, consider diversifying the cast. I should warn you to do this with caution. Make sure to have those who come from a similar background as your characters review your materials to tell you if you’re appropriating or stereotyping. There have been several incidents in recent publications of white authors who handed racial issues insensitively.

Hope Bolinger is a literary agent at C.Y.L.E. Her YA novel Den was contracted by IlluminateYA while she was still in college (to be released June 3, 2019).

More than 200 of her works have been featured in various publications. She is a multi-award winner from being a finalist in the Jerry B. Jenkins short story contest to her one-act earning second place in the Searchlight Playwriting Contest. She has served in various publishing capacities from working at newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses.

She can be found at hopebolinger.com.