When it comes to editing magazines and anthologies, some people seem to enjoy it. I don’t, not especially. I like giving life to new ideas and finding platforms for other people’s fiction or art. I hate slush reading, decision making, administration and writing rejections. My key editorial ethos is probably ‘Try not to screw up too often’. And I hadn’t planned on writing this piece, but recent social media discussions have corkscrewed their way into my brain.

The role of the editor(s) and diversity in anthology or magazine contents is one of Those Things. It’s an important Thing, but can easily drive you to despondency or endless argumentifying. A lot of the discussions this week have been about the question of female writers’ presence in Tables of Contents and, putting it bluntly, the degree to which ToCs often seem to be dominated by male writers, especially white male writers. However, I think this raises the broader subject of editors’ approaches to diversity in general, which is more the meat here today.

(Incidentally, as an editor I tend to feel that you’re basically getting something wrong with every issue or volume, and you know it, even when no one else notices. When people do notice, you are doomed by being resolute in the face of criticism, and doomed by trying to explain that your good intentions were trampled by the Elephants of Life.)

WHAT FOLLOWS BELOW CONTAINS NO DEFINITE ANSWERS, BECAUSE I DON’T KNOW ANY. AND I BARELY KNOW WHAT I’M DOING SOME DAYS. SO THERE.

NOTE TO COVER MY BACK, ALMOST: I can be a bit random about terminology. Feel free to exchange ‘Chinese’ or ‘desi writer’ for ‘black writer’; ‘non-binary’ or ‘gender-fluid’ for ‘queer’ and so on. I’m writing in diversity shorthand rather than wanting to make lists. Many recent discussions have taken ‘straight white male’ as the default position for majority inclusion in many projects, and there’s certainly a history to that, so I’ll use it here. Write your own piece if it offends you.

Diversity for the Common Editor

1. WHO DO YOU SERVE?

This is an underlying matter I’d like to get out of the way. Unless you’re running some sort of weird one-person vanity show, it seems to me that as an editor you serve too many masters and mistresses from the word Go.

Your publisher – needs to avoid bankruptcy or a reputation for putting out endless volumes of barely readable tosh.
Your writers – need to sell their work to you and have it seen by as wide an audience as possible, in a decently edited format.
Your readers – want something which is both worth their cash and in line with their reading interests.
You – want to produce something of which you can be proud, and/or which makes you a pittance or enhances your reputation.

That’s a lot to deal with from the start. Let’s be honest. I’ve acquired stories that weren’t my cup of fish (as a recreational reader). And I’ve rejected ones that I loved. We’re not talking about the quality of the stories here, only the question of how much your personal taste guides your selections. Misguidedly or not, I’ve done this to try and serve readers, to showcase a range of tales which might appeal to the broadest audience. I’m not the one who’s going to buy this stuff, after all.

For each of the above, there are other issues you have to bear in mind. What does your publisher feel about diversity? Are there matters which go beyond any one magazine or anthology going on here, related to their wider activities? And if you think you know your audience to any degree, what’s the vibe there – is it hungry for change and new approaches, or is it staid and suspicious? As you select, you have to be hoping and guessing about that audience – does it really like what you think it likes? Or are you deliberately selecting for people who you think aren’t well served by other anthologies and magazines, which is another and perfectly valid choice again?

(Also worth checking – did you invent your audience in your head and wake up later to flashbacks of Vietnam and the Airborne cavalry?)

2. ARE YOU LEGION?

There’s an argument for single-handed editors of established skill and taste, and one for collectives of editors. Real life often means that small/independent press editorial boards are simply a few colleagues who already get on, and may do so because they have shared tastes and interests. As most are working for little or nothing, it’s for the love – or it started that way. What might a varied editorial board, if you had that luxury, have to offer? They might well:

Provide confidence, their presence encouraging writers from a wider range of backgrounds to submit in the first place.
Bring a more extensive contact list at every level from submissions to marketing.
Act as promoters of particular styles and areas of interest.
Sound loud warnings on the acquisition of too many similar pieces.
Spot dodgy representations of particular groups.
Take more risks (not guaranteed – achieving consensus can mean playing it safe as well).

Editorial groups do have their limits, so be gentle. Nancy Tinubu from the local writers’ collective is not a gestalt avatar of all young black women, nor an endless source of answers as to the entire field of Afrikan literary, political and cultural issues. She might be bloody useful, though.

Some readers do like the stability of a single editor, one whose previous anthologies or issues they enjoyed. Almost a brand feel (Ellen Datlow, to pick the most immediate example that comes to mind, is often cited in that category). That, however, is contingent on the mind-set of the single editor, and we all have blind spots about our own choices. I mean, that selection of fourteen very similar Cthulhu pastiches written by a group of close friends, all of whom are middle-aged lapsed Baptist real estate agents and all of whom happen to live in the same town, for example. How could people say that it was ‘somewhat lacking in variety’? The ingrates.

3. DID YOU TELL PEOPLE?

Which is also ‘Did you tell people and did they believe you?’ Anyone can call out for submissions from a diverse range of writers from different backgrounds, cultures, skin colours, sexual identifications and so on. You can even do it and not mean it. It’s certainly vital to make your position clear early on. But what happens next?

They never found out – if you can’t find your way into the social networks, loose confederations, contact lists and niche hangouts of many different types of writer, they may never realise that you would like them to come forward.
Your hands are empty – you want them, but you don’t have a concrete example to prove it. Your last book or magazine had no non-white authors in, for example. It was how the submissions fell that time, and it happens.
They prefer focus – at this stage they see more mileage in specialist outlets or ones specifically set up to highlight the work of societal sections/groups with which they identify, not a general writing market.
They don’t trust you – they’ve heard all this before, and are dubious. You might be merely talking the talk to sound right on, man. Or whatever cool people say these days.

You can’t make people write for you. You can review any editorial statements, guidelines and open call marketing you put out, and think hard about how they sound to others. You can make an extra effort to share any guidelines about your approach. I mean, there was that ‘All Women’ special of Carcass Noire, where you forgot to encourage female writers to submit or circulate the Open Call in the right places, and had to get some of the guys to change their names to Daphne and Enid in order to fill the issue. Do you have to remember everything? Yes.

4. BLIND SOLICITORS

How hard and crystalline a route to diversity do you want to take in your editorial capacity? There are two very different steps you can try:

a) Direct solicitation – simply contact every decent non-white, or non-male, or non-straight writer you know and say you want a story from them. If you don’t know any, that’s a bit rough, and shows you haven’t been paying attention to the field at all. You suck.

Many will be too busy, or not interested in the theme, etc, so this can be a slow business. It’s not very good for finding the talent that you don’t know about, unfortunately, and can end up as its own nepotistic little bug if that’s all you do. Once started, it has to be developed.

b) Blind reading – if you think you’ve done what you can so far to reach out to a cross-section of the writers you would like to submit, read submissions blind, i.e. with all identifying information stripped at the slush stage. It’s not perfect, because you can’t strip your head of your own fancies or prejudices. And again, you can’t make people write for you, but you can hope that some will consider this a good way to get seen without any editor having prior baggage about them or their work.

Blind reading can be a way round the fact that the writing world has its incestuous moments, and you are going to know, even be friends with, some of the submitters. You may even spot their style, but it might help. Mind-set comes up again, of course, because if you’re determined only to have a particular character set or number of tropes, you may well sabotage yourself anyway. That’s where a group or board can be useful.

5. DID YOU TAKE THEIR WORK?

Male writers, female writers, queer writers, black writers – everyone gets rejection slips. Authors in wheelchairs and authors from Sri Lanka can write rubbish, just like anyone else. Equality of incompetence has an effect – if you get three barely so-so stories from the broader range of writers you wanted, and thirty great stories from white male career writers, what do you do? If you’re blind reading, you may well end up with those guys.

But if you weight your selection, who wants to say they took a story because they didn’t have any other hearing-impaired or Inuit writers who submitted, even though the story was a bit lame? And who wants to be the writer who was accepted on that basis?

Alternatively, you could:

Dedicate a number of slots to authors of particular identities or origins – it can be done, but it can vary from being a passionate statement to being another token gesture (I’m talking general magazines and anthologies here, not theme and author specific issues, which have a different place and purpose).
Encourage and accept stories with diverse characters and cultural backgrounds, no matter who wrote them, to try and fire up the engine, to let people know you want change. Not ideal, but it shows you can imagine moving out there.
Redouble your editorial marketing efforts – probably the best choice. Encourage confidence. Work at it so that you get so many submissions from the wider pool that you’re pretty much guaranteed to have some winners.

6. WHY BOTHER?

Every so often silly people ask why on earth diversity is important in this context. It’s the easiest question to answer, of all of them. You can be as self-serving or noble as you want if you intend to be a successful editor. Take your pick:

Talent is everywhere. Extraordinary talent is hidden in little known corners. If you close your books except to a set section of our societies, you miss genius and wonder. Entirely selfishly, you might miss out on being the one who can say ‘Hey, I’m cool. Look at what I found!’
Social justice and equity apply not only in biscuit factories, but in the literary world as well. Close your doors, put your hands over your eyes and ears, in any context, and you’re the problem.
Everyone has money, but there’s too much to read. If you want to grab those pounds, dollars or rupees first, you want to interest as many individuals and groups as possible before your core readership slips into senility.
Yes, you might get applauded for being reliable but slightly dull. Is that all you want?
Overt or covert exclusion is the tool of controlling agents who are unlikely to have your interests at heart. Why should they? Rise up and mutter ominously. Even editors can change the occasional opinion.

7. IN NO CONCLUSION

I’m open to complaints and comments about any of the above. This should have been written by a far more erudite, far more experienced editor than me. If I get sound new information, I adjust. If I’ve made a genuine mistake, I adjust. It’s what you do (or should do). I’m aware that having good intentions doesn’t always cut it, though I believe it can help. I may well even revise my own editorial habits as a result of writing this. I probably will.

And I am also a writer, after all. Getting a fair chance to be considered is always an issue for any writer. I come from the old Write, Sluice the Yard, and Write Again School, but I’m hardly unaware that I have privileges. You might well ask what could go wrong for a reasonably experienced white male author, except that we would drift into discussions on whether or not you’re ‘in vogue’, ‘cutting edge’ or have the wrong circle of writing and publishing friends – or just no friends. And if you forgot to grab the attention of that crucial editor in the one second when they noticed you. No one really wants to be the snotty little kid who didn’t get invited to Danny’s seventh birthday party, and ended up setting fire to Danny’s Spiderman costume that night. With Danny in it (well, OK, maybe not many of you).

But the important point is the privilege aspect. I’m not marginalised. I don’t have to look at endless Tables of Contents and say ‘Why are there so few white guys like me in there?’ I’m not embarrassed or apologetic about being what I am. I simply think everyone should have a fair crack of the herring.

Oh, and if you want to submit to Occult Detective Quarterly when we open again, I want the most fantastical set of submissions from the most wildly diverse set of writers. I want stories of every culture from writers of every culture and self-identification. And you know I mean it, because I’m ancient and get bored very easily. I’m selfish – I need diversity to keep me interested in this stony little globe…

Proper posts, lurchers, author features and interviews are on their way…

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