This thought previously occurred to me when I began applying for entry-level roles in publishing – a wide variety of roles where I quickly understood that despite them being entry-level, I was still inexperienced. As a young BAME woman struggling to begin her career in the publishing industry, I could almost beg to get my foot in the door. But in 2022, are minorities still being tokenised and undervalued in the publishing workplace?

When I attended Magazine Street 2022, I didn’t expect there to be such an open discourse around this topic. Arusa Qureshi’s talk on magazine publishing made me feel more comfortable in voicing my opinion and gave me a sense of camaraderie; unlike before when I felt my voice was quickly disregarded, I’m not alone in my struggle and there are people out there who have been in the position that I’m in but are also openly talking about it at an international conference. Knights Of’s Managing Director Aimee Felone also talked about her experience of setting up the independent publishing house and how she faced problems from the commercial market at the Bookseller’s Children Conference 2022. 

Culturally, Middle Easterners aren’t encouraged to enter a creative industry and thankfully, I grew up with a family where we were encouraged to experiment with what we wanted from our lives. Naively, in my pursuit, I encountered certain walls such as my age but more importantly my ethnicity. 

I’ve been told quite a few times by friends, teachers, and colleagues that the publishing industry is quite elitist and has only been available for people from middle and upper-class backgrounds. Was this their way of telling me to look elsewhere? Maybe they were only being helpful because it is an old industry, but they can do better. Maybe the doors were never open for us anyway. Or, if they were, they were only slightly ajar. Employers need to advertise their roles better and make entry-level roles actually entry-level without a requirement to have experience and knowledge. 

Thankfully, there are organisations out there that are specifically designed and created to encourage people from minority backgrounds to get into the creative industry. One great example of this is Creative Access which aims to get people from BAME backgrounds or from lower socio-economic backgrounds into creative roles. Employers can use this service to advertise their roles and the organisation will help applicants by providing support. 

However, the work isn’t finished and more needs to be done. Employers need to make their employers feel valued and ensure that their voices are heard. There’s still a large imbalance and a 2020 survey of diversity in the publishing industry shows that the number of people from BAME backgrounds in the industry has stalled. There is an appetite for our voices to be heard, certainly on the bookshelves, but how are publishers meant to know what to say if we aren’t there to say it?