Authors Virginia DeBerry and Donna Grant. (Photo: PostScript'd)
From our partners at PostScript’d:
Much is written about the publishing industry’s woes, from diminishing margins and accusations of price fixing, to the ceding of territory to self-publishing in both print and digital formats. But for writers of color, the concerns are more personal. All over the Internet and the blogosphere, writers of color lament the difficulty in getting a deal from mainstream publishing’s Big Six: Hachette Book Group, Harper Collins, Macmillan, Penguin Group, Random House and Simon & Schuster. All of this has led many to speculate that maybe big publishing is just “not into” writers of color anymore.
In a November 15th missive reprinted widely, authors Virginia DeBerry and Donna Grant got straight to the point. The best-selling duo, after assurances that neither of them was ill nor had a fallen out as friends, dropped this bombshell: “…our writing career is officially on ‘HOLD.’ ”
DeBerry and Grant (pictured above) went on to lament how the industry has changed, requiring an omnipresent cyber presence through social media, as well the pressures to crank out a book a year to meet an industry’s unrealistic expectations for them. Before poignantly closing, they share that “there are no more DeBerry and Grant novels in the pipeline. Whew…that was hard, but also a relief.”
Say what you will about DeBerry and Grant, they engineered their own exit from publishing. Other writers of color have not been as lucky.
Read the rest at PostScript’d.
