Fireside open submissions this week

Dan Jones said:
My suggestion would be for publishing and agency houses' editorial teams to be more diverse wherever possible, and have calls as open as possible, so that they can assess submissions more equally, and I think the occasional anonymous call should also be encouraged.
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I think:
  1. It's good that publishers explicitly state they welcome and encourage submissions from people who are underrepresented. It's important because it encourages people who might otherwise select themselves out. But publishers should be sensitive to how this can feel like the literary equivalent of "Hi! Would you like to be my [minority] friend?"
  2. I'm uncomfortable with the idea that which groups the writer is a member of weights selection. That cuts both ways. "White men" have a step up on the ladder being the default, but on the flip side, I once had a boss, who ran a department of "white men" in a very white male dominated industry tell me point blank "I'm glad you applied for the job so I could get HR off my back." I was absolutely qualified for the position, and very good at my job. But I wasn't hired because of that. Feels bad, man.
  3. On the subject of "white men", you can't tell a person's "race" just by the colour of their skin. Likewise, you can't tell sexual orientation or gender identity just by looking at a person. Under EU law, racial and ethnic origin, sexual orientation and identity, health and disability, and political affiliation and religious beliefs, among other things, are considered "sensitive" personal data for a reason. I question whether a publisher really needs that information about an author in order to decide if a story fits their publication.
  4. Rather than collecting personal information about writers, publishers would do better to have a system that allows them to read submissions blind. (It's worked to increase representation in orchestras.)
 
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Jo Zebedee said:
On a more upbeat notion. I might try to come up with something shockingly Norn Irish in 1000 words :D
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Thanks to the thread beforehand, I now have Ted Hastings bellowing "Nobody's blacker than me!" playing on a loop in my head. Thanks :p


And re the earlier thread - the odds are against all of us anyway. I don't think we should get too whatever on a personal level of submitting just because they're higher or lower in certain places. I'm not doing this because I have nothing and only just saw the thread - but maybe I'd have been the guy who beat the odds. Or got a nice rejection letter helping me and giving me confidence. Or maybe they show it to a friend at another place and you get traction that way. Who knows? All of this is rolling the dice and as long as it costs nothing to roll, you might as well keep rolling.

Regardless of whether this is right or wrong, there's no reason not to keep submitting.
 
awesomesauce said:
It's good that publishers explicitly state they welcome and encourage submissions from people who are underrepresented. It's important because it encourages people who might otherwise select themselves out. But publishers should be sensitive to how this can feel like the literary equivalent of "Hi! Would you like to be my [minority] friend?"
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It's all to do with precise phrasing. If a publishing house says, "we welcome submissions from anybody, but particularly from X, Y and Z," then that leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation, however benign the intent. In my world, where people have to submit research proposals for funding, there's a lot of work being done to encourage underrepresented people to submit; but it explicitly states in the funding literature that being of a particular race, sex, religion etc has no bearing on the evaluator's decision, because above all what they're looking for is a commitment to excellent science.

I don't see why the world of literature (and the wider humanities) shouldn't adopt the same transparency. The commitment surely should be for excellence in literature, and I agree work should be done to encourage people from BAME backgrounds etc to submit, but it should also be clear that the final decisions will made on the excellence of the work and the excellence of the work alone. Otherwise the whole thing, the whole structure is devalued and degraded for everyone.
 
The point that is being missed is simple: your ethnicity, gender identity and/or other things that mark you as marginalised have an effect on your access to certain things like education, healthcare and so on. So it’s far more entrenched and difficult to navigate that simply saying ‘you can’t tell I’m white/male/Christian etc’.

Yes, everything on its own Merits but that only works with an equal starting grid which we don’t have.

ph
 
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Ok, just curious - I haven't received anything from them yet so I'm not sure what that means. :)
 
lol hey, I think I might have made it past the slush pile, at least - they held on to it for a few days. I wish they'd tell you exactly how far you got in the process, but I know that's impossible.
 
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