Since 2020, we’ve shared an annual update addressing our efforts to advance equity and justice in the publishing industry. Publishing plays a key role in determining which perspectives are heard, so we believe it is critical to make sure we’re appropriately and fairly representing works by historically marginalized voices. Equity, inclusion, and diversity are core values of our company, and we make an effort to foster these values in our relationships with our author and publisher partners, our readers, our community, and the wider publishing industry. With that said, we are pleased to update you on the progress we’ve made over the past year within each of these areas, as well as our vision for the coming year.
Our partners
In last year’s message, we committed to improving our ability to measure how historically marginalized and underrepresented groups are included among the books and authors we feature. We’re proud to have made considerable progress here in the past year, significantly increasing the number of authors for whom we have demographic information. Thanks to this improved data, we can better measure the success of promotions from authors who identify as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and/or people of color), and we can better understand how BIPOC author representation in our curated promotions has changed over time (we want to note that this author information is used in aggregate to review how we’re doing, but is not visible to our editorial team or used in our selection process in any way).
Thanks to this data, we can more clearly see the results of our initiatives aimed at increasing diversity and representation among the authors who chose to partner with us and encouraging our publisher partners to submit books from a diverse range of authors. These efforts led to much more proportionate representation of author race and ethnicity across the books we featured on BookBub, with BIPOC representation nearly doubling among BookBub promotions in recent years from its previously less representative size. And because of the ongoing efforts of team members across the organization, we’ve sustained these more equitable levels of representation within BookBub over the past several years and seen similarly proportionate representation of BIPOC-identifying authors on Chirp.
It’s important that all of our authors, including those from historically marginalized groups, have successful promotions with us, and our improved data shows positive signals here as well. On BookBub and Chirp, our latest data shows that BIPOC-authored books have sold comparably well in recent years to other books we’ve promoted.
We credit these successes to deliberate improvements to our editorial processes and merchandising strategy — for instance, we’ve continued to highlight books by Black, Indigenous, AAPI, Latinx, and LGBTQ+ authors in featured deals, on-site carousels, promotional emails, author recommendations for new subscribers, and articles. We also attribute these results to updated marketing strategies to appeal to a wider range of readers — not to mention the consistently high quality of the books we promote — and we are incredibly excited that we can now measure the impact of those changes. Looking ahead, we plan to continue expanding our demographic data along dimensions of race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, and more so we can both increase our confidence that members of historically marginalized groups are finding success with our services and continue finding areas of improvement.
We’re incredibly proud of the work that our editors and other team members do every day to make sure that our promotions are representative and inclusive of historically underrepresented groups — and we now can be even more confident these efforts are helping us move toward a place where authors of different backgrounds are equally likely to have a great experience promoting their books with us.
Our readers
Over the past year we continued our ongoing efforts to promote a diverse range of content across our services. We believe this work is a critical part of serving the many groups of readers using us to discover books — and this strategy has helped us to grow and foster a diverse audience of readers with wide-ranging interests and perspectives across BookBub and Chirp.
To ensure that we’re successfully tailoring our offerings to a broad group of readers, we run an annual demographic survey of our members. After reviewing this year’s results, we are happy to report scores from historically marginalized groups were largely in line with scores from our overall audience, who tend to report very positive experiences with BookBub and Chirp. Specifically, BIPOC readers continued to give BookBub and Chirp high satisfaction scores, and LGBTQ+ readers’ satisfaction scores were high as well, even increasing from the previous year.
We strive to provide a great experience for all readers, including those with accessibility needs, so we are very intentional about following industry best practices related to accessibility. Happily, our surveys showed that our readers and listeners with visual impairments also rated us highly.
Our survey results indicated that by focusing on new audiences in our marketing efforts, we can reach new groups of readers that have been underrepresented among our audience in the past, allowing us to achieve increasingly proportional representation of these groups in our member base. We’re excited to continue this work, and through a variety of strategies we aim to continue growing a diverse audience of readers in the regions we serve in the coming year.
Our industry and our community
In 2024 we also maintained our focus on giving more authors an opportunity to find success in publishing. We continued our yearslong relationship with We Need Diverse Books, an organization that works to diversify publishing and advance equity in the industry. We sponsored their annual Walter Dean Myers Awards, honoring diverse children’s literature, for the fourth year in a row, and financially supported their Black Creatives Fund programming. We are also working with We Need Diverse Books to offer supplemental programming for their Internship Grant cohort and programming for independent and hybrid authors who are part of the Black Creatives Fund.
Our longstanding partnership with Hack.Diversity has also continued — we are delighted to have three alums of their Fellowship program on our team as full-time engineers, along with another summer Fellow. We also continue to participate in their slate of Racial Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion programming.
Finally, we’ve continued to support 826 Boston in their mission to support the writing and literacy needs of students in Boston, and regularly work with Prison Book Program in their efforts to support currently incarcerated people by sending them books and print resources.
Looking ahead
We’re humbled to share the small part we’re able to play in advancing equity and inclusion in our industry and our community, and we’re grateful for the support and collaboration this community has provided over the past few years. We’re excited about the progress we’ve seen so far, and anticipate more meaningful strides in the future. We would love your feedback on these efforts — if you have any comments to share about our ongoing work, we’d be grateful to hear from you via this form, which you can complete anonymously. Thank you, as always, for your support!
