by Nisi Shawl, Somto Ihezue, and Zhui Ning Chang

We’re in this together. That’s what publishing has taught me over the course of decades. That’s what this project, Publishing Taught Me, continues to teach me and all my friends. You, too. All my friends; all my relations.

Publishing is a community endeavor. If we analogize it in mechanical terms, we can say it has lots of moving parts: writers, readers, editors, publishers, marketers, printers.  Reviewers, narrators.  Illustrators.  Interns.  Sellers and librarians, and I may even be forgetting a few more important elements, but my point is, publishing is multiplex as hell: it’s full of clusters of different levels of fractal expressions of itself leading to and from its major, medium, and minor iterations.

So, we really need each other. Every one of us needs to be doing our best in order to make publishing do its best.

That means we can’t just passively accept the status quo—not when that status quo excludes many people. Race-based gatekeeping, gender policing, ableist submission tools, and the like—they’ve simply got to go if we expect our publishing community to flourish.

It’s an accomplishment devoutly to be wished, and something various elements of the enterprise have tried to achieve. Have we succeeded?  Now and then. Here and there.

This anthology is both a good assessment of how well we’ve done making publishing properly inclusive, and an excellent tool for doing so.

I was approached by SFWA for my feedback on this project back in 2022, when it was first proposed to the National Endowment for the Arts. It sounded like such a great idea! The plan was to create an online anthology of essays addressing the experiences of BIPOC authors, editors, etc., as they interacted with current and established publishing practices. The SFWA volunteers and consultants who were the plan’s architects recognized that paying for the work of marginalized authors and editors makes greater participation possible, so an integral part of the plan was to offer the authors professional rates while also compensating the project’s editor and editorial interns.  Win-win! I pronounced myself delighted!

I was even more deeply delighted to learn that SFWA had chosen me to head up the anthology.

Behind the scenes, our work began.  Some of it was pretty boring: schedule checking, protocol setting, calendar clearing, that sort of stuff. Some of it was fun and easy: I named the anthology Publishing Taught Me in honor of the Twitter hashtag #publishingpaidme, one of the means by which certain inequities we wanted to talk about were revealed.

Some of the work was fun and hard. The one task that felt particularly hard to me was hiring my two editorial interns. But I’m incredibly proud of my choices: Somto Ihezue and Zhui Ning Chang. Working with them has been pure pleasure. Their hearts and heads have proven indispensable to making this anthology as wonderful as it is to read, and I’m asking them now to chime in on this introduction.

ZNC:

It has been a joy to work on this with Nisi, Somto, the SFWA team, and all our contributors. In publishing, too often we chase the young and fresh and new, and so I was especially drawn to the idea of an anthology of essays that sought to recognise, celebrate, and reflect on the experiences of those who have been fighting for years for greater equity. To contribute some small part to this endeavor, among such fine colleagues and pillars of our community, was my honor.

The selection and editing process was extremely democratic—I learned a great deal from Nisi’s open, horizontal management of the entire project, and enjoyed bouncing off Somto’s keen eye and precise notes in our collaborative editing.

Some essays, in particular, have stayed with me: Diana M. Pho’s incisive insight into the editor’s role in the publishing process, and the challenges of balancing author care and business demands; Erika Hardison and Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas’s respective recognition of the labor and love poured in by slush readers and book reviewers, to help sustain stories from opposite ends of the spectrum; the contrast of Yoon Ha Lee’s cynicism and Emily Jiang’s faith in where and how our industry and our communities move forward from here.

I hope that, wherever you are on your publishing journey, this anthology will help bring you closer to what you wish to achieve. We can’t wait to read the stories you will tell. So come, step through the door and join us.

Somto:

“Learning is a life-long journey, not a process.”

Among editors, there’s a recurring phrase: Editing is a thankless but rewarding endeavor. There’s something about working meticulously with others, exchanging thoughts and ideas, lending your guidance, and being trusted with the words and stories of authors. It intimately connects you to the work, makes you a part of the story, a part of the journey—and working on the Publishing Taught Me anthology, this connection has been the reward. I will forever be grateful to have been brought aboard this project with Nisi Shawl, Zhui Ning Chang, the SFWA team, and the fantastic and brilliant contributors who trusted us with their words. This was a fulfilling process in many ways; every minute spent with the authors and my fellow editors was enlightening and a learning moment. From Yoon Ha Lee’s work, I learned that our experiences as authors can be valid and instrumental in our storytelling. Still, they shouldn’t be a cage hoisted up by the expectations of the industry and society. In James Beamon’s call to “Take Humor Seriously,” I learned that laughter might not solve the root problem when facing tragedies, but, often, it is the right prescription to know that things will be okay. In Kanishk Tantia’s story snippets, I learned the need for honesty, substance, and authenticity in our storytelling.

Working with Nisi and Zhui Ning was a reminder that we are eternal students. Nisi’s firm and exemplary work ethic, their commitment to care, and their acknowledgment of the weight of words when approaching a text as an editor—all exemplary in every way. On the other page, there was Zhui Ning’s punctuality, enthusiasm, and thoroughness—demanding that authors interrogate every statement and maximize their words and thoughts to their fullest potential.

And to our ever-readers, as you immerse yourself in this anthology, our fervent hope is that you learn with us the many ways we tell our community’s continuing story to each other.

This is the introduction to the Publishing Taught Me: A SFWA Anthology Project. The Publishing Taught Me project is overseen by multiple award-winning editor Nisi Shawl and two editorial interns, Somto Ihezue and Zhui Ning Chang. More information on this series can be found here: Publishing Taught Me: A SFWA Anthology Project – SFWA