If you ask me, by far one of the coolest things to happen to publishing in the 21st century so far is We Need Diverse Books — a grassroots coalition of authors, bloggers, librarians, educators, and industry folks coming together to “advocate essential changes in the publishing industry to produce and promote literature that reflects and honors the lives of all young people.”

The organization’s mission is to “put more books featuring diverse characters into the hands of all children” and its vision is “a world in which all children can see themselves in the pages of a book.”

Simply put: it’s a group that’s inspiring as heck. And you know what I wish? I wish the adult publishing world would get inspired by We Need Diverse Books and do something similar for grown-up books.

Because in the same way that that it’s essential for children to see kids like themselves reflected back to them in the books they read, it’s essential for adults to have books that reflect back their own experiences and those of their people.

And in the same way that diverse books help children learn the about the lives of people different from themselves, so too do adults need a greater understanding of lives different from their own. Both children and adults need constant reminders that different isn’t wrong, that the true nature of our world is one of variety and multiplicity, that fear of otherness is our enemy and empathy our one true purpose.

We need diverse adult fiction. We need diverse art books (my own personal bailiwick as an editor). We need diverse history, and spirituality, and humor, and celebrity memoirs. We need diverse books about everything and everybody because books are for everybody.

Do diverse adult books already exist? Of course they do. But could we do better? Of course we could. Just go back to the statistics about who works in publishing — the industry is 79% white — and it’s clear it’s an imperfect system.

So consider this a rallying cry. If you work in adult publishing and are reading this; or if you’re an adult book author or librarian or blogger or anyone who feels inspired by what We Need Diverse Books is doing on the children’s side and, like me, wishes we had some equivalent thing on the adult side, get in touch!

As Toni Morrison said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Maybe the same thing is true here. If there’s a grassroots organization you wish existed but has yet to be created, then you must create it. Who’s with me?

The Power of Liking

How do you know what you like? Yes, what do you like?

Embedded in that seemingly simple question is actually a pretty subversive notion — namely that it matters what you actually, personally, like. That you should be going out and looking at stuff, not because it is the important stuff that this or that person — the newspaper art critic, the museum curator, the culture blogger, your college art history professor, your mom — says you should be looking at (should be admiring, should be appreciating, should be talking about, should be familiar with, so that when other people talk about it you don’t feel stupid), but rather because, gosh darn it, you like it.

We all remember liking, right? As in, the way you like a boy or a girl when you’re a teenager, like you like them like them. It might make you giddy, it might make you vaguely nauseous, but the main point is that it makes you feel, and feeling that feeling of feeling feels good. It’s an art crush. That’s art happiness, right there. And to find it you must become your own tastemaker.

“Anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.” — David Whyte

Be Your Own Tastemaker

There’s a lot to be said for the concept of the taste­maker. Someone who spends a lot of time looking at and thinking about art — be they a gallerist, curator, arts journalist, art blogger, or collector — is going to be famil­iar with a ton of artists and their work and, as such, is going to be able to introduce you to loads of things you might not have stumbled upon on your own. Which is great, cool. That’s a resource, and by all means, use it.

But here’s the thing: Only you can know when a work of art is working for you. Only you know what you like. Only you know what gives you pleasure. Only you know what makes you think and feel and see. Someone else can only make your taste if you let them. And they can never make it as well as you can yourself. So why let them?

Trust yourself. Trust your taste. Trust your capacity to cultivate and grow and develop and make your own taste. Take recommendations from others, sure, but ultimately allow the buck to stop with you yourself. Have the courage to articulate to yourself what you do and do not like. Have the courage to challenge and stretch yourself. And ultimately have the courage to be your own tastemaker.

Trust Your Instincts

In practical terms, being your own tastemaker means learning to trust your instincts. What instincts are those, you might ask? Oddly enough, the metaphors for under­standing such instincts are nearly always bodily, such as the fanciful notion that there are certain receptors in your brain that certain works of art — and only those certain works of art — can fit into. Or that certain works of art jump out at you and sear themselves into the back of your retinas. That certain artworks give you chills, make you gasp, make your jaw drop.

These are the same quasi-physical instincts that tell us when we’re romantically attracted to someone, when someone would make a good friend for us, when to take a gamble, when a job’s worth staying at, when things are about to get a whole lot more interesting.

Some people are a lot better at trusting their instincts than others. But nearly everyone could use a bit of practice at trusting them when it comes to matters of aesthetic taste. We’ve all heard it said so many times that liking this or that thing — jazz, white walls, dry white wine — marks us out as smart and sophisticated that we have a really hard time not believing it. But deep down we know what we like and what we don’t like — the same way we know whether we like or dislike mushrooms. We know what gives us a thrill and what doesn’t. What we agree is amazing and what we secretly think is overrated. And that’s what we should practice trusting. Does this mean we should never stretch ourselves? Of course not. If we all only ever stuck with what we already know we like we’d all still be consuming nothing but macaroni and cheese and apple juice. But that’s the beauty of instincts. They not only tell you what you like and don’t like right now; they can also be a beacon, drawing you toward the next thing you could learn to like, your next palate-expanding adventure. If you just learn to heed that almost physical tug and follow where it leads.

“If you see something, say something.” — Department of Homeland Security

Finding Words for What You Like

Ok, so how do we make our taste? Follow our instincts? Well, one very good way is through language. Say you spend Saturday afternoon at a museum or your lunch hour browsing art blogs, and somewhere in there you see something you really like. Something that makes your eyes and brain light up like a Christmas tree. Use your words. You could actually write it down, or tell a friend, or you could just articulate it to yourself inside your head.

What is the artist’s name?
Frida Kahlo.

To what period/era/style/movement does she belong?
Twentieth-century Mexican surrealism.

In simple terms, what is it you like about the art?
The colors. The strangeness. The feeling it gives me.

Dig a little deeper. What about the colors?
Their vibrancy.

What about the subject?
Its female-centeredness.

What does it make you feel?
Curiosity. Fear. Bliss.

Just use regular old English for now. In time you may pick up some more technical language, but it’s not important at this stage. Just from the short self-interview above, you already have half a dozen leads to follow: Kahlo, surrealism, Mexican art, vibrancy, feminism, emotiveness.

As you start looking at more and more art, you can use the descriptive words to start to triangulate. Which of those factors do you find yourself drawn to consistently? Maybe you’ll find you have a thing for twentieth-century Mexican painting. Maybe you’ll find you don’t give a crap about time or place, but you really care about use of color. Maybe you’ll find five of those six leads are dead ends, and you really just like Kahlo. Either which way you are using language as blocks from which to construct the palace of your own taste. And that is a tremendous thing.

“. . . so good, and so twisty, and so shadowy, and so chewy, and so boomerangy, that it requires the forging of a new word for ‘beauty.’” — Nicholson Baker

If Words Fail

So, yes, it’s very useful to use your words. But it is also the case that sometimes words will fail you. And that’s ok. There are two main reasons this might happen:

The first, and best, is that you are just so blown away by something that words actually fail you. You just stand there with your mouth hanging open. And if someone were to come up to you and demand you put into language why it is you like so much this thing you’re looking at, you would not be able to give them a coherent answer no matter how hard you tried. Well, congratulations! You are having a more or less transcendent experience, and that beats, hands down, the opportunity to add one more brick to your language-based palace of knowledge.

Other times language might fail you not because you’ve had your socks knocked off but simply because you lack the necessary information. Say you see a painting you like used as décor in the lobby of a public building, or spot a cool mural from the window of a moving train, or notice some beautiful, anonymous hand-lettering used in an ad in a magazine. So you don’t know who made this thing, and there’s no easy way to figure out what style or school or movement it’s a part of, and maybe you even saw it so briefly you’re not even sure exactly what it was about it that caught your eye. Well that’s ok too.

Simply, the more you appreciate the better.

Even when you lack the words to say why it is you like what you like, you are training your brain to like, to like what it likes, and to know what it likes. And major kudos are due to you for that.

There are numerous ways for anyone to enjoy art…so many, in fact, that I wrote a book about it! You can find How Art Can Make You Happy here, published by Chronicle Books—it’s full of tips on how to visit museums, talk about art at cocktail parties, and how to let art wake you up to the world around you.

How to Find the Art You Like was originally published in Open Book on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Realizing you’re a grown-up is a little bit like realizing you have a super power. You’re just going along about your business when unexpectedly something clicks and the truth is revealed to you. I remember the exact moment when I suddenly understood that I possessed the power of adulthood.

It was a few weeks after my twenty-seventh birthday, and I was meeting some friends after work at a bar. I’m a compulsively punctual person, and the place was just around the corner from my office, so I arrived first and was guessing my pals wouldn’t be joining me for at least another twenty minutes or so, maybe longer.

I got a glass of wine and looked around for someplace to sit. The establishment was crowded and finding a spot was going to be tricky. I wandered through the scrum without much hope of getting a table, when what should I see but the perfect seating area: a nice big sofa and an armchair with a coffee table in between, totally empty and just waiting for me and my friends to sit down and relax. I hesitated by the arm of the couch and had a little conversation with myself:

“I don’t know. Can I do this? Can I sit here in this great big area that’s clearly meant for like six people, all by myself for like half an hour holding down the fort until everyone else gets here? While loads of other patrons mill around and look for seats and maybe glare at me? Can I get away with this?”

And that’s when it happened. A voice I’d never heard before, my own grown-up voice in my mind, answered me loud and clear. Nearly fifteen years later I still remember exactly what it said:

“I’m twenty-seven years old! I can do whatever I want!”

I dropped my bag and jacket on the chair; sat down on the couch; put my wine on the table. I think I may even have crossed my legs, leaned back, and stretched my arms out along the back of the sofa like an evil nineteen-eighties movie business man.

I sat there for half an hour, sipping my wine and people watching until my friends arrived. No one else in the place paid even the slightest iota of attention to me. I was embodying one of the great, most wonderfully freeing lessons of being a grown-up: 95% of the time no one is looking at you!

The reason teenagers are embarrassed by their mothers’ unfashionable blue jeans or goofy laughs is that they, mistakenly, think they are the center of the universe and that everyone, everywhere, is looking at them all the time. And not only looking at them, but also judging them, harshly.

For me to realize my grown-up status in that moment meant simultaneously allowing myself to believe, on the one hand, that I deserved to take up more space in the world and, on the other hand, that I neither deserved, nor would receive, the unrelenting attention of the people around me. And I was lucky enough, in that particular time and place, to have both of those things be true. I was granted the privilege of being met with indifference.

I love this memory because, to me, it sums up the perks of being a grown-up perfectly: you are free to do what you want, and strangers probably care about you much less than you previously thought — sit down, get comfy, and have a glass of wine.

Explore more tips, tricks, and perks no one thought to tell you in my new book, The Secret Art of Being a Grown-Up.

The Moment I Realized I Was Indeed a Grown-Up was originally published in Open Book on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the fall of 2015, Mira Jacob wrote a piece for BuzzFeed about a speech on diversity that she attempted to deliver at a publishing industry party, to which no one listened. For a person in publishing it’s a gut-wrenchingly shameful read. And I found it all the more so because, if I worked in New York rather than in San Francisco, I’d have been at the party in question. I like to imagine that, had I in fact been there, I’d have been among the “very small ring of people” who paid attention to Jacob’s speech — but would I really? Can I be sure?

In early 2016, the results of the first-ever industry wide Diversity Baseline Survey were released, and the numbers were just as bad as we’d all feared they would be. Publishing as a whole is 79% white. Given that fact, it’s hardly surprising that books and authors are not nearly as diverse as they ought to be either. Many people in publishing care deeply about these issues and want to fix the problem, but — despite some great efforts, particularly in children’s publishing, and amplified by organizations like We Need Diverse Books — the industry as a whole continues to struggle to change.

Here at Chronicle Books, there are a number of initiatives around this topic, but meaningful change takes time. As with any social action, it’s important to divide your energy between long-term, big-picture endeavors, and smaller-scale projects that can be implemented quickly. One such smaller project I’ve been working on for the past year and a half or so is creating and maintaining a library of articles on topics related to diversity issues, and sending out a monthly newsletter of recent articles of note. Drawn from that library, here are a few of the key moments in the ongoing conversation about diversity in the publishing industry, from the tail end of 2015 through 2016. Already this year the conversation has continued to evolve, so perhaps I’ll come back here with another installment soon. For now, read on.

1. I Gave a Speech About Race to the Publishing Industry and No One Heard Me

BuzzFeed, September 17, 2015

Author Mira Jacob discusses how she gave a speech on what it means to be a writer of color at the Publisher’s Weekly Star Watch 2015 party, and very few people listened. Then, she shares the text of her speech in full, detailing her experiences with the insidious nature of discrimination.

2. Equity in Publishing: What Should Editors Be Doing

PEN America, October 14, 2015

A round-table discussion including various editors, a number of of whom work on poetry and literary journals, discussing their editorial responsibility with regards to white privilege and creating a larger, more inclusive space for writers of color in the publishing industry. An extensive resources section at the end links to a number of other useful articles.

3. AAP, UNCF Partner on Internship Program

Shelf Awareness, January 15, 2016

The Association of American Publishers is partnering with the United Negro College Fund to create a paid summer internship program, intended to place African American students from historically Black colleges and universities at a number of industry-leading publishing companies. The positions range across of departments, including editorial, marketing, publicity, and sales.

4. First Diversity Baseline Survey Illustrates How Much Publishing Lacks Diversity

Forbes, January 26, 2016

This article details the results of the first-ever Diversity Baseline Survey of the publishing industry, conducted across numerous companies in 2015 and intended to capture a demographic snapshot of current staffing. The data confirms a lack of diversity, with the industry as a whole being: 79% white, 78% female, 88% straight, and 92% nondisabled.

5. Why Publishing Is So White

Publisher’s Weekly, March 11, 2016

In response to the results of the Diversity Baseline Survey (see above), this article examines hiring practices across the publishing industry to ascertain what factors create and maintain the lack of diversity. It concludes that while publishers do care about diversity, they are not yet taking effective steps to bring about lasting change.

6. Diversity In Book Publishing Isn’t Just About Writers — Marketing Matters Too

NPR Code Switch, August 9, 2016

Discussions of diversity in book publishing tend to focus on the demographics of authors and/or editorial staff, but it’s also important to talk about the impact of marketing. Marketers need to be able to make people care about books written by minorities, which comes with its own special challenges and skill-sets.

7. The Uncomfortable Truth about Children’s Books

Mother Jones, Oct/Sept 2016

An in-depth look at the lack of protagonists of color in kid’s books. The writer concludes that the questions roiling children’s publishing are among the pressing cultural questions of our time: Whose story gets told, and who gets to tell it? How do you acknowledge oppression without being defined by it? And to what extent should writers bow to popular opinion?

7 Must-Read Articles on Diversity Within the Publishing Industry was originally published in Open Book on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ask editor Bridget Watson Payne who has been helping authors do just that for over 10 years.

A lot of people who are already well-known seem to get book deals. Do you have to be famous to pitch something to Chronicle Books?

Absolutely not. For certain kinds of projects, of course, having a “platform” (which basically means being well-known enough to have fans and followers you already connect with, and who will be interested in your book) is a huge plus. But there are plenty of other kinds of books where it really is all about the distinctiveness and awesomeness of the content — AKA your work. Humor and pop culture books are one great example of that; art, illustration, and curation can be as well. If what you’re doing is super witty, or clever, or drop-dead gorgeous, or just makes me say “yes! exactly! of course this should be a book!” then I am not going to get hung up on your level of fame or lack thereof. There are all different kinds of projects — some are author platform-driven, some are content-driven — and there’s no better or worse about that, they’re just different.

How much does your personal taste factor into which books you choose to develop?

This is a tricky one. I’ve been doing this for over a decade and some days I’m still working it out. It took me a long time to really internalize the fact that just because I love something personally, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a fit for Chronicle’s list. I don’t have to make every single project I personally like into a book because we can only make so many things, and also I (like everyone) have some weird pockets to my own taste — things I might be super into but that maybe not very many other people would dig, or where perhaps it’s for an audience that may indeed be out there but we’re not sure how to reach them. If I took on those projects, knowing on some level we weren’t the right home for them, I would be doing everyone, especially the authors, a disservice. However, there is also something to be said for honing an awareness of when I myself am indeed the ideal consumer for a particular project — if I love something, and I can envision us reaching lots of other people like me who will also love it, then that’s when my own personal taste can be really useful. So it really just becomes a question of having gradually learned over time to distinguish the parts of my taste that are super weird and niche from the parts that are more readily applicable to a wider audience.

What’s the weirdest proposal you’ve received that’s actually become a book or product?

That would probably be The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie. It’s a design book about the lingerie industry in Syria, which included undergarments that lit up, played music, and were adorned with all kinds of amazing decorations. It was one of the very first books I acquired way back when I started doing the editorial gig, almost ten years ago, and I just fell in love with the project — how strange and amazingly creative this kind of fashion design was. In retrospect I’d say this was definitely before I learned to do the thing I was just talking about — separating the very weird part of my own taste from the more widely applicable part. But in that case, hey, it worked out OK.

I’ve submitted a few times to Chronicle Books but nothing has worked out yet. How can I get truthful feedback about what would make my proposal stronger?

There are actually a few different questions to consider here. The first thing to think about is that not every project we do, not every author/publisher relationship we have, was an instant hit the very first time we were pitched something. I have a number of authors — both big-name ones and lesser known rising-stars — who sent in as many as half a dozen ideas that didn’t quite work for us before nailing the one that totally did. So to a certain extent the answer is just grit and persistence. One idea doesn’t work? Come up with another idea, and another. The great thing about being a creative person is that (barring creative blocks — and we have a book to help overcome those!) there is always more where that came from. Just keep going!

The second part, of course, is the question of how to make a book proposal stronger. I’ve got another blog post over here full of tips and tricks that might help with that. But the third aspect of your question is perhaps the most interesting of all — the part about getting truthful feedback.

As editors we try to be as truthful as possible when writing decline letters to folks about the reasons a particular project isn’t going to work for us. But we do get a ton of proposals and we don’t always have the time to give the level of detailed feedback people might like. When you’re in the situation of feeling really confident you have a great book idea, but suspecting it’s your pitch or proposal that could use some serious reworking, I would recommend talking to a literary agent or creative consultant. This is someone who can really take the time to do a deep dive with you into the pros and cons of your proposal — what’s working and what could be improved. Here are a few Chronicle alumni who could help you out:

What’s the one piece of advice that you think could most help those who dream of being published?

Don’t be discouraged by rejection, and don’t take it personally. Nearly every person with a great success story, if she’s being honest, also has dozens of rejection stories. I might almost go so far as to say that the only sure way to be told “yes” about anything (not just book proposals!) is first to be told “no” a whole bunch of times. I decline great projects all the time — not because they don’t merit publication, but simply because they are not a good fit for what Chronicle does. And I always really hope that those people will take my decline letter, not as a roadblock or a major disappointment, but as motivation — either to research more publishers and find the perfect homes for their ideas, or to cook up a new ideas to send back to me. I hope they think “I’ll show her!” and then I hope they do! Grit, tenacity, and the awareness that although, yes, you probably have poured your heart and soul into your project, it is not your heart or soul that is being rejected. A decline is simply a business decision and not a reflection on the intrinsic worth of either your project or your self. A consciousness of that is invaluable.

Ask an Art Book Editor was originally published in Open Book on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When you work in publishing all day long, you come to think of the process of making books as being this natural and organic thing that everyone understands just as intuitively as you do. But alas, many of the processes of book publishing are not familiar to the general public, or are cloaked in industry jargon, or both. Let’s demystify some of this stuff, shall we?

This is a general overview of some of the most usual publishing practices that we use around here — of course, there are always exceptions and other possible scenarios that come in to play from time to time, and other publishers may do things differently. But here are the basics of how it works here at Chronicle Books, in a dozen simple steps.

Step 1: Book Proposal

To kick things off, you send in a book proposal. Publishers have submissions guidelines telling you what to include in your proposal and how to send it. Chronicle’s submission guidelines live here. (And a handy post I wrote about how to propose an art book lives here.)

Step 2: Initial Conversations and Approval

First, there are some initial conversations between you (or your agent) and your would-be editor. If the editor likes your proposal and wants to publish it, he or she takes it to an acquisitions board meeting for official green-lighting.

Step 3: Offer

The editor is now empowered to make you an offer. This is a formal letter outlining the materials you will deliver, due dates for those deliverables, how much the publisher is offering to pay you, and other details.

The financial piece of a standard publishing offer takes the form of an advance against royalties. Anadvance is a sum you are paid upfront to help offset your costs of working on your book. Royaltiesare the percentage of the sale of each copy of the book that you earn. Down the road, when your book starts selling, the royalties on each copy go towards earning out the advance you were already paid. When enough royalties have accrued to zero out the advance, you start getting royalty checks. But even if your book never sells enough copies to earn out your advance, the advance is still yours to keep — you do not have to pay the balance back to the publisher.

Step 4: Contract

You (or your agent) negotiate a deal with your editor. Once you’ve reached an agreement you both are happy with, you virtually shake hands and you have a book deal. A contract follows several weeks later. Since the contract contains a good deal more detail (and a lot more legalese) than the offer letter did, there may now be some new points for negotiation. Once that’s done, the contract is signed and everything is official.

Step 5: Writing/Art Making

You go write a book. Or, in the case of many of my authors since I work on art books — you go make the art for a book.

Step 6: Final Draft

Your deadline rolls around and you turn in your final art and manuscript to your editor. Art takes the form of high-res reproduction-quality digital art files. A manuscript is your clean final draft of the text for your book in a Word document.

Step 7: Editing

Your editor edits your delivery. For text this means marking up your manuscript with questions and suggested changes, most likely using the track changes feature in Word. For art this can mean discussing the matters of the image edit and image sequence. Once the editor has done his or her big-picture edit, the manuscript with also go to a copyeditor to catch the smaller stuff (spelling, grammar, typos, etc.).

Step 8: Galleys

The final clean manuscript and art go to the design department to lay out the book. You, your editor, and a proofreader all review galleys. Galleys are the book all designed and laid-out, viewed either on-screen as a PDF or as paper print-outs. This is the time we all make sure no mistakes have slipped though, and that everything is making sense on the page.

Step 9: Proofs

Once we’ve gone through several rounds of galleys to make sure everything is just as it should be, we send the book files to the printer and they output color-accurate proofs. Our production department reviews the proofs in a light booth to make sure the color looks great. With my authors who are artists, I send proofs with them as well to confirm color accuracy.

Step 10: Advances

The book is printed and bound at the printer. Your book is finished! We receive advances. Advances (not to be confused with an advance) are a small number of copies of the book that are air-freighted from the printer to the publisher so that we can see the finished book as soon as possible — we send a couple of copies to you the author, and our publicity department uses advances to pitch the book to long-lead media (aka glossy magazines that determine their content 4–6 months in advance).

Step 11: Marketing and Publicity

Our publicity department and marketing department coordinate with you to make plans for the book’s release and promotion. Just like the publication process outlined above is a collaboration between author and publisher, so too is the execution of the book’s marketing and publicity plan. We reach out to the media, you reach out to your fans and followers, we work together to coordinate promotional activities specific to your project.

Step 12: You’re a Published Author

The book comes out. The world is astounded by your brightness.

PS — A word about timelines: all of the above typically takes about 1–2 years total. This sounds like a long time until you get down in it, and then the time flies by like the wind.

Photography by Irene Kim Shepherd

From Manuscript to Bookshelf: How a Book Gets Published was originally published in Open Book on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.