Natasha Onwuemezi

I was in Berlin the other day. There is a world-famous club (Berghain) and a world-famous bouncer (Sven) who stands between a night (or morning) of pulsing beats, slick sweat and sensational (I imagine) vibes. The door policy is notoriously opaque – and you can be turned away with a flick of the wrist without explanation or apology, even after you have spent hours queuing. My friends and I were short on time (and rejection tolerance), so we decided not to even try.

I found myself thinking about it while compiling this year’s Black Publishing Focus because it mirrors what the book trade has been asking Black writers, readers and publishing professionals to do for years: invest time and effort in an industry whose judgements depend on who is on the door.

But some persist. They are featured in this issue: Marcia Hutchinson, the debut novelist whose manuscript was rejected 54 times, with many editors praising the writing before passing; Angela Flournoy, the author who waited a decade to find a UK publisher for her debut, fielding rejections that questioned whether her characters were relatable enough; Que the Wolf, the book club founder who saw how little visibility Black and diverse authors were receiving, and wanted to champion their stories. We know about these stories because these people persisted, but what about those who do not?

Black authors’ works account for just 1.2% of the UK’s top 5,000 bestselling titles so far this year, according to the NielsenIQ BookScan data. Across the board, the share of total market value held by Black authors has fallen from 1.6% in 2025 to 0.9% in 2026. These are the numbers of an industry in retreat, and they land six years after publishing collectively declared that things were going to change. 

A recurring theme throughout this issue is taste as a gatekeeping mechanism, determining which stories are considered publishable, and who considers themselves suited to publish them. While the existence of gatekeepers is not, in itself, a problem – books cannot be published without people making decisions – the issue is how decisions are made, and in the narrow range of experiences that shape them. Bengono Bessala, the former senior commissioning editor turned literary agent, names the smoke and mirrors of acquisitions meetings, the lobbying needed to get a book to the table and the ways personal experience can influence what is published. Hutchinson experienced it firsthand: turned down by a publisher who already had a Windrush title on its list and by an editor who did not feel they were the right person to champion it.

As Cassava Republic’s Bibi Bakare-Yusuf puts it, taste is never neutral. It is socialised, formed within particular worlds, institutions, educations, class positions. It determines which stories are seen as universal, which readers are catered for and which editors feel confident advocating for a manuscript. When the same manuscript travels through 54 rooms and repeatedly hears “no”, that begins to look less like a collection of individual decisions and more like a structural pattern. That is where taste becomes power.

Symeon Brown, whose new book draws on more than 1,500 interviews with Britain’s Black middle class, told me he was not against gatekeepers in publishing, he just wished we had better ones. Somewhere between the writer who is rejected 54 times and the one who never submits in the first place is where the real cost of bad gatekeeping lives. Sven, at least, is honest about what he is doing.

Pieces from the full issue can be read here.