Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Bloomsbury

Gender diversity at Bloomsbury

We have a diverse workforce and management team led by a gender diverse Board. The majority of senior managers and employees worldwide in the Group are women. The number of employees by each gender as at 29 February 2024 is shown here:

Activities of the Staff Networks during 2023/2024 include:

• The Accessibility Network marked Disability History Month in November and December with author talks from Clayton A. Copeland, Selina Mills, and Samantha Baines, as well as hosting a fundraising cake sale for Sense.
• The Bloom Network focused on in-person events and creating connections across the Company, with a memorable focus
• on Black History Month. They also continued their successful Bloom Buddy Scheme, matching new starters with other ethnically diverse colleagues for guidance and support.
• The Mental Health Network created weekly virtual coffee catch- ups for all network members to try to tackle the loneliness and isolation felt by some when working remotely.
• Our Parents, Guardians & Carers Network ran several events for the network. They held an event with Frances Cushway,  The Maternity Coach, and Ian Dinwiddy, Inspiring Dads, entitled ‘Parenthood: The Ultimate Personal Development Opportunity’, highlighting how the skills developed in parenthood benefit not only parents as individuals but the workplace as a whole. They also hosted an event with Bloomsbury author Jen Gale on ‘How to Have a Crap-Free Sustainable Christmas’, for those looking to cut the amount of plastic during the festive season and improve their carbon footprint.
• Our Pride Network celebrated Pride Month with a series of events both for the members and the wider Company including book swaps and a special Pride-themed quiz with teams from the whole Company taking part.
• In the US, throughout the year we spotlighted important heritage/pride months with talkers – including historical information and Bloomsbury book features that are relevant to each month and initiative.
• All Staff Networks have formulated Mission Statements.

Publishing Assistant Apprenticeship

The Publishing Assistant Apprenticeship, run in association with LDN Apprenticeships, continues to offer an alternative route into publishing for candidates who are typically from a socio-economic background under-represented in publishing. In October 2023, we welcomed seven new apprentices, and in November 2023, we won Apprenticeship Employer Provider of the Year Award at the AIM’s inaugural Empowering Futures Conference and Awards.

Widening Access - publishing diverse voices

In 2023/2024, we developed several initiatives not only to support diverse creators to be published, but also to encourage talented individuals to pursue careers in publishing. We know that diversifying our output, supported by the work of a diverse employee base, will enhance our lists and help to improve the long- term outlook of publishing as an industry. As part of our ongoing relationship with The Black Writers’ Guild in the UK, we donated £20,000 in support of the Guild’s work, designated to support the hardship measures to assist writers in the Black Writers’ Guild.

Academic

Bloomsbury Academic Writing Fellowship

Supporting the UK academic community is vitally important for Bloomsbury. In 2023, we launched the Bloomsbury Academic Writing Fellowship to uncover new authors who have started their work but are not yet ready to submit to a publisher. The Fellowship aims to widen the talent pool in order to give the new voices a platform and is the first initiative of its kind in the UK academic community.

In its first year, the Fellowship was open to UK-based authors and researchers with African or African Caribbean heritage, with the aim of expanding the remit as the programme grows. In all, there were 12 shortlisted submissions out of a total of 67 applications and the successful Fellow Tionne Alliyah Parris, based at the University of Hertfordshire, will receive support throughout 2024: an editorial mentorship, £1,000 financial support, practical resources and event and networking opportunities.

Bloomsbury Academic Widening Representation Pilot Programme

Continuing our support of the UK academic community, Bloomsbury launched a new Widening Representation Pilot Programme which ran in 2023/2024 with the aim of making our publishing more inclusive, equitable and diverse. The Programme, running until July, offers financial support for publishing-related costs to academic authors who may not otherwise be in a position to publish their works. This includes early career scholars, scholars in precarious employment, authors for whom English is not their first language, and authors who have accessibility requirements. Funding is available for any of the areas in which the Division publishes and funding available per title is capped at £1,500/$1,850 (USD) for the pilot period. The ambition of the Programme is to further diversify the authors and the works published by the Division, by improving access for hitherto underrepresented groups.

Open Access

Bloomsbury Open Collections, an innovative pilot programme launched in 2023/2024, is a subscribe-to-open type model for scholarly monographs. The aim was to provide a route for Bloomsbury books in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences to publish open access immediately on publication without the need for author-side fees. An alternative to more traditional Open Access models, which typically rely on an individual or their funder or institution paying a fee (or “book processing charge”) to cover the costs of publishing, this collective-action approach seeks to spread the cost more equitably across multiple institutions.

60 libraries signed up and 89% of participating institutions were based in the US and UK. We are making ten frontlist titles in African Studies and International Development open access (OA) over the next year, having prioritised authors based in the Global South. We have enabled OA for Bloomsbury authors for whom it would not have been possible under a fee model. As these titles are all additional to our existing OA programme, we are helping to amplify their voices and secure worldwide access to their work, without requiring fees or fee waiver requests from these authors.

Lawscot Foundation

Bloomsbury continues to support a Scots Law bursary with the Lawscot Foundation. The Foundation supports 10-12 academically talented students from less-advantaged backgrounds in Scotland each academic year. Bloomsbury supplies these students with our full suite of Scots Law textbooks, which would otherwise cost each recipient over £1,000. New editions are supplied at no extra cost. This is additional to an annual grant of £2,500, mentoring, networking and work experience opportunities. Further details of our charitable donations can be found in the following pages.

Consumer

Writers’ Mentorship Programme

Work is also underway in our Consumer Division. In July 2023, Bloomsbury Adult Editorial announced the Writers’ Mentorship Programme, a one-year coaching scheme for under-represented fiction writers in the UK. Focused on longevity, the programme aims to break down barriers and help these new voices establish long-lasting careers. The programme is open to people of colour, those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, those living with a disability and those from the LGBTQ+ community. Bloomsbury received 800 entries in the first year and announced its first winner, Alice McCusker, in March 2024.

Writers & Artists: Accessible to All

Bloomsbury’s Writers & Artists community (www.writersandartists. co.uk) offers up to £4,000 of financial assistance as part of its accessibility scheme, ensuring that opportunities are available to underrepresented and low-income writers and illustrators. The role of Writers & Artists (W&A) is to put aspiring authors and illustrators in touch with the publishing industry, offering practical, impartial guidance as well as working with established authors to offer advice on the creative process. The W&A website makes hundreds of advice articles on the writing and publishing process available for free, and features a range of editing services, events and writing courses. In 2023/2024, 203 writers benefited from the W&A accessibility scheme through a combination of events, writing courses and editing services.

Cocoa Girl Magazine Partnership

We are delighted that Bloomsbury Children’s Books and Cocoa Magazine have announced a partnership that aims to demystify the publishing industry and demonstrate to children the career paths that could be available to them in the future. The partnership will run inspirational and informative content in each quarterly issue of Cocoa Magazine, alongside a competition that gives children the opportunity to see their own writing in print. The goal is to show children that turning a hobby into a career is an attainable possibility, with each quarterly issue of Cocoa Magazine debunking a different department within the publishing process, including editorial, design, sales, marketing and publicity.

Working with Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) Talking Books Library

In February 2023, Bloomsbury donated our entire audio book list to the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) Talking Books Library. The new collection includes an estimated 600 titles and, moving forward, every future Bloomsbury audio book will be added to the RNIB Library.

Our Accessibility Working Group has continued to review ebook and online accessibility to be in line with industry standard regulations by 2025.

Bloomsbury Publishing x Lit in Colour

We became an official partner of the Lit in Colour initiative in early 2022 alongside race equality think tank The Runnymede Trust. The Lit in Colour initiative aims to support schools in diversifying the teaching of English and to increase students’ access to texts by writers of colour and from minority ethnic backgrounds.

Bloomsbury commissioned research into the current landscape of teaching plays and drama in schools. A teacher posed a single question to Bloomsbury: Can you recommend a play by a writer of colour? This was the foundation for the programme. In November 2023 Bloomsbury launched 'The (Incomplete) Lit in Colour Play List' with 57 plays. The list will be updated and published annually with an eventual 172 plays. It has been compiled in collaboration with Faber and Nick Hern Books. The List represents an agnostic approach from the three leading play publishers in the UK with all plays suitable for study with secondary school students aged 11-18 and includes highlighted plays that feature on exam boards' set text lists.

Lit in Colour won Outstanding Drama Initiative at the 2024 Music and Drama Education Awards, where the judges were impressed with the wide-reaching change in syllabus content that has happened as a result of this inspiring project.

Publishing diverse voices – one book at a time

We aim for our authors, illustrators and creative talent to match, at a minimum, national census data on Black, Asian, and multi-ethnic representation in the US. 2023 was the first year that Bloomsbury asked authors, illustrators and creative talent to complete a survey focusing on capturing ethnicity data on a voluntary basis, enabling us to monitor progress against our DE&I Action Plan and objectives. In our action plan we had an ambition that we wanted Black and minority ethnic groups to represent in 20% of new authors in the UK and 35% of new authors in the US. Based on voluntary author responses, we have reached 15.6% in the UK and 22% in the US. Bloomsbury is proud to publish a range of titles from an international and ethnically diverse author base, many of whom address issues of social justice and representation in their writing.

Supporting education

Books are one of the most powerful tools for educating and shaping young minds, so we work with a range of education partners to ensure that the power of books and the imagination of our authors reach and benefit students of all ages and from all backgrounds. Please see Our Communities on the following pages for details on how our charitable donations of books, money and colleagues’ time support these goals.