Living within five miles of Stanford University, I often attend talks there that are open to the public. I recently went to a Stanford Asian Pacific American Alumni Club (SAPAAC) and Stanford’s Asian American Student Association sponsored panel discussion: Owning our Narrative: Conversations with the First Asian American Publishing House, Third State Books, This talk featured the founders and authors of Third State Books, a new publishing house focused exclusively on amplifying Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander voices and stories.
The panelists included (above: from left to right):
- Charles Kim, Co-Founder and President of Third State Books and a Stanford lecturer.
- Stephanie Lim, Co-Founder & CEO of Third State Books.
- Eric Toda, Third State Author, Global Head of Social Marketing at Meta
- Dion Lim, Third State Author and a two-time Emmy Award–winning TV news anchor and reporter for ABC7 News in San Francisco
- Norman Chen, CEO of The Asian American Foundation, a Third State Books Partner
Before the talk, I didn’t really know that much about the book publishing industry except that I was briefly involved with ebooks back in the early 2000s when I worked for Adobe (and was even quoted in a Harvard Business School case). Charles Kim has been in the publishing industry for over thirty years and first gave a high level overview of the industry hat really got me fired up early in the event. Here are some facts he cited about the U.S. publishing landscape and how consolidated the book industry is:
- “Big 5” publishers control 60% to 70% of English-language book sales
- Publishing is centered in New York City – majority minority (over 70%+ non-white, but the “Big 5″is 85% white)
- 80% to 90% of book agents, editors, marketing, librians, etc are white – and are more white the more senior the role in the book industry
- African Americans are approximately 14% of the U.S. population and there are over 100 publishing houses focused on African American authors and stories, etc.
- Asian Americans are growing to almost 7% of the U.S. population – and Third State Books is the first publishing house focused on Asian American authors and stories.
- Book publishing is a $26 billion industry in the United States (U.S. domestic box office theater revenue in 2023 was $9 billion, peaked at $11 billion pre-pandemic)
This got me really mad, like almost like when I first started going to political events in the San Francisco Bay Area and not seeing any politically active Asian Americans (which has started to change). As Charles had stated, there should be more!
