Twinja Book Reviews, a website whose mission is to fight to bring multiculturalism to YA fantasy and science fiction novels, asked Ayanna Coleman of QSLA to answer a few questions. Here’s one below.

The word on the streets is that publishers are LOOKING for more diversity in books, but the amount of books released with multicultural themes is greatly lower than ones that aren’t…..What gives???

Publishing houses are companies. Companies filled with well-intentioned employees, but still companies with bottom lines. If there’s a pervasive thought within the industry that yes, diversity in books is an overall good thing, but diverse books don’t sell, then why would publishers invest money in creating more of them? Then, when they do publish books with characters deviating from the norm, they aren’t seeing the sales that they’d hoped for. Why is this? Is it because the publishers are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where they don’t invest time and money into books and therefore they don’t do well or is it something more? Either way, I do believe publishers want more diversity but the above thought is part of the reason we aren’t seeing more come through the pipeline.

–Ayanna Coleman, We’re almost to the end!- Ayanna Coleman from Quill Shift Literary sits down with Twinja Book Reviews!

Check out the full Q&A here.