LatinaLista — “We don’t need more Latino authors. We need more Latino acquisition editors.” It’s a bold statement by a woman by the name of Marcela Landres but one that reveals the crux of the problem as to why Latino writers are so underrepresented among the major publishing houses.
It’s a problem Landres knows intimately since she was among the first Latina editors at Simon & Schuster. Landres, who today is a freelance editor and book consultant, the co-founder of Comadres & Compadres Writers Conference and publisher of Latinidad®, “an award-winning e-zine which was chosen as one of the 101 Best Web Sites for Writers by Writer’s Digest Magazine,” shares lessons learned as an editor from her 2010 e-book “How Editors Think: The Real Reason They Rejected You” in a podcast with writer Jeff Rivera.
At a time when there is greater awareness of the shortage of writers of color in the publishing industry, it helps to get an ‘inside’ perspective on not just improving the odds on the way to getting published but beating them.
