BookCon is an event coming up in May in New York, in which readers will be invited to rub elbows with some of their favorite authors in exclusive signings, panels, and other events. It’s connected with BookExpo America, a yearly industry event—BookCon is the consumer portion of BEA, and basically represents the publishing industry opening their doors wide and showing readers the best of what they’ve got. Put on by ReedPOP, the organization responsible for New York ComicCon, it’s got the potential to be a really cool event.

Well, had the potential. BookCon is weeks away, but already the event looks to have a diversity issue. As Jeff O’Neal of Book Riot put it in a tweet:

There are more cats than people of color scheduled for #bookCon: thebookcon.com/guests/—
Jeff O'Neal (@readingape) April 23, 2025

There will be one cat at BookCon: the interwebs-famous Grumpy Cat. I trust you can do the math.

Particularly at issue is a marquee kidlit panel composed entirely of white men: Jeff Kinney, James Patterson, Rick Riordan, and Lemony Snicket. The complete absence of writers of color even drew criticism on Twitter from Riordan, at which point the discussion of the lack of diversity at BookCon kicked into high gear. Book Riot has been offering excellent coverage of the whole fiasco.

To the casual book reader, the discussion that often crops up around conferences and conventions—who did or didn’t get invited to sit on which panel—can often seem insidery. The shape of these conversations is inevitably influenced by the fact that it’s very often other writers who are participating in them. As a result, the conversation generally focuses on those issues most relevant to writers: what voices the publishing industry values, who is given valuable platforms to speak directly to readers, and why, in a book world with only so much oxygen to go around, it is so often white men who are allowed to suck all the air out of the room.

These are relevant issues—and make no mistake, it’s not just writers and industry insiders to whom these issues are relevant. Diversity should matter to readers, too. The lack of diversity at BookCon isn’t just unfair to writers of color. It represents a failure to the book consumer as well.

Let me make this more personal. I’m not an industry insider. I live in Minnesota—flyover country to most people in the book biz. There’s no way I’m going to make it out for BookCon. But the lack of diversity at BookCon still matters to me.

See, what I am above all is a reader. I read a lot. I don’t exclusively read kid lit, but I read a lot of it—maybe about a quarter to a third of the 40-50 books I average every year. I love authors and publishers. They entertain me and challenge me and teach me, and in exchange I’ve given them lots of my money over the years.

But the lack of diversity at BookCon makes me mad, because to me it represents a way that the book industry has failed me. I want to read more diverse voices—more women, more people of color, more authors who speak to LGBT experience. That’s something that matters to me as a reader, as a consumer of the product that the book industry provides so well. And I know that those writers, those books, are out there.

But I can’t shake the feeling that the publishing industry has done a poor job of putting those books in front of me. When I want to find diverse voices, I have to go looking for them. I scour Goodreads lists and message boards; I look to sites like Book Riot; I ask for recommendations on Twitter. These are valuable resources—but why, I wonder, are publishers making us hunt for this stuff? Forget representation for a minute, this is just business: if it’s diversity the consumers want, why isn’t the publishing industry giving it to us? More importantly, why isn’t it giving it to kids and teens, who will live in a more diverse and open world than any adult has ever known? Who are, by simple virtue of the world they’ve grown up in, far more interested in diverse voices than we adults give them credit for?

The people who will pay to go to BookCon for access to their favorite authors aren’t casual readers—they’re power-readers, the ones who really love books. They’re the kind of boots-on-the-ground readers who create the next bestsellers by sheer force of their evangelism: “You’d love this book I just read,” “You’ll never guess this amazing writer I just discovered!” Putting these kinds of readers in contact with a diverse pool of writers representing a variety of vital voices in lit could’ve been a really great thing—for writers and readers alike.

Sigh. Maybe next year.