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IN CONVERSATION WITH SHELLY ROMERO Shelly Romero is a children’s literature editor who is passionate about working with BIPOC creators and traditionally marginalized authors. She is currently the Lead Editor at Cake Creative. Shelly graduated from Stephens College with a bachelor’s degree in English and attended the 2017 NYU Summer Publishing Institute. Most recently, she was an associate editor at Scholastic where she acquired MG and YA titles and worked on Goosebumps. Born and raised in Miami by Honduran parents, she now resides in New York City. When not working, you can find her rewatching her favorite horror movies. This interview has been edited for length and clarity
You’re lead editor at Cake Creative. Can you
For me the focus has always been if it's going to be queer, my
describe a typical day in the life for you?
priority is queer authors of color. I want to show that
Sure! Cake is a book packager. We're not a publisher. We create our own IP (intellectual property). We find authors, go out on submission, and then sell them to the publisher. Book packaging is very different than traditional publishing. At Scholastic I used to do quite a bit of IP work too, but their process is completely different and honestly they don’t pay authors as much as they should. But now my role at Cake is to manage the titles; mostly kid lit, but also some adult titles. I’m also developing, concepting, creating outlines, meeting with authors and seeing which ones are a right fit for the projects. Basically a lot of project managing. It’s a lot of work, but a lot of fun. Our focus is publishing traditionally marginalized authors and so a lot of our projects are centered around BIPOC, queer, disabled characters and authors.
representation because publishing does not always like that.
I’m familiar with the large conversation happening right now about representation in publishing, especially on different forms of social media. Can you discuss your shift away from Scholastic/publishing? Was this a part of it? There’s a lot of reasons why I left Scholastic, and not necessarily because of my list. I got to acquire some really amazing titles that were predominantly BIPOC authors, queer authors. But there were other reasons. Not being supported enough, and even though I had really good bosses, not being advocated for in the way I thought I should be advocated for. Not being paid what I thought I deserved. No, not what I thought I deserved. What I deserved. The industry tends to be overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly cis and straight, and this tends to leech out into all the
Was this mission something you always wanted
different areas of publishing and how that impacts your work
to pursue when beginning your publishing
and yourself. Before I wanted to leave, I thought about
journey?
staying longer but, I’m glad I didn’t because I probably would
From the get go I was very adamant about what I wanted my editorial list to look like. I started meeting with agents about 6 months in, (publishing career) and I didn’t acquire until I was about a year and a half in.
have burnt out and left publishing. (Cake) fits more in what I want to do. This is a company that wants to take care of authors of color and support them in ways they might not have been had they gone out on submission by themselves.
