WHO GETS TO DECIDE WHAT “GOOD WRITING” IS?

This essay is part of our ongoing examination of publishing systems and editorial power in Black and Caribbean literature.

Publishing standards hide behind taste, neutrality, and inherited ideas of quality in the publishing industry.

Publishing industry power hides behind taste. Behind standards. Behind claims of objectivity that collapse under scrutiny. What is considered “good writing” is rarely neutral—it reflects who has historically been allowed to decide.

The question sounds abstract until you trace it backward. Who trained the editors? Who wrote the style guides? Who decided that certain sentence structures signal sophistication while others signal error? Who determined that some dialects need translation and others are already universal? The answers are not mysterious. They’re just unspoken. Literary standards carry the fingerprints of their makers, even when those makers are long gone.

Good writing, in the dominant framework, means writing that confirms what gatekeepers already believe good writing sounds like. It means prose that moves the way they were taught prose should move. It means structures that feel familiar because they match the structures those gatekeepers absorbed before they had language to question them.

This is not conspiracy. It’s inheritance. And like most inheritances, it carries forward the values—and the exclusions—of those who came before.

Black-owned publishers and Caribbean presses operate outside those inherited hierarchies. That independence is often framed as marginal. In reality, it is corrective.

When I started Maroon House Press, I wasn’t trying to prove that Caribbean writing could meet existing literary standards. Black Caribbean literature represents a complete and ongoing literary tradition, not a deviation from dominant Western canons.

I was trying to build a space where different standards could apply—standards that emerged from Caribbean literary traditions, from Black storytelling practices, from the specific intelligence of voices that have been told for generations that they needed fixing.

The industry doesn’t like to talk about this directly. It prefers the language of quality, as if quality were self-evident rather than constructed. A manuscript gets rejected not because it challenges the reader’s assumptions but because it doesn’t work. Doesn’t work for whom? By what measure? These questions get waved away. The rejection stands. Publishing gatekeeping disguises itself as quality control.

I’ve seen the rejection letters. The feedback that praises voice while questioning structure. The editorial notes that suggest smoothing out exactly what makes the work distinctive. The agents who say they loved the writing but don’t know how to position it. Position it where? In a market that has already decided what Caribbean literature publishing should look and sound like? In a category that was built without this work in mind?

The positioning problem is real, but it’s not the writer’s problem. It’s the industry’s. A system that can’t figure out how to sell brilliant work is a broken system, not a reflection of the work’s value.

Publishing standards or power in publishing follows predictable patterns of access. The internships that require living in expensive cities on minimal pay. The networking that happens at conferences and parties and industry events that cost money to attend. The mentorships that flow through existing relationships, replicating who already has access. The submissions process that assumes familiarity with unwritten rules—what to include, what to omit, how to pitch, whom to approach.

None of this is explicitly exclusionary. All of it functions to exclude.

Black writers, Caribbean writers, writers from outside the traditional pipelines—they enter this system already behind. Not in talent. Not in preparation. In access. In the accumulated advantage that accrues to those whose presence in publishing spaces has never been questioned.

And then, when those writers don’t break through at the same rates, the industry shrugs. The work just wasn’t ready. The market just wasn’t there. Quality, again, doing the work of politics without admitting it. Publishing gatekeeping at its most invisible.

Maroon House Press rejects that framing. Power in publishing must be questioned, redistributed, and named. Otherwise, the industry will continue to confuse dominance with excellence.

Naming is the first step. Saying plainly that literary standards are not neutral. That taste is trained. That what feels like intuition to an editor is actually ideology absorbed so deeply it no longer announces itself. This isn’t an accusation—it’s an observation. Everyone who works in publishing carries these inheritances. The question is whether we examine them or let them run unchecked.

Redistribution is harder. It means building institutions that don’t rely on the existing gatekeepers for validation. It means creating pathways for writers who would otherwise be filtered out by systems designed, however unintentionally, to filter them out. It means defining success differently—not by whether mainstream publishing eventually notices, but by whether the work reaches its readers, builds its community, contributes to its tradition.

Publishing Standards Are Not Neutral

Black-owned publishers do this work constantly, often without resources, often without recognition. We operate in the gaps the industry leaves. We catch what the industry drops. And we do it knowing that our success will likely be framed as niche, as marginal, as supplementary to the real work happening elsewhere.

Publishing standards function as inherited taste cultures, not impartial measures of literary merit.

But the real work is here. The real work has always been here—in the small presses, the independent houses, the community-based publishing projects that keep literary traditions alive when mainstream publishing can’t be bothered.

The question of who decides what good writing is has material consequences. It determines which books get published, which writers get paid, which stories reach readers, which voices shape the culture. When that power concentrates in institutions that have never adequately served Black and Caribbean writers, the cost is not abstract. It’s counted in careers that never launch, books that never exist, traditions that thin when they should be flourishing.

These publishing standards are inherited systems of taste, not objective measures of literary value.

I’m not interested in asking permission from those institutions. I’m not interested in proving that Caribbean literature deserves space within their frameworks. The literature already exists. The tradition is already rich. What’s needed is not approval but infrastructure—our own presses, our own distribution networks, our own critical conversations that don’t depend on external validation.

This is what Maroon House is building. Not a petition to the industry. A parallel structure. A place where the question of what makes good writing gets answered by people who have actually lived inside the traditions being judged. Caribbean literature publishing, done right.

The gatekeepers will continue to gatekeep. They’ll continue to mistake their preferences for principles, their training for truth. That’s fine. They can have their standards. We’ll have ours.

And when readers find work that speaks to them—work that was rejected elsewhere for not fitting, not positioning well, not meeting standards it was never trying to meet—they won’t care about the industry’s definitions. They’ll care about the words on the page. The voice that feels like recognition. The story that finally tells what other stories couldn’t.

That’s the measure. Not what the gatekeepers approve. What the readers receive.

Power in publishing is real. It shapes what gets made and what gets lost. But power is not permanent. It shifts when alternatives become viable, when new institutions take root, when writers stop waiting for validation that was never coming and start building their own.

Maroon House Press is one small part of that shift. There are others—Black-owned publishers across the diaspora doing the same work, building the same infrastructure. Together, we’re not asking who gets to decide what good writing is. We’re answering. We’re deciding. And we’re publishing the proof.