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The UK publishing industry in the twenty-fi rst century is one populated by high-profi le, multicultural authors. Monica Ali, Hari Kunzru, Andrea Levy and Zadie Smith have enjoyed critical and commercial success, building on the literary and marketplace achievements of postcolonial writers such as Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri and Arundhati Roy. Postcolonial and multicultural writers, and novels with multicultural characters and with postcolonial themes, have been foregrounded by the mechanisms of the industry: its marketing activities; its literary awards; and by the literary media. Yet how does the British publishing industry cater for multicultural consumers, or, in the acronym predominantly used in offi cial UK discourse, a BME (Black Minority Ethnic) readership?1 Using industry data and surveys, this chapter explores this question with regards to content, genre and access to reading material, and analyses how the operation of the book trade, and demographics of industry workers, might affect readership. It also considers whether the visibility of multicultural literary authors has infl ected the production and consumption of works towards an exoticising mode which, it is argued, does not encompass diversity of writing and reading practices, including in terms of genre. The framework adopted in this chapter draws on Robert Darnton’s book communications circuit, with its organising principles of agents within that circuit (including authors, publishers, printers, booksellers and readers), and the impact of the “economic and social conjuncture” in which the circuit is embedded (Darnton 1990). It also draws on revisions to his “model circuit” by those who have sought to politicise and foreground the gatekeeping role of publishers, such as Simone Murray’s call for a “rewiring” of the communications circuit in Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics (2004, 13). In the communications circuit of the contemporary British literary marketplace, BME authors have been highly visible, as well as commercially and critically successful. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) is a case in point: with a black Jamaican mother and a white English father, a childhood spent in multicultural northwest London, and a very recently completed degree in English literature from Cambridge, Smith was a highly promotable author, endorsed by Rushdie himself (Squires 2002; Smith 2000, front cover).