Readers, writers and editors of romance books are grappling with the genre’s record on diversity, after a week where a report found that books by authors of colour were on the decline, an imprint specialising in diverse romances closed, and another publisher was forced to apologise for telling a writer they avoided putting people of colour on book covers because they didn’t sell.

Queer romance writer Cole McCade came forward last week to reveal conversations with editor Sarah Lyons of the New Jersey-based publisher Riptide. McCade, who also writes as Xen Sanders, described Riptide as “at all levels hostile to me as a person of colour”. He published an email from Lyons in which she told him: “We don’t mind POC But I will warn you – and you have NO idea how much I hate having to say this – we won’t put them on the cover, because we like the book to, you know, sell :-(.”

Lyons has since resigned. As Riptide authors came forward to ask for their books to be pulled from the publisher’s list in the wake of McCade’s revelations, the publisher issued a statement saying it had accepted Lyons’s resignation, describing her behaviour as “unacceptable” and said that it did not condone Lyons’s comments about people of colour on covers.

But the uproar continued to grow, as authors and readers shared Riptide’s previous missteps: in 2016, it apologised after one of its novels featured a black character who was referred to as “Dark Chocolate Love Monkey”; earlier, it also apologised for a website for a series set in a world where slavery remained legal, which included fake ads for buying and recruiting slaves.

Riptide issued a subsequent statement in which it acknowledged that “apologies are not enough”, and that “the anger that has been directed toward us in the past days is justified”. It has closed its doors to unsolicited submissions, and returned rights to angry authors “who have sought to dissolve relationships with us”.

“We need to prune the aspects of our company, our attitudes, and our message that are rotten. It’s time for us to take a good, hard look at ourselves and foster new, diverse voices to help us see what we’ve missed in the past,” said the statement from co-owners Rachel Haimowitz and Tal Valante.

But the controversy arrives as a report into diversity in the genre found that fewer books by authors of colour were published in 2017 compared to the previous year, despite an increase in the numbers of books published overall. “Clearly there is plenty of room to pull up more chairs as long as the people sitting in those chairs are white,” wrote the report’s authors, Bea and Leah Koch, who run the romance bookstore The Ripped Bodice, in Culver City, Los Angeles. The report revealed that for every 100 books published by the leading romance press in 2017, only 6.2 were written by people of colour, down from 7.8 in 2016.

Riptide was one of the publishers included in the Ripped Bodice’s study, which analysed 3,762 books to identify how many were by authors of colour. At Riptide, 4.8% of its books were by authors of colour, slightly up from 2016; in total, 80% of publishers surveyed had fewer than 10% of their books written by people of colour.

By far, the best-performing publisher in the report was Simon & Schuster’s imprint Crimson, with 29.3% of titles by authors of colour. But in the same week as the report, S&S announced that the imprint will close, citing “changing consumer reading habits and the continual evolution of the marketplace”. It follows Harlequin’s decision last year to close its African American romance imprint Kimani, citing at the time “changes in the retail landscape and reader preferences”, and “declining support from retailers”

But The Ripped Bodice’s owners said that their own figures give the lie to the “main argument” publishers give for not publishing authors of colour: “that the sales are not strong enough”. The shop, America’s only bookshop dedicated entirely to romance novels, said that six of its 10 bestselling titles from 2017 were by authors of colour.

“I think this shows that the market is so desperate that good books from diverse authors have fantastic selling potential. There is a ton of self-publishing happening by authors of colour, especially because of historical and current attitudes towards diverse books from major publishers,” said Koch.

She said it is a “complete assumption” from publishers that white readers avoid books without white protagonists. “My customers want good books that reflect the world they live in,” she said.