Inside the Book World
from “The Fight for the Future of Publishing” [from The Free Press] by ALEX PEREZ / November 28, 2023
Ideological fanatics and fear have crippled the major houses. But new book publishers are rising up to take the risks they won’t.
The Old World
The disruption of the so-called Big Five who make up the publishing industry—Penguin Random House, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and HarperCollins—has been a long time coming. For two decades, their collective revenue, which was $25.7 billion in 2020, has been basically flat. Then, in 2022, that figure declined by 6.5 percent.
Editors who spoke with The Free Press attributed that drop to people emerging from the Covid lockdowns and socializing more than reading.
But that’s not the whole story.
For years, there has been a growing politicization inside the industry, which editors describe as a slowly percolating illiberalism that makes it difficult to publish books by authors who don’t adhere to the new dogma. Out of fear of losing their jobs and friends, these editors (we spoke with ten across these publishing houses) insisted upon speaking anonymously.
“It’s so much harder to publish controversial books than it was when Judith Regan published Rush Limbaugh back in the day,” said an editor at a major publishing house, referring to Regan’s time as a Simon & Schuster editor in the early nineties, when she acquired a book by the conservative radio host.
The new dogma, industry insiders told me, is two-pronged: books should advance the narrative that people of color are victims of white supremacy; and nonblack and non-Latino authors should avoid characters who are black and Latino—even if their characters toe the officially approved narrative. (White authors who write about black or Latino people oppressed by white people have been accused of exploiting their characters’ trauma.)
“It began, really, in 2010, 2012,” the award-winning author Lionel Shriver, best known for her novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, told The Free Press. “It’s just been getting worse, and there are a lot of characters or plot turns in my own earlier books that, especially if I didn’t have this pretty solid relationship with a mainstream publisher, would get me into trouble or would be called out, and I’d be told to change them, or if I were just starting out I would be rejected because of them.”
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One of the biggest flashpoints in the politicization of the publishing industry arrived in early 2020 with publication of Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt.
Cummins’ novel—about a Mexican woman and her son who cross the U.S. border to escape violent cartels—won a seven-figure advance and was hailed by celebrities from Oprah Winfrey to Stephen King. But Cummins, being half-white and half-Puerto Rican, ran into trouble with Latino activists who accused her of appropriating Latino struggle. After protests erupted outside her publisher, the Macmillan imprint Flatiron, Cummins’ national book tour was canceled, and the publisher apologized for how the novel had been marketed. (Despite the controversy, American Dirt went on to sell more than three million copies. Cummins declined to comment for this article, saying she is busy working on her next book.)
At the same time, publishing houses started canceling books by established but “problematic” white male authors including Woody Allen, whose memoir was dropped by Grand Central Publishing, a Hachette imprint, in March 2020.
Then, in late May 2020, George Floyd was murdered.
In an immediate attempt to appear committed to combating racism, the major publishing houses rushed to hire and promote editors of color. Several editors described the hiring and promotion frenzy of 2020 and 2021 as “excessive” or “obviously political,” and they identified several key diversity hires who alienated longtime editors, agents, and writers.
These included Dana Canedy, who had spent most of her career at The New York Times doing “corporate communications,” according to her LinkedIn profile, before being named publisher of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint; Phoebe Robinson, a stand-up comedian who now runs the Penguin imprint Tiny Reparations Books; and Adenike Olanrewaju, who was a publicist at Penguin and The New York Times, where she was also a newsroom contributor, before being named executive editor of HarperCollins. Since joining the house in late 2021, Olanrewaju has secured one deal, according to Publishers Marketplace.
Neither Robinson nor Olanrewaju replied to requests for comment. Canedy, who left her position in July 2022 after two years at Simon & Schuster, told The Free Press that any claims she was “unqualified” for the job “are cheap shots likely made by an incredibly small number of unnamed sources who do not deserve my energy.”
Human Resources departments at the Big Five were mostly behind the drive to hire and promote unqualified job applicants without any guidance, an editor at a major publishing house told me. The editor added that it was not uncommon, in late 2020 and 2021, to encounter new editors and editorial assistants who were out of their depth—“young people without previous publishing experience who struggled to write a professional email.”
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At the same time, the new generation of junior editors and editorial assistants—steeped in the progressive identitarianism of the campus—were making their voices heard inside those companies.
“Most of the people who we hired were literature majors,” another editor at a major publishing house told The Free Press. “They come in having read a lot more bell hooks and Jacques Derrida than even The Atlantic, not realizing they’re pretty radical.”
After the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020, many publishing staffers were “like, ‘Ben Shapiro is definitely a Nazi,’ and there was no point in trying to explain to people that Ben Shapiro”—a conservative Jewish commentator—“is definitely not a Nazi,” the editor said.
Another editor said: “People were scared. People were afraid to lose their jobs. Still are.”
In addition to the new editors, a gradual feminization of publishing has made the industry less adventurous, Lionel Shriver said. “The problem is the editors, almost all of whom are women,” she said. “Women err on the side of trying to please, they tend more to be communitarians and risk averse and therefore, I think, the female takeover of publishing has made it cautious and bland.”
‘A New Generation of Ideological Fanatics’
With the new editors came new books by mostly untested, “diverse” writers whose stories featured characters struggling to overcome the shackles of whiteness or the patriarchy.
These include Rasheed Newson’s My Government Means to Kill Me, which was published in 2022 and has been described by its publisher, Flatiron, as “an exhilarating, fast-paced coming-of-age story” about a gay, black man.
Nadxieli Nieto, an editor who joined Flatiron in the wake of the American Dirt fiasco, bought the book for $250,000. So far, according to the sales tracker BookScan, it has sold nearly 4,500 copies—not nearly enough to cover the advance. (BookScan, the book industry site from which sales-copy figures come, does not include digital book sales.)
Similarly, in 2022, Flatiron bought Elliot Page’s book—a memoir that revolves around the actor’s gender transition—for more than $3 million. So far, it has sold south of 68,000 copies, according to BookScan.
In 2021, Dial Press, a Random House imprint, bought Lucky Red—described as “a genre-bending queer feminist Western. . . following a young woman’s transformation from forlorn orphan to successful prostitute to revenge-seeking gunfighter”—for more than $500,000. So far, it’s sold about 3,500 copies.
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Then there’s Carolyn Ferrell’s Dear Miss Metropolitan, described by The New York Times as “a story of three young girls, Black and biracial, who are kidnapped and thrown into the basement of a decaying house in Queens.” Ferrell’s book was acquired in a “significant deal” (a.k.a. more than $250K), but has so far sold 3,163 copies since it was published in 2021.
“The rule of thumb,” one editor said about book advances, “is that if you paid $7 per book sold, you paid the right amount.” The editor added: “You can pay $1 million for something and have it be a bestseller and still lose hundreds of thousands of dollars,” even if you sell tens of thousands of books.
All the while, according to some prominent writers and editors, these publishing houses appeared to be discriminating against white male writers. In June 2022, best-selling author James Patterson called the difficulty white male authors were facing “just another form of racism.” After a backlash, he quickly apologized and said: “I absolutely do not believe that racism is practiced against white writers. Please know that I strongly support a diversity of voices being heard—in literature, in Hollywood, everywhere.” But one month later, acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates made a similar point. In a tweet, she wrote: “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested.”
A senior editor at one of the major publishing houses echoed these thoughts, telling The Free Press: “We flat-out decided we weren’t going to look at certain white male authors, because we didn’t want to be seen as acquiring that stuff.”
When asked whether editors openly acknowledged that they were discriminating against writers because of their skin color, this editor replied: “I don’t think it was worded quite as blatantly as that. It was worded more like, ‘Is this the right time to be championing authors of more traditional backgrounds?’ Often, the language was a bit opaque.”
Adam Bellow, who spent many years at HarperCollins and St. Martin’s Press, a Macmillan imprint, before moving to Post Hill Press, a conservative publishing company in Nashville, acknowledged “generational change” is a fact of life.
“It just so happens that, in this case, the new generation is a generation of ideological fanatics,” Bellow said.
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