Munroe Bergdorf lands big book deal with Bloomsbury

Hmm. Currently urgently looking for volunteers, apparently.

www.unwomenuk.org/who-we-are-un-women-uk

Indeed. What are we again? Jelly, mist, gas..?

I read UN Women as Unwomen nowadays. They seem to be all about gender identity.

Is there an outline of this book anywhere? I’m curious to see what’s going to be in it/who is writing it (if it’s ghosted) and why it was commissioned (apart from ‘we thought it would sell and make money’).

a National Advocate for UN Women - and what is Bergdorf going to advocate for?

What concerns might Bergdorf have experience of that are shared by women?

Munroe was made a National Advocate for UN Women UK in 2019.... I missed that! I remember the good old days in 2016 when all we had to worry about that Lancaster university's woman officer would potentially be a transwomen named Anna Lee and now this... I don't know how we got there so quickly... WTF?! I knew UN Women had lost it but omg. I have no words.

Never heard of anyone having to pay back their advance
Me neither, however I have heard of tax write offs. Where you give away/make a huge loss and therefore pay less tax. Maybe this is one.

There's no justice!

You don't have to pay an advance back if the book doesn't sell out. In fact, those big six figure debuts rarely do. I imagine Bloomsbury will be aiming to earn woke cookies, diversity points, retail slots and possibly industry awards for marketing campaigns etc rather than cold hard cash.

I bet the little gang that resigned, are furious.

Yes they must be actually musnt they?! I don't think Munroe has much integrity when it comes to the prospect of making money and gaining attention though! Which is why they had no problem working with Loreal, despite Loreal selling skin lightening creams for women.

Never heard of anyone having to pay back their advance!

Meant to expand on what I was saying about 'female weighted on Insta' - everyone seems very bothered about what others think of them on Instagram, there is still a big '#bekind' vibe going on, and people want to be seen to be in the right tribe and supporting the 'right' people and I feel like Munroe has managed to creep into that category, making friends with certain influencers etc.

Twitter seems to have more blokes (and increasingly more women thank god) who don't give a fuck and will tell people like Munroe what they think.

I have noticed that a few people I know have started following Munroe in the last few weeks. Munroe has done quite a lot of awareness raising around Black Lives Matter, and I wonder if people don't realise that Munroe says stupid shit on Twitter like 'centering reproductive systems in the women's match is exclusionary' and encourages minors to privately message them. They have a lot of 'yaaaaas queen' messages on Insta from Blue ticks under their posts, on Twitter they have a lot less followers and get more criticism. I wonder actually if its because Instagram tends to be more female weighted than Twitter?

That is an excellent question. Presumably Munroe hasn't quite realised that? Bloomsbury probably took down all the HP posters on the walls.

I'm looking forward to the book. I am very keen to hear about woman-ing. I think the first rule is to not talk about my biological functions.

yes but I've given them a generous 4% of followers buying book others say on instagram its more like 0.3 %. But yes there are some quite high profile cases of the publishers sueing authors for the money back when the sales did not match. But as others say it may well be a arse covering tactic to sign them up. I'm amazed that Munroe is prepared to be published by the same firm as JK Rowling! Why hasn't this been brought out ??

Munro has 467k followers on instagram?

You have to pay advances back if the book doesn't sell enough to cover it?

Publishing sounds like a racket.

I think the advance will be a scant 100000 but they will have to pay most of it back. Based on their instagram following I think unlikely to shift more than 18-20000 copies. If it sells for £10 thats £1 in royalties. £1 x 20000 = £20,000.

Sounds like mb has been doing some research on womanning throughout the ages. Hope they learnt something!

This is penance and damage limitation.

I've no doubt that Bloomsbury were hammered after the JKR Twitter pile-on, and were lobbied hard by the activists to balance things out, in lieu of actually cancelling JKR.

They know that in terms of publishing (if not in terms of personal cost) JK is untouchable - no publisher is going to cancel her, and they knew that, so the next best thing would be for Bloomsbury to throw money at a book to (in their eyes) provide fair balance.

Hence the six figure sum, the opportunity to discover all the ways that JK and women are wrong, to create a permanent print narrative about the history of 'gendered souls' (or however MB frames it) and the history concept is to presumably cement the fact that gendered souls have been here forever, by enveloping them in a certain amount of simplistic social history about women.

Creating a duel narrative is presumably supposed to give it credibility. What worries me greatly though, is the reference to adolescence - this is possibly going to be the massive push to affirm kids - 'don't let them suffer like I did'. The framework will be designed to persuade everybody that there have always been hundreds of thousands of trans kids and this book will be the manifesto to 'educate' everyone.