Woke publishers ‘paid huge sums for books that flopped’ - Times article

“That book Grace Livery "A work of staggering penis" apparently had publishers fighting over each other to get the rights. That was a flop.”

Just me laughing childishly at that, then?

I can't help thinking that the TRA agenda will obviously require TRA-supporting books to be published - preferably to the exclusion of others.

And, in same way they work on getting people into positions of power in charities, regulatory bodies, political parties, etc, maybe some of the billionaire TRAs with an agenda are making some backroom donations to push the material they want. Or just get themselves on the board.

I will never underestimate the drive of these men to get what they want.

68,000 is an awful lot of coffee tables needing propping up.

I don't want to ask if that's how many primary schools there are in the UK.

When you look at the digital publishers eg Storm, Boldwood and Bookouture (I think they’re now owned by HarperCollins) you can see that non-trad publishing is where the less known writers get spotted. These books sell on reviews - prob by mostly mid life women aka most readers.

McEwan is a Scottish name. Can't Ian of that ilk claim victimhood as an oppressed Scot?

I mean, there's a whole political party which does that, successfully until very recently

'Many will not consider working with white male authors, it is claimed, while white writers must avoid writing about non-white characters or risk being accused of cultural appropriation.'

'‘Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity,’ he writes. ‘It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.‘'

Ian McEwan, although as a white man, I suppose his opinion is now void.

Part of the problem imo is that there are no 'medium' publishing houses anymore.

There are tiny shoestring stapled together blogzines, or there are the Big Four.

So decisions are going to be made on the Big Four Big People deciding what they want to signal, sometimes to achieve their special DEI gongs, rather than on any attempt to find what people want to buy. There is certainly fuck all diversity in terms of class/wealth - it's rich people running the show.

It's reminding me of the Oxfam situation - an industry that operates as a tiny elite circlejerk of well off people at the top, issuing righteous decrees on What Will Do The Plebs Good and performing in service to those ideas of the Right Side of History. Meanwhile, staff/writers/volunteers are shat upon, advances are slashed to virtually nothing, and royalties are pittances for so many that only already comfortably well off people can write for a living.

Readers/shoppers although they may put a rainbow flag in their Twitter bio, are not willing to actually pay money/read/buy stuff that is subpar crap or self righteous hectoring, because none of that is any fun.

This is from an article in Unherd:

More and more [publishers] have, in recent years, been adding ‘morality clauses’ to their contracts; a New York Times report says these include HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House and (though the publisher declined to confirm it) Hachette. This news is being greeted with some alarm by the admittedly few writers who bother to read them.
This is, it should be said straight out, not so simple as a ‘freedom of speech’ issue. A morality clause doesn’t police (as private publishers are entitled to, tut-tut though we may) the acceptable parameters of what a writer can say in their work: rather, it reserves the right to pull the work from the shelves if the writer does something they don’t like in their public life, or does something in their private life that becomes public. But in making it a point of something so nebulous as morality, that writes the publisher willing to act in bad faith quite the blank cheque.

I’m not sure who judges what is immoral in these cases - the ‘sensitivity readers’ maybe.

Every book that’s signed has to be approved by many levels of management especially when the advance goes over £50k. Sales marketing and ceos will have signed a £3 million advance.

the bookscan figs quoted above won’t include all global sales but even so £3 mil won’t get earned out

Young Adult lists have done well as a growing market and it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that some of those young book-buying adults would continue with those interests, and buying habits into more mature adulthood. The question is why hasn't that happened?

Many of the young adults I know don’t read much non-fiction or biography.
They do read a lot of LGBTQ+fiction, but it’s often fantasy.
Vampires, werewolves, anngels and demons and polyamorous across the gender rainbow.
Not hardback autobiographies.

I once had the misfortune to share a 5-hour-long train journey with a bunch of youngsters in the publishing industry. Each spoke with a mouthful of marbles, gossiped incessantly about their celeb clients, and one mentioned an eight-bedroomed family home with several acres of land.

I imagine it's these kind of people the article's referring to.

I agree. Following the "friend of the family" connections is revealing. These jobs are not advertised at the rate of staff turnover.

My heart bleeds 💚🤍💜

It's an interesting one, taking aside the politics mentioned in the article, I can see why publishers thought these kinds of titles would be well-received and supported by the buying public.

Young Adult lists have done well as a growing market and it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that some of those young book-buying adults would continue with those interests, and buying habits into more mature adulthood. The question is why hasn't that happened?

Unquestionably publishing (certainly as I remember it in the UK) was not a diverse industry, it was also not at all a well-paid industry meaning that many who couldn't afford to stay in it moved on. It's certainly positive if the industry is genuinely trying to broaden its workforce, but that isn't going to happen in just a couple of years. Also if inexperienced editors have been allowed to sign off huge advances that the publishers won't recoup, that's a failure of senior management and I'm uncomfortable with the idea of the entire blame being hung around the neck of inexperienced staff.

Are you saying that its almost as if the apparently 'uneducated' read more?

I think that’s key - the biggest book-buying demographic is middle-aged and older women. Young people with blue hair are more interested in watching Tik Tok videos than buying books.

You might expect publishers to know that.

Are books that go onto libraries classified as a ‘sell’? Plus all the discount bookshops. So not making much on those sales I guess.

Oh dear how sad
Never mind 😉

You get a lot of woke millennials (and now gen-z) working for the publishers who think that tweets equals sales.

Indeed. They all seem to read a lot (online), but not actual books (online, audio or otherwise).

It's just a case of giving the public what they want. Hollywood may slowly be coming to terms with it, and struggling sales of niche books should soon get publishers to realise that no one outside of publishing cares about these issues.

That book Grace Livery "A work of staggering penis" apparently had publishers fighting over each other to get the rights. That was a flop.

I've heard publishers contact people who do online comics on trans issues stating that they would like to publish the stuff as a book.

You get a lot of woke millennials (and now gen-z) working for the publishers who think that tweets equals sales. I've seen too many items with a lot of tweets saying "I'm buying this" not actually translate into real sales.

Surely publishing was one of the least safe Industries to take up virtue signalling to this scale? It's different to, for example, M&S, who might seriously piss their customers off by letting men in the changing rooms but probably retain many who like the products and the convenience. But you can't actually force people (yet) to buy books they don't want to buy.

Did they really not realise that effectively silencing any dissent on gender identity does not = everybody finding gender identity navel gazing fascinating and wanting to read about it? They must be spectacularly out of touch.

Another editor said some of the new employees were out of their depth and many were “young people without previous publishing experience who struggled to write a professional email”. Some of the new hires are accused of signing huge book deals that flopped.

This might just be me, and I have no experience of the publishing industry, but if you're hiring someone with no experience who can't even write an email, maybe not let them sign off on 'huge book deals'?

There’s an interesting discussion about the publishing industry not publishing books that readers want on Meghan Daum’s Unspeakable podcast with NYT columnist Pamela Paul. It chimes with this thread.

And indeed, often had to contend with bookshop staff taking them off display etc.

Yes it’s even more striking compared to the surprise successes of various GC books which had no marketing campaign and even had trouble finding publishers at all.