Everyday Cancellation in Publishing - new report from SEEN publishing and Sex Matters

There used to be a thing where politicians would get huge advances for memoirs that nobody bought. Some of these were even good books, but unless it's Tony Blair or somebody of comparable fame, not many people want to read a politician's memoir.

And then Iain Dale came along with his business model knowing that there are a certain number of politics nerds who will buy Sir Bufton Tufton's My 10 Years on the Public Accounts Committee and you can make a modest profit on a short print run plus a competitively priced ebook, and those few thousand nerds are your core audience. So Iain cornered that market and the big publishers were happy to get out of the unprofitable political memoir business.

I used to go by Foyles quite often, and they would have huge piles of books by Shon Faye or similar, probably a window display, and I don't think I ever saw anyone buy these books. It looks like the median sales figure for a gender identity book is less than 2000, probably the majority of those to libraries who buy them for ideological reasons. That's a potentially profitable line for a small queer publishing house, but not something that big publishers should rationally be spending money on, or that bookshops can give infinite amounts of display space to.

The bottom line will kick in eventually. We might be a while getting there.

Woman’s Hour is a disgrace.

She tells the story in a chapter in The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht. Worth a read.

It's a fantastic piece of work, and I hate to be a naysayer, but I really don't think it will be read by anyone who isn't already a captive audience. And this is a serious problem at the moment. If the only people who report on it are the Torygraph and Mail, then the people who REALLY need to hear it won't bother, will double down, make false accusations about other people's beliefs and handwave these issues away as "culture wars"and "being indoctrinated by the far right" As we saw with both Cass and the SC ruling.

I've yet to see anything that will convince me the truth is getting through to those who REALLY need to hear it in any way whatsoever.

I was at the launch last night. Everybody was delighted that the report had been written - but there was a sense that changing the culture of a small, captured industry is not something that is going to happen overnight.

An article in the Telegraph about gender ideology in books aimed at toddlers but also covers the report

‘Sparkly’ pro-trans books targeting toddlers https://share.google/Gb5Wn6bYdZpuqA8Yi

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06/25/sparkly-pro-trans-books-targeting-toddlers/

I knew Gillian had initially lost her case but I thought she still had an appeal in the pipeline?

The New York Times just ran a piece on 'Why Did the Novel-Reading Man Disappear'. It's rather formless, positing two sides of the question: that novels no longer address subjects or have characters that appeal to men and that men's tastes have moved away from literary fiction, and concludes that neither is wholly adequate. A great unsolved mystery! 🤔 One that's rather easily dispelled if you consider the way that the publishing industry has turned into a gigantic woke propaganda machine hostile to it's readers, and relentless in suppressing anything that hasn't been subjected to rigorous sensitivity vetting and whose author isn't party member in good standing. The minimum bar of acceptability is worthiness to cause of our modern day socialist realism - woke. Indeed they couldn't even make it through the first paragraph without slagging off, as being politically incorrect, one of the last major novelists with cross-sex appeal, David Foster Wallace. The the determined blindness to the ideological capture of the industry is on display, as one captured industry to another.

archive.ph/pKDl3

"In 2020, the former children’s author Gillian Philip added the hashtag #IStandWithJKRowling to her Twitter (now X) profile. She was then subjected to an extreme 24-hour social-media pile-on that included death threats. Philip’s contract was immediately terminated by her publisher with the tacit support of her agent."

Bloody hell. So many awful things have happened that I can't hold them all in my head individually. I remember this, yet I was still shocked reading about it just now.

While it's good to have such a report is there any chance it's going to change anything, who would have to read it for it to have an impact? Apart from the Bloody Bad Corporation who really need to read how rubbish Women's Hour has become when it comes to women's issues.

While the publishing industry in the past could seem a bit genteel & unworldly about money the ruthless conglomerates that now own many publishers are more driven by the bottom line so there will be a corrective.