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

[SirSamVimesCityWatch]

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/7ea5efaf-b36d-47d3-9418-f251e8f95376?shareToken=0b1e9d8a8e3ca314f562ed93f72ada34

Oh deary me.

My heart bleeds 💚🤍💜

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

'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.

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

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.

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.

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.

“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?

Definitely.

@RedToothBrush , heh, I couldn't possibly comment.

@teawamutu - I was in a library earlier this year when M Bergdorf was supposed to be doing a talk about that book as part of a literary festival. About ten teen girls turned up (accompanied by a couple of mums), to discover that it had been moved online at very short notice.

I guess it was so because of poor ticket sales.

I don't know if this is still the case, but a few years ago it seemed to be extremely difficult to get a permanent salaried job in publishing or the media without first doing a succession of unpaid or badly-paid internships to get the essential contacts and experience. Obviously young people from wealthy backgrounds had a head start there, as did those with a family base in or very near London where they could stay for no or low rent. That was never going to result in a workforce drawn from all sectors of society and all parts of the UK, and given the correlation between income and ethnicity and income and disability it can't have done much to improve diversity in those respects either.

Gender identity must be an absolute godsend to employers who want to score well on measures of diversity and equality without actually doing the expensive and difficult work necessary to recruit and retain a truly diverse workforce.

I might have expected the Pageboy book to find an audience, given it got promoted by Oprah Winfrey and heavily in the Guardian among others. But maybe people aren't queuing up in droves to read about a transman who wasn't actually that famous to start with?

Gender identity must be an absolute godsend to employers who want to score well on measures of diversity and equality without actually doing the expensive and difficult work necessary to recruit and retain a truly diverse workforce.

Hm, do you think a category one can opt into with nothing more than the wave of a pronoun might be attractive to employers and privileged people?

Sorry if this details the thread a bit, but the article prompted a question from me, as there are some people who clearly have experience of publishing as an industry.
One of the books in the article sounded interesting to me, although I realise it might be niche, or even 'woke'.
I've just bought a copy, but couldn't find it on Bookshop and could only import it from Amazon US.
Which made me think 'Why pay someone $250,000 for a novel that you are only going to print in limited numbers in one market?'
Is it that they realised it wasn't selling well and stopped printing new copies?
Is it that they appreciate the kudos it brings the author, and anticipate selling more books by him in future based on the reviews of this one?
Or is it that publishing these books brings kudos to the publishing house itself, like the virtue-signalling arguement?
If you genuinely thought it would make lots of money surely you'd also print lots of copies in anticipation of the rush?

Oh dear, this is all terribly sad isn’t it?

<reaches for small violin>

Can you hold your violin a bit closer, I can’t see it.

Like this?

<hands over violin and a microscope>

My heart bleeds purple piss for the publisher.