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

[ArabellaScott]

https://sex-matters.org/posts/publications/reports/everyday-cancellation-in-publishing/

This looks absolutely brilliant. I've only read the Intro as there's lots there to digest. Some other recs:

“An astonishing report that lays bare how a once open-minded publishing world has allowed a minority of activists to bully it into so far abandoning its core principles that it has begun to work, not only against its own ethos, but also against its own interests.”

Anne Fine OBE, author and second Children’s Laureate

'This report gives the publishing industry a clear roadmap back to lawful workplace policies and creative, even unorthodox commissioning. Leaders in publishing must take note.”

Lionel Shriver, author

“When history looks back on the epidemic of collective lunacy that was the trans cult, special odium will attach to psychiatrists, counsellors and teachers who warped the minds, and surgeons who mutilated the bodies, of vulnerable people in their care, especially children. But lesser culprits will not escape blame, and high on the list will be publishers who, contrary to their normal editorial judgment, censored or even cancelled brave authors critical of the cult.

Richard Dawkins

This is a bit eyebrow-raising:

'Helen Joyce received a £20,000 advance for her book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, which went on to sell over 23,000 physical copies in the UK and over 100,000 internationally. Munroe Bergdorf, by contrast, received a six-figure sum for Transitional, which sold fewer than 3,000 copies in the UK.'

'Journalists on BBC Radio 4’s flagship women’s-affairs programme Woman’s Hour have not interviewed best-selling gender-critical authors about their books, despite the issues they cover being so relevant to women. By contrast male gender-studies academic Grace Lavery has been interviewed, despite selling only 1,723 copies of Please Miss – A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis. So has Juno Dawson, a male transactivist who also identifies as a woman.'

'Of the 30 organisations reviewed for this research, only four correctly cite the protected characteristics of sex and gender reassignment across their publicly listed policies.'

'The impact of this hostile environment and the harms it has caused to those in the industry who hold gender-critical beliefs has been immeasurable. Interviewees mentioned stress and poor mental health, fears for their own safety and the safety of their families, physical ill-health and financial catastrophe. Loss of work has been the biggest professional impact.'

I'll stop pulling quotes. Highly recommend reading the full report. It's so useful to see it all laid out clearly, with stats and figures.

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.

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.

I'd imagine plenty of people in publishing will be reading it. And that's exactly where it needs to be read.

The overwhelming impression one gets when reading it is just how tiny the numbers of 'trans activists' are. They have a massively disproportionate voice, but the sums don't add up. Much as the industry is trying to push genderwoo books, people aren't interested in buying or reading them, even notwithstanding the massively funded campaigns and publicity.

"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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

Hmm. What some people will notice is the bottom line.

Publishing is business, in the end, and those numbers are astonishing.

Woman’s Hour is a disgrace.

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.

Also a key point in the report, though a little downplayed, that this is an overwhelmingly female business, and I don't think that's unrelated to ideological conformism or a fear of sticking your neck out.

Female socialisation is a hell of a thing.

It will go to all the people we sent it to - all the head honchos at publishers, literary agencies, funding bodies and membership organisations in the industry. Whether they do read it or not is another matter. But it will have landed in their inboxes and is provocative enough for them to at least glance through the exec summary. Some of them were asked for a comment by Book Brunch and were too scared to say anything, and others were so scared that they asked Book Brunch not to even mention that they'd refused to comment.

I was also at the launch. And no, nothing happens overnight. But nothing also happens - and bad things happen - if nobody does anything.

Yeah, you're right. We should all do nothing. We should just lie down and let them march over us.

GB News and The Telegraph have picked up on the issue re children's publishing. But there's definitely an issue with adult fiction and non-fiction. People are scared of writing about feminism. And when they do overcome that fear agents and publishers are unwilling to take the risk of putting the books out there. So, as Helen Joyce, said in a GB News interview, our ordinary mainstream views are being made to seem marginal and dangerous. In a healthy democracy ideas can be debated through books. But that debate is being - quite successfully - shut down.

As an author whose agent failed to sell my novel, it’s horrible to read that creepy men received six figure advances for writing squalid nonsense that nobody read.

How many aspiring authors could have been given a chance for that wasted money? It really stings.

@StrawberryLetter32 @PollyHutchen has the Bookseller covered it? I don’t subscribe so can’t read most of their articles. Just thinking there was a bit in the report saying how the Bookseller hasn’t covered people like Gillian or Rachel being cancelled so will they just avoid it? Or does bookbrunch now have more subscribers?

excellent report btw, thanks for all you did (if you did!).