Hachette Dropped Woody's Memoir. Well, GOOD.
It's not a free speech crisis—if anything, it's a victory for labor.
Earlier this week, Hachette Book Group announced that one of its imprints, Grand Central Publishing, was going to put out Apropos of Nothing, a memoir by Woody Allen, at the beginning of April. This was quite a surprise to everyone, because the last we’d heard, Allen had been trying to attract the attention of publishers as recently as May 2019, and nobody seemed interested.
And yet! The Guardian reports that Grand Central had already made a deal with Allen two months earlier, “after publisher and senior vice-president Ben Sevier read a complete draft of the book.”
You might think it’s a bit unusual to announce the imminent publication of a major book like this just five weeks before its release date. It is! Usually, you can’t wait to tell the world you’ve acquired a memoir from a very notable celebrity, planting the seeds of your eventual media blitz as early as possible. Unless, of course, your author is not just an acclaimed film director but an accused child molester and sexual predator—then, you want to control the publicity campaign as rigidly as possible, and that means giving the world as little time as possible to react to the news of the book’s release, or to spill the book’s contents before people start paying money to see what’s inside.
The cone of silence around Apropos of Nothing was so tightly drawn within Grand Central that not even the employees of Little, Brown, another of Hachette’s book imprints, knew the book had been acquired—nor did one of Little, Brown’s bestselling authors of 2019, investigative journalist Ronan Farrow, whose Catch and Kill detailed his efforts to tell the truth about Harvey Weinstein and other sexual predators in positions of power. Farrow is Allen’s estranged son, and the reason they’re estranged is that Farrow believes the allegations of sexual abuse made against Allen by his adoptive sister, Dylan.
Farrow was, to say the least, extremely upset to discover that the publishing house he’d been working with was also working with Allen, especially since there was absolutely no indication that the publisher had done any kind of fact checking of Allen’s manuscript. (Certainly, Farrow observed, Dylan had “never been contacted to respond to any denial or mischaracterization of the abuse she suffered.”) He also revealed, in his public statement, that “a publisher that would conduct itself in this way is one I can’t work with in good conscience.”
(The media’s characterization of that last statement has been, as Publishers Weekly puts it: “Farrow severed his ties with the publisher earlier this week over its intention to publish the memoir.” I do not know the particulars of Ronan Farrow’s contract with Little, Brown, but I also know from industry experience that it’s not that easy for an author to be the one who walks away mid-contract—although one likely scenario would be if the contract had only ever covered Catch and Kill, without even requiring Farrow to give Little, Brown the right to be the first publisher to see whatever book idea he had in mind next. It’s an option many publishers like to assert as a matter of course, though a particularly good agent might be able to negotiate her way into having it removed.)
Anyway, that was Tuesday. On Thursday, word got out that several Little, Brown employees had initiated a work stoppage to protest the acquisition of Allen’s memoirs. Over time, we learned that it was, in fact, a Hachette-wide walkout, and that employees had specific requests for Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch (Sevier’s boss, who also had to have been in the loop about the project all along). The book should be cancelled immediately, they told Pietsch. Furthermore, he and Sevier should apologize to Hachette staff, and Pietsch should guarantee that there would be no reprisals against employees who participated in the protest or spoke out against the book.
Before the walkout, Pietsch had told the New York Times that “Grand Central publishing believes strongly that there’s a large audience that wants to hear the story of Woody Allen’s life as told by Woody Allen himself. That’s what they’ve chosen to publish.” By Friday, though, the mood at Hachette had shifted, and the publisher issued a new statement, declaring the book cancelled, with all rights reverting back to Woody Allen immediately.
“At HBG we take our relationships with authors very seriously, and do not cancel books lightly,” the statement said. But, it added, “as a company, we are committed to offering a stimulating, supportive and open work environment for all our staff. Over the past few days, HBG leadership had extensive conversations with our staff and others. After listening, we came to the conclusion that moving forward with publication would not be feasible for HBG.”
In other words, the employees of Hachette Book Group asserted a moral authority that superseded the management’s financial considerations, and forced the company to conduct the business of publishing books in what they considered a more ethically responsible manner.
This is a good thing.
What this is not, in any way, shape, or form, is a free speech issue. Nobody’s telling Woody Allen he can’t publish his memoirs. Heck, they specifically gave him the publishing rights back, presumably without even asking him to return any of the money they’d already given him. (Again, I don’t know the particulars of Allen’s contract with Grand Central, but I am willing to bet he received a significant amount of money upon delivery of the manuscript, and he held up his end of the bargain—he gave Ben Sevier and Michael Pietsch a book they considered publishable—so he’d get to keep that money.)
So, if Woody Allen can find somebody else—anybody else—willing to publish his memoir, he can publish it. In fact, there are robust self-publishing options available through Amazon, which would enable him to get the book out very quickly, if that were his aim. Instead, he chose to enter into a business relationship with Grand Central Publishing which both parties believed would be financially beneficial to them—and that’s fine, rah rah capitalism, and all that. Once other people at Hachette found out about the deal, though, they felt profound discomfort at finding themselves working with the kind of people who would choose to publish Woody Allen’s memoir, let alone publish it without following some basic principles of moral responsibility. That discomfort was pervasive enough throughout the Hachette workforce that Pietsch was forced to take steps to regain the trust and confidence of his employees.
(Let’s be generous and say cancelling the book, without a public apology, was enough to accomplish that goal, and that the employees who walked out will let the water flow under the bridge and give Pietsch and Sevier the benefit of the doubt moving forward. I don’t know if it’s true, but it seems possible.)
So a book deal got cancelled. Another book deal could happen any day now, maybe at a smaller publishing house where the people responsible for deciding what gets published don’t have to hold themselves and their business affairs accountable to as many employees, or any employees at all. Or Woody Allen could just publish the book himself, if he wanted. And then people could buy it, if they felt like doing that, or not. It’s really just a question of finding someone who’s willing to work with Woody Allen, and if that’s proving exceedingly difficult, well, that’s how things shake out in a free market sometimes.
(Full disclosure: I got about 2/3 of the way through this, when I realized that, oh, hey, the book I wrote back in 2005 was published by a now-defunct Hachette imprint. They did a really nice job with it, too.)
If you’re coming to this newsletter from social media, and you liked it, I hope you’ll consider signing up for the emails. A premium subscription would be great, of course, but the less-frequent free edition is cool, too.