Just Shut Up Already, Tucker
…one of those newsletters where I make use of my history as a person who once stood hovering next to publishing industry insiders to explain why Tucker Carlson is full of shit.
(You’ll notice that’s not Tucker Carlson—one, because I’m too cheap to pay a media license for a photo of that creep; two, because I’d rather post pictures of my cat anyway.)
The Washington Post ran a news item the other day about Tucker Carlson—a man who, the more carefully you pay attention to his words, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish his worldview from that of unapologetic white supremacists—decided to pick a fight with his publisher, Simon and Schuster. Ostensibly, his loss of respect for S&S stems from its treatment of Josh Hawley; you may recall that, earlier this year, the supersized publishing company abandoned plans to put out a book Hawley was said to have written because he was seen by many as having given aid and comfort to the treasonous mob that attacked both houses of Congress and Vice President Pence.
In Carlson’s eyes, at least in terms of what he’s saying publicly, that makes Simon & Schuster “a disgusting company run by disgusting people,” starting with president Jon Karp, who he singled out as “dishonest,” “not super smart” and “absolutely awful.”
This is going to be one of those newsletters where I make use of my history as a person who once stood hovering next to publishing industry insiders to explain why Tucker Carlson is full of shit.
Yeah, full disclosure: Over the years, I’ve met many people who work for Simon and Schuster, and spent time with them in both personal and professional capacities, and very few of them have been disgusting. I can’t say that I had more than glancing contact with Jon Karp in all that time, and certainly nothing stands out about the occasions on which we did meet, which means he probably didn’t do anything to make me question his intelligence or his integrity.
So as far as Carlson’s allegations are concerned, I am reminded of the adage that if everyone you meet is an asshole, the truth is that you’re the asshole.
Anyway, all that business with Hawley happened at the beginning of 2021, and here we are at the end of September, and Tucker Carlson has a new book out from Simon and Schuster—it’s been out since mid-August, in fact. If he hates them so much, you might ask, why did he go ahead with this book?
The first answer that probably springs to mind is the one Post reporter Jeremy Barr lays out: “Carlson says he was contractually obligated to keep writing…as part of a two-book deal with the company.” Moreover, Carlson told another journalist, he actually did tell S&S “he didn’t want to write the book,” at which point, he alleges, the company “threatened to sue.”
This seems plausible, on a superficial level. When one signs a contract with a publishing company to deliver a book, one rarely gets the opportunity to just up and change one’s mind. As far as the publisher is concerned, you promised to deliver a book, and were given money in advance with the understanding you would do so, and now you’re obligated to do that—if the publisher decides, once you’ve fulfilled your end of the deal, that the book sucks and it wants to wash its hands of you, they can do that. But you don’t get to take a publisher’s money, then change your mind about writing the book and keep the money.
Those last four words are crucial: If someone like Tucker Carlson saw himself in a dead-end relationship with a publisher he was convinced was not going to give him or his book all due respect (and by “respect” I mean “commercial commitment”), he would be perfectly within his rights to go to his publisher and say, “Here is the money you’ve given me so far for my unfinished book. This isn’t working out. Let’s call it off.”
The publisher could, of course, reject such an offer—but my experience as an acquisitions editor suggests that’s the least likely of possible outcomes. What I saw was that publishers don’t, as a rule, want to work with authors who aren’t committed to their books’ success; if somebody tells you their heart isn’t in a project anymore, or that they’ve lost faith in you, you’re usually happy to recoup your initial investment and resume looking for book deals that won’t blow up in your face.
(The Carlson/S&S scenario is a particularly disagreeable version of how such a deal might collapse. I know of another case, for example, where an author had taken an advance for a book, then life came calling with other, more pressing obligations, and the author reluctantly concluded delivering a book in the timeframe the publisher wanted would be impossible. That sort of thing happens—not often, but it happens.)
Let’s assume, then, that Tucker Carlson could have bought his way out of his contract with Simon & Schuster—or, at least, we can assume the option was as available to him as it is to anybody else. Why, we should ask ourselves, would someone who had such an option not avail himself of it?
Speculation offers at least two possible answers.
First, we might speculate that Tucker Carlson didn’t offer to buy his book back from Simon & Schuster because he didn’t have enough cash on hand to make such an offer. That wouldn’t necessarily mean that he was broke, it could just as easily mean that his money was tied up in various investments and not easily pulled together for an unplanned expense of this size. And this doesn’t necessarily mean he didn’t make any offer; this is the second book in a two-book deal, and one can easily imagine an author in such a situation making a lowball offer… one of the few scenarios in which I actually could see a publisher threatening to sue if a higher offer were not forthcoming.
(How much money are we talking about? I don’t know exactly. But it’s Tucker Carlson, and it’s Simon and Schuster, so I’m willing to assume that he had already received a ridiculous amount of money when the relationship deteriorated to the point that he wanted to end it.)
Second, we might speculate that Tucker Carlson did have the money to buy his book back from Simon and Schuster, but that he may well have recognized that seeing his relationship with his large corporate publisher through to the bitter end was his most financially rewarding option. Remember, Josh Hawley got to keep his advance, because the publisher pulled the plug on his book, so he had all that original money plus the smaller advance a smaller publisher gave him soon enough. If Carlson were to give Simon & Schuster its money back, he would almost certainly not have received the same amount of money from anybody else, and more? HAHAHAHAHAHA.
For one thing, there are only three other companies that can pay the same amount of money a house like Simon & Schuster might pay a television personality like Tucker Carlson, and it seems very unlikely that they would do so for… well, we haven’t even discussed the fact that this book is actually just a collection of Tucker’s old magazine clippings from 1995 to 2016, with mild “updates.” The book before this one, that’s the one Carlson might have gotten anybody else at the bigger publishing houses interested. This book? Straight to the “minor leagues,” as it were.
As usual, I want to emphasize that I don’t have any actual inside information about Tucker Carlson’s dispute with Simon and Schuster, and I’m not about to call any of the people I know who work there and ask them about it. I’ve simply speculated about what might be the case based on what I do know about the publishing industry, particularly about contracts. That speculation leads me to wonder if Tucker Carlson is behaving in a manner I would find consistent with a greedy asshole.
All I can say is: If I wanted to make as much money as possible from my shitty juvenilia, I would probably tack it onto the end of a multi-book deal with a corporate publishing house, gouge the publisher for as high an advance as I could, then let it soak up the losses… or gin up a controversy that might even convince particularly gullible members of my fan base to actually buy the damn thing, because if it ever did earn out and start generating fresh royalties, that would frankly be a gift.
And if you get the sense that I would have zero sympathy for somebody who exploited a publishing house, even a corporate publishing house, in this fashion, you’re right.
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