No Book Deals for Tyrants or Traitors
...and no working with the publishers who would give them deals, either.
A few days ago, there was some talk about the possibility that former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale might be getting a book deal. Mind you, once you dug into the story, it was clear that the only source for all that chatter was Parscale himself—all the reporters could really tell us was that Parscale had told some people that he had an agent and was on the verge of what might be a seven-figure deal for his memoirs. When you remember, though, that Brad Parscale was involuntarily committed just two months ago after the police came to his house in response to a dispute with his wife, you start to think—or at least I do—that anything he has to say might be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.
Still, somebody is going to give one or more of the villains in Donald Trump’s orbit a book deal, and we know this is true because they already have. And now, although some publishers are noncommittal about it, talk has even turned to the prospect of a book deal for Trump himself. Various media outlets associated with Rupert Murdoch, for example, are suggesting he could land $100,000,000 altogether, although that claim comes from somebody who’s a big enough fan of Trump to call him “the Donald” to a Page Six reporter’s (literal or metaphorical) face. A second source, more familiar with the book industry, says the numbers “don’t sound accurate,” but also teases that if anyone were going to publish Donald Trump, it just might be Simon & Schuster, which has a pre-existing cozy relationship with him… and with other hardline conservatives and alt-right supremacists.
You can probably guess how I feel about that. If not, here’s Exhibit A and Exhibit B.
As I wrote after it was all over, though, “Milo [Yiannopoulos]’s cancelled book deal [didn’t] really affect the publishing industry at all.” That’s partly because Milo was a special case—Simon and Schuster didn’t dump him because of the political views that had led them to offer him a book deal in the first place; they dumped him because he got caught, on tape, advocating for sex between grown men and young teens. Neither Donald Trump nor anyone in his administration has done that on tape. (Donald Trump has been caught on tape celebrating his ability to sexually assault women, but we all know that didn’t hurt his election chances much, once it came out.)
The book industry will continue to publish books by Milos Yiannopoulos, and John Bolton, and Miles Taylor, and probably Donald Trump, and who knows maybe even Brad Parscale (although I seriously doubt he’d get anywhere near $1,000,000), for the simple reason that people will buy them—and readers will not stop buying books from the publishers who work with men like that because the average reader simply doesn’t care that, say, Stephen King and Donald Trump might have the same corporate publisher, under different imprints, and wouldn’t refuse to buy the new Stephen King book just because the company that put it out also published Donald Trump, if that were to happen. (In fact, it already has.)
That’s why it’s incumbent on authors to inform publishers that they have a choice: “You can work with Donald Trump and the members of his administration, or you can work with me.” Obviously, it would mean one thing for, say, Stephen King to issue that ultimatum, and a different thing for a “midlist,” “literary” writer to do it, and a very different thing altogether for someone who has never been published, who might in fact be trying to be published, to do it. If you’re reading this newsletter, I imagine the chances are very good that you are in the last category, and thinking to yourself, “I can’t tell a publisher that. I can’t risk not getting published just because somebody who’s offering to publish my book also publishes a morally reprehensible person.”
Strictly speaking, of course, you wouldn’t be issuing that ultimatum, because the corporate publisher involved would simply look at your unpublished manuscript, then at the financial statements for the books they publish by very bad men, and send you on your way. What you have to do, then, is resolve yourself to not submitting to those publishers in the first place.
That is a very scary proposition, I know, and if you have a literary agent, I would hope that agent was professionally responsible enough to at least talk you through it—not necessarily talk you out of it, but remind you of the possible consequences to your career and then leave you to examine your conscience and make the final decision. (And then, of course, either abide by that decision or let you find an agent who will.)
Your refusal to work with the people who work with tyrants and quislings won’t, in all honesty, change a corporate publisher’s mind. That’s not going to happen until enough people like Stephen King or Tana French or Glennon Doyle draw that line. (Or, to name someone who actually did break her contract with S&S over Milo Yiannopoulos, Roxane Gay.) That day may or may not come. In the meantime, however, you should do whatever enables you to live with a clear conscience.
If, for you, that means minimizing your engagement with a corporate system that rewards evil, then you should do that. If you’re able to reconcile yourself to the situation, to say that your participation in the media-industrial complex is too insignificant to matter, or to say that it’s a terrible world but you might as well get what you can from it, those are paths forward, too.
It’s not a simple issue. I’m not condemning anybody who has a book deal with one of the Big 5 imprints. I’ve published a book with one myself, and I know a lot of good people who publish with them now, a lot of good people who work for them. At its best, it’s a good system, and it does a lot of good for a lot of people, even as it supports some terrible people along the way.
All I’m saying, I guess, is that I have a pretty good idea what it would take for publishing to change for the better in this respect, so: who’s up for that?