Late last year, the announcement that Simon & Schuster had signed Milo Yiannopoulos as an author generated relentless industry criticism and calls for boycott (which we covered)—even as some voices in the community defended the move on the basis of publishing’s support of free speech.
So news traveled fast when Simon & Schuster emailed a statement to newspeople on Presidents’ Day just after 5:00 p.m. EST. It was a classic—one sentence only:
“After careful consideration, Simon & Schuster and its Threshold Editions imprint have cancelled publication of Dangerous by Milo Yiannopoulos.”
Monday’s terse statement came after a video surfaced in which Yiannopoulos appears to condone sexual relations with boys as young as 13 and makes light of pedophilia among Catholic priests. The Conservative Political Action Conference canceled Yiannopoulos’s speaking invitation, and then S&S announced that they were pulling his book deal. And—as we were going to press—the other shoe dropped: Yiannopoulos resigned from Breitbart News.
Over the past several weeks, however, S&S has taken a heavy drubbing. In January, S&S CEO Carolyn Reidy issued a statement to concerned authors that many at the time thought might be predictive of a cancellation. Reidy wrote, “Neither Threshold Editions nor any other of our imprints will publish books that we think will incite hatred, discrimination, or bullying.” Their author Roxane Gay pulled her book from publication in late January and remains fiercely critical in new Tumblr comments after the cancellation.
Bottom line: While it’s easy to stand outside events like this and feel that we all might make better decisions, conservative political books are big money in the trade. Nevertheless, we see a higher bar being put into place in the current political environment: while hate speech may be in the ear of the beholder, we think we’ll see more publishers encounter far greater scrutiny than in the past. It’s worth considering the closing lines of Gay’s new commentary: “There are some who will spin the cancellation of this book contract as a failure of the freedom of speech, but such is not the case. This is yet another example of how we are afforded the freedom of speech, but there is no freedom from the consequences of what we say.”
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
