The announcement from Simon & Schuster’s Threshold Editions of its deal with Twitter-banned right-wing Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos caught many in the industry by surprise.
Announced in late 2016, the deal for Dangerous (to release March 14) prompted disparagement of S&S for spreading hate speech. The Chicago Review of Books announced it will boycott S&S books this year in response to the publisher carrying Yiannopoulos’s writings, and a petition has called for the New York Times and Washington Post to follow suit. Also, a San Francisco bookstore, Booksmith—in addition to not stocking the book—has decided to reduce all of its orders with S&S by 50 percent.
The Authors Guild has joined the Association of American Publishers and the American Booksellers Association in a group of eight organizations defending the S&S contract with Yiannopoulos. Their statement says that “threats to boycott publishers undermine intellectual freedom and harm readers and writers,” and “suppression of noxious ideas does not defeat them; only vigorous disagreement can counter toxic speech effectively.” For a much less sympathetic view toward S&S (and corporate publishing in general), take a look at “Publishing during Wartime,” a post by Dennis Johnson of Melville House, a well-known and left-leaning independent publisher.
Interestingly, the UK arm of S&S has declined to publish Dangerous in that market, and Slate followed up with editors at conservative imprints who declined to take the book on. As of this writing, the book continues to chart very high in pre-orders—for example, showing at number one on Amazon in the Political Humor category. (Whether that’s an intentional categorizing by the publisher is unclear.)
At the New York Times, Alexandra Alter writes about “the minefield publishers face as they try to court an emerging market of young conservatives,” and that the incident has thrown “an uncomfortable spotlight on a lucrative but often overlooked niche.” We’ll undoubtedly see more of this tension as international political trends to the right assert themselves.
Bottom line: Do boycotts work? That question may become more relevant than ever during a Trump presidency, as pointed out by James Surowiecki in the New Yorker. He writes, “Boycotts are not just futile griping; they often work. A study by Brayden King, a professor at (aptly) the Kellogg School of Management, found that, during high-profile boycotts between 1990 and 2005, a company’s stock price fell, on average, every day that the boycott was in the news. King also found that more than a third of the boycotted companies ended up changing their behavior in response to the protest. Perhaps his most striking finding was that boycotts usually had only a small impact on sales. Bad publicity and worried stockholders were enough to bring a company to heel.” That will likely come as welcome relief to S&S authors worried about becoming collateral damage.
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.
