Stuck in the middle with you

OK, I admit it. I clicked. Last week one of our national newspapers ran a hit piece on publishing, claiming that “woke books” bought in the wake of George Floyd’s murder had flopped. I know I shouldn’t have read it, but caring about this sector and the people in it does mean I occasionally end up in the weeds.

The story targets a few books, all of them written by marginalised writers, its view that publishing is focusing on ideology over sales, with so-called “inexperienced editors” pushing their agendas even as readers turn away.

The piece was actually a version of a longer article published on The Free Press, a news website set up by Bari Weiss, a former columnist for the New York Times (Weiss famously resigned from the NYT claiming that Twitter had become the paper’s “ultimate editor”). That commentary, grandly titled “The Fight for the Future of Publishing”, posits the theory that the growing politicisation of corporate publishing results in “slowly percolating illiberalism that makes it difficult to publish books by authors who don’t adhere to the new dogma”. We might read the same argument from author Lionel Shriver who once described Penguin Random House as “drunk on virtue”, and who is also quoted in The Free Press piece, or from some independent publishers who position themselves as publishing those books the corporates will no longer touch.

One might dismiss this stuff as an attempt to correct a correction. For longer than any of us can remember, the dominant (or perhaps dormant) ideology in publishing was anything but “woke”. There are backlist books that today would make us cringe, and yet, apart from the occasional pruning or revision, many are still actively published, and as they were originally composed. There are, too, plenty of frontlist books written by authors whose views the Daily Mail and The Free Press would no doubt approve of. Weiss is published by PRH imprint Allen Lane, for example.

For longer than any of us can remember, the dominant (or perhaps dormant) ideology in publishing was anything but “woke”

I might say that I clicked through, so you don’t have to. But publishing would do well to push back on this. Junior editors (if they are in these cases) are in part brought on to publish into areas seniors might have swerved or not had the relevant experience of, and their work ought to be supported. Flops (if these books are) are part of the day to day, just ask some of those who commissioned this year’s other celebrity memoirs. Sales, too, cannot be the only arbiter of merit, particularly if Nielsen (which provides a useful but partial measure) is the source: some books land softly, but live again in later formats, other are just too far ahead of the curve. The notion that books from the left (or right) don’t sell is also clearly a nonsense.

Publishing does not exist in a vacuum, and we all must make complicated judgements each day about how we respond to the polarised world we inhabit. Not every decision will be a good one, and in truth the future of the entire publishing business will not be dependent on it. It is right that editors are seen as the tastemakers, and also held accountable. But it seems to me that the ideologues are those writing about publishing, not those doing it.