Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry in for Tanzina Vega, and you're listening to The Takeaway. The publishing industry is in a bit of a bind. Recently, there's been a number of controversies surrounding book deals for former Trump administration officials and other polarizing figures.
Just last month, more than 200 employees at Simon and Schuster signed a petition calling for the publishing company to cancel its deals with former vice president, Mike Pence, and former Trump Senior Advisor, Kellyanne Conway.
Simon and Schuster is far from the only major publisher grappling with the question of who exactly should get a book deal? This is a debate playing out across the industry right now. Which authors deserve the platform and resources of these publishers and who gets to decide if and when they don't? To walk us through that question and more, we're joined by Constance Grady, culture writer at Vox. Constance, welcome back to the show.
Constance Grady: Hey, thanks so much for having me.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Absolutely. Let's start with this open letter from the Simon and Schuster staffers. What exactly were they calling for? Was it simply to cancel certain book deals or was it broader than that?
Constance Grady: It was a little bit broader than that. They wanted Simon and Schuster to cancel the Pence book deal, to also commit to refusing to sign any other members of the Trump administration. They also wanted Simon and Schuster to end the association with an independent press that Simon and Schuster has a distribution deal with, which came under a lot of scrutiny earlier this spring, because it had signed a book deal with John Mattingly, one of the cops who shot at Breonna Taylor.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Help me understand how the general public sees these questions as well. We saw some reactions on social media.
Constance Grady: There was a lot of social media outcry. There was also a lot of people signing this petition sort of in solidarity with these staffers at Simon and Schuster, who did not want to work on these books. Some of them included prominent authors who worked for Simon and Schuster, including Jesmyn Ward, who is the only woman ever to win two national book awards.
There's been a lot of outcry from people who feel that figures like Mike Pence and other people who work in the Trump administration don't deserve to have the resources of a major publisher at their disposal.
At the same time, there's also a number of people who really do like these figures and support them and think that they should have book deals. There are other people in the middle who will sometimes argue that taking a book deal away from someone is the same as censorship and that a publisher should never concern itself with such issues.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Yes. Let me go to exactly that point. We spent the first part of our episode today talking about Nikole Hannah-Jones and the decision by the UNC trustee board to deny her tenure. Help me understand how this is any different. These are ideas. They're ideas that clearly some people will pay for.
At this point, we don't know that the books would be full of things that are inaccurate. Presumably, that would occur in the-- Fact-checking would occur in the context of the editorial process. Isn't it simply a matter of a form of censorship?
Constance Grady: One thing that I want to flag in what you just said is that in fact, most of the publishers don't have fact-checking as part of their editorial process. That's one of the ways that book publishing is different than magazine publishing.
Book publishers will have it included in the contract that the author is supposed to make sure that anything that they've put into a nonfiction book is definitely true, but they don't generally connect. They don't generally connect all those to the fact-checkers. They don't loop it into the editorial process in the same way that, for instance, copy editing is looped in. That's one of the reason--
Melissa Harris-Perry: I feel like books that are labeled non-fiction now need to come with a government warning. That's like, "What's in this book may or may not be true".
Constance Grady: Surely, this is part of the reason why you'll sometimes get a lot of outcry about these books from figures who built up a big following on Fox News is, these books are being sold as non-fiction, but they haven't really necessarily been checked over. They're often written by people who have demonstrated a limited concern for the truth in their public lives. Kellyanne Conway has a book deal with Simon and Schuster's imprint Threshold books, and she coined the term alternative facts. How can the public trust that what she writes is going to be true?
Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, given that we're talking about Simon and Schuster, one might also bring up the books by John Bolton, and also by the former president's niece, Mary Trump. Weren't they also published by the same press?
Constance Grady: Yes, they were. This is an interesting paradox of publishing. I think there's, on the one hand, this idealistic idea from a lot of people in publishing that, this is an industry that is supposed to display the widest possible amount of viewpoints towards readers, and put them out on the marketplace of ideas and let readers make up their own minds about them.
I think what Simon and Schuster staffers have been saying is it's one thing to publish books by figures that we can trust have rigorously checked their own work, and it's another thing to put forth the ideas into the marketplace of ideas that we are pretty sure have not been checked and may potentially be harmful.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Help me to think about what all of this says about the publishing industry, about its goals, and its own understanding of itself within our current society.
Constance Grady: I think this is a really major question that a lot of these industries are facing as they try to move away from the monolithic whiteness of the gatekeepers of culture. Publishing last I checked was about 79% white and that really affects the stories that are told and the people who get the resources to put their stories out there.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Constance Grady is a culture writer at Vox. Constance, thank you.
Constance Grady: Thanks so much for having me.
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