A Wry Soupçon of Schadenfreude

A year of highs and lows, light and dark, and chickens coming home to roost.

Photo by Hana Oliver on Unsplash

After all the publishing drama of 2022, where cancel culture seemed like a voracious piranha devouring all the pesky writers whose opinions or writing it deemed contemptible, surely, surely 2023 couldn’t be any worse? Well… yes and no. There are new sparks of light on the surface but dig a little deeper and you find areas where the dark is so dense no light can penetrate. No sector of the industry proves this more than in children’s publishing.

In June, an anonymous children’s writer wrote an incredibly thoughtful essay detailing the all-pervading fear that’s caught by the throat many writers (and others in publishing) who believe the industry’s enthusiasm in publishing unscientific, gender ideologically suffused children’s books is causing great harm. There’s been a whole swathe of them published for children of all ages this year that fits this bill, but to my mind, no other book encapsulates it quite as much as Harry Woodgate’s Granddad’s Pride. A book targeted at children aged 4+, its illustrations include men in bondage gear and a girl with mastectomy scars.

Also deserving a special mention is Welcome to St. Hell: My Trans Teen Misadventure by Lewis Hancox. A graphic novel for teenagers that promotes transition without a whisper of caution about its irreversibility, it even depicts its protagonist injecting testosterone.

Continuing the ‘we will ram this ideology down all the kids throats until they’re sick’ philosophy was the School Library Association. For its annual book awards last month, its judges chose ABC Pride as winner of the Under 7 category.

Who knew children would take such joy in learning things such as E is for Equity? Not the children – they voted for Do Bears Poop in the Woods as their favourite.  

Outside children’s publishing, things appear a little brighter, but it’s the small, independent presses taking the risks by publishing books the wokerati will set the piranhas on them for. Twenty-two publishers turned down journalist Hannah Barnes’ forensically researched exposé on the Tavistock clinic, Time to Think, with many doing so because they knew their junior staff would have a fit of the vapours. The plucky Swift Press gamely and fearlessly took it on and are reaping the rewards – it was a Sunday Times bestseller, has been listed as one of both The Economist and The Times books of the year, and has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Baillie Gifford book prize.

Swift Press also published Sharron Davis’s book, Unfair Play, another of The Times’ books of the year and one of the Telegraph’s too. It is also up for an award, having been shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year.

Another plucky small press, Eye Books, took on a possibly even more controversial book in comedy writer Graham Lineham’s hilarious and moving autobiography, Tough Crowd. To the fury of his critics, who can’t believe he won’t just go off and lick the wounds inflicted by that voracious piranha in silence, that too was a Sunday Times bestseller.

However, while it’s great to see well-written books that deal head-on with controversial subjects finding their homes and audiences, that particular spot of lightness is darkened by some booksellers and libraries actively doing their best to stop customers from finding and buying them. Many readers have complained about being unable to find the above mentioned books in certain book stores – there is no doubt many book sellers are either shelving them under the wrong category, hiding them out of sight and, in too many cases, not stocking them at all. Of course, there isn’t the shelf space to stock every book published, but these are books that came with huge swathes of publicity. In a sane world, they’d be a book seller’s dream.

Another example of this phenomena is the children’s author, Onjali Rauf, who won Waterstone’s Children’s Book Prize for The Boy at the Back of The Class just four years ago. Not only is Onjali a celebrated author but she founded Making Herstory, a charity committed to ending the abuse, enslavement and trafficking of women. For this, along with her services to literature, she was awarded an MBE. When someone like Onjali struggles to find their latest release in certain book stores, you know the problem runs deep.

Whilst it could be argued that refusing to stock a book by a gender critical author on the basis of their protected beliefs has a whiff of discrimination about it, there’s an argument to be made that book sellers are private enterprises and therefore free to stock whatever books they wish. The whole point of running a business though, is to make a profit. As The Fight for the Future of Publishing by the Free Press shows, publishers are losing huge sums of money in their never ending quest to throw their lot in on books and authors that tick all the latest EDI boxes (and keep their junior staff from throwing tantrums). If they’re losing money then the book sellers can’t be making much off those loss-earners either. The trouble with pesky humans, so I’ve learned in my decades on this earth, is that most really don’t like being told what to think, and they certainly don’t like being told what to read. People read books for a whole host of reasons, but unless a story, whether fact or fiction, is compellingly told, they won’t throw their money away on it.

While booksellers do have discretion in the books they choose to sell, librarians have no such excuse. It was horrifying to learn many are actively hiding books – specifically gender critical ones – from the public. Here’s the article that kicked it all off. One spark of light that transpired from this debacle was that the hidden reads had a higher borrow rate than the enthusiastically displayed and recommended ones that ticked the EDI boxes.

As the year draws to a close we can take comfort that the winds of change are (touch wood) upon us. Hachette UK’s CEO and VP of the Publisher’s Association, David Shelley, has spearheaded a new code of conduct for publishing professionals. Whilst it’s much weaker than many would have wanted, that he felt compelled to spearhead it at all shows that publishing knows the current state of play can’t continue. Whether he and the others involved in the code’s drafting find the cojones to beef it up and make it crystal clear that publishing will no longer tolerate the bullying or cancellation of any author or publishing employee, only time will tell. Maybe the Society of Authors, who approved this limp biscuit, will finally find their cojones and demand this too, especially now that its Chair is feeling the piranhas breathing down her own neck: This Wednesday, after what feels like years of SoA members begging her to speak out against cancel culture rather than side with the mob, she finally took it upon herself to speak out against a (US) debut author having their contract cancelled for allegedly review-bombing rivals.

Alas, this has not gone down well with her fan base, most of whom are fervent believers in cancel culture, or her detractors who have been pointing out her rank hypocrisy. My first ever substack has plenty of screenshots exposing Joanne Harris’s prior laisse faire attitude to authors having their contracts cancelled. We know, too, from Kate Clanchy and Rachel Rooney’s testimonies, that she has been a participant in the mob treatment they suffered.

As I write this, Joanne is having to deal with the ignominy of her historic tweets being scrutinised, with many found in some eyes to be wanting. And that, in a nutshell, encapsulates so much that is wrong with publishing and the world at large – step a foot out of the purity line and the mob will descend like wolves. Everything you’ve achieved, any good you’ve ever done; it’s all swept aside while your words are twisted, your motivations assumed (and always assumed to be nefarious) and your reputation shredded. Quite honestly, I want to take delight in this. As the saying goes: Live By the Mob, Die By the Mob. But I can’t. I know too many people who’ve been on the receiving end of it to allow myself more than a wry soupçon of schadenfreude, because to be on the receiving end of the mob is soul destroying. I can only hope that when Joanne comes out on the other side of the firestorm, she can find it in herself to recognise her contribution to the conditions that’s allowed the mob to come for her. She has only a month left as Chair before she has to stand down, so I have to hope too, that others on the SoA’s Management Committee finally take the destruction of authors careers by mob rule seriously. The omens are hopeful because…

Remember Julia Williams, who last year bravely spoke at the SoA’s AGM on the resolution asking that Joanne Harris resign, and then stepped into Amanda Craig’s shoes at the very last second to speak on the Freedom of Expression resolution (details of why she felt compelled to do this can be found here)? Well this year, the SoA’s membership voted Julia onto the Management Committee on the basis of her campaign to champion and protect free speech. Hope really does spring eternal.

And with that, I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and the most joyous of New Years.