Get Woke, Go Broke - Book Publishing Edition

How many times do industries need to learn this lesson? WOKE BOOKS BOMB! Publishers take bath on Elliot Page tome, others

If you're not interested in making money, then you probably won't. If you're not interested in making money, then you probably shouldn't be in a position where your decisions determine if your company will or won't make money.

Experts said that in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the wave of protests that followed, publishing houses began hiring editors of colour, some of whom were more interested in ideology than selling books.

Eliot Page was given a $3 million advance for the memoir of transition, Pageboy. It sold 68,000 copies, which isn't a bad number, but not nearly enough to cover $3 million.

Other recent woke disasters: Carolyn Ferrell’s, Dear Miss Metropolitan , which nailed a $250,000 advance and sold just 3,200 copies since 2021 and “queer feminist western” Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens which earned the author a $500,000 advance while selling just 3,500 copies.

Editor Nadxieli Nieto bought Rasheed Newson’s My Government Means to Kill Me for Flatiron for a sweet $250,000. According to BookScan, it has sold less than 4,500 copies.

And the Woke insanity extends to actual discrimination.

“A friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested,” author Joyce Carol Oates has said.

One publishing insider admitted as much.

“We flat-out decided we weren’t going to look at certain white male authors because we didn’t want to be seen as acquiring that stuff,” one senior editor told The Free Press.

And if a publisher wants to treat a "conservative" topic, they will be ostracized by their peers.

In a few years, we will no doubt see articles bemoaning the fact that so many publishers have gone out of business. You can't set fire to $3 million dollars here, and $250,000 there and expect to stay in business. But hey, all of those Woke editors that they hired hate capitalism. Too bad they need capitalism to keep their companies open and their paychecks coming.