What do you do when your business does not match your values? The book industry has a lot wrong with it and there are many injustices that people face who want to do the right thing in that industry. The industry says they stand for one thing, while they become hypocrites and publish exactly what the say they do not like.
Key Takeaways:
- Working in the book industry, I know well that it’s a business like any other. But unlike most industries, it purports to serve a moral purpose bigger than its bottom line. The unfortunate reality, though, is that it’s fallen far short of those ideals long before signing an author like Yiannopoulos.
- Recently, over 160 children’s book authors and artists (many of them published by Simon & Schuster) wrote an open letter to the publisher claiming that Yiannopoulos’s views are antithetical to their sense of publishing’s social mission.
- Playing the game for either level of success doesn’t always leave room for the values that publishers claim not just to hold dear but to actively advance. Their businesses, like most businesses, simply aren’t set up to allow them to.
“Simon & Schuster, as a company, may not condone hate speech, but it continues to vie with other publishers to award book contracts to people who do.”
