This WOW is brought to you “courtesy” of John Paul Mac Isaac. This part of the story turned out to be less male-female and more “conservative”-liberal. And it turned out to be an involved search, although with interesting (I think) results along the way. But if you are more interested in our usual news roundup, please feel free to skip down to “In Other News”.
A story by Laura Clawson reporting that Hunter Biden is now suing the people who have tried to make his life miserable (good for him!) got me looking further at the computer shop guy. You know that guy, the supposed small business owner who supposedly took in Hunter Biden’s laptop for repair after liquid had been spilled on it. Then this computer guy decided that it was more important to pass along the contents of that computer to Reptublicans, specifically Rudy Giuliani, than to protect the confidentiality of one of his customers. And he wonders why he is no longer in business.
So this failed business owner and white guy you wouldn’t trust with scooping your dog’s poop has “written”a book about this whole experience! (No ghost writer is credited, but come on, this is the only writing listed in the guy’s bio.) And he did not have to self publish — this book was published by Liberatio Protocol. Which apparently is/was a right-wing division of Simon & Schuster, one of the major publishing houses. However, the Simon & Schuster pages about their own division appear to have been scrubbed.
If you’re an aspiring and mostly unknown writer like me, you know how difficult it is to get published, and many end up resorting to self publishing.
So this disconnect between the publishing success of this white guy only remarkable for his ethical and business failures, and the publishing struggles of the rest of us, got me thinking: Are the success stories mostly white male? If so, by how much? Can I find other commonalities of publishing success; say, a right-wing philosophy?
US demographics showthat publishing staff are about 75-80% white. Surprisingly to me, they identify as about 55-60% male. I expected a much smaller ratio of women in the industry, but another website (that I can’t find again now!) showed that even executives and boards of publishing companies are about 40% female. That’s a good start! But the rest of the diversity information is very disappointing. In particular, Blacks comprise only about 3.5% of publishing staff, about 13% of the general population; Hispanics/Latinos about 8%, 19% of the general population; Native Americans 0.3%, about 3% of the general population. It looks like their inclusive recruiting efforts need some work!
Working writers reflect these demographics pretty closely, with about 55% women making about 95% of what men make in the field. However, again, about 75% are white, 8% Hispanic/Latino, 6% black and 0.4% Native American. Trying a different source and one in-depth study of authors and creators at one publishing house, the percentages are almost identical.
Still not sure, then, why you and I have so much difficulty getting published. Apparently the odds of publication are only about 1-2%. Notably, along with all the usual necessities such as spelling and grammar, odds increase if your book “fits” within a particular genre. And then here we see that women authors “fit” within lower-paying categories such as romance and fantasy. These are also categories that publish a lot more books, and so overwhelm the market that chances are no one book will catch on massively. And so here we find at last some reasons why published female authors make about 89% of what published male authors make. As well as how difficult it might be to break away from low pay: If you are a female author and submit a “male” manuscript such as one featuring science or science fiction, will they think that your female name does not “fit” in the category?
If you’re still with me on this question, note this list of famous multitudinous rejections: Included are female authors of Twilight, Harry Potter, and A Wrinkle in Time. But also male authors of A Time to Kill, Carrie, and The Wizard of Oz.
Still not convinced that this failure of a white IT guy didn’t have something else going for him, I kept digging. Aha, right-wing authors are very popular! In this article, they suggest that right-wing readers are fans of a few prominent writers, intensifying their popularity; whereas left-wing readers read a much wider array of authors, diluting the popularity of any one.
And yet finally, I think I found the real answer here in The myth of the conservative bestseller: Right wingers game the system. They get conservative groups to make bulk purchases for them. The books may sit in boxes in some office or warehouse somewhere, but that initial purchase gets them on the bestseller lists, and from there people buy because they’re bestsellers. And so right-wing narratives are pushed into the popular consciousness and look like they are much more popular than they really are. And even though we know that many right-wing voters are not very well educated and do not read a lot, “somehow” right-wing books are nearly all at the top of the mainstream bestseller lists. Because the RNC or a PAC or the Heritage Foundation or the Koch Brothers, etc., bought them in bulk. Note that also, then “bestselling author” right-wing trolls are invited to go on book tours, onto talk shows, and may make significant money with speeches. Because “everyone” is interested, right? Their book is a bestseller! Right-wing bestselling authors, as you might expect, are much more likely to be male.
Note also that bulk purchases can be seen and tagged, so these could be erased from mainstream bestseller lists because they are not really popular. But so far, the publishers of such lists have not decided to do so. And probably the publishers are against it, because I doubt that they care whether books are bulk purchased or not. As long as they are purchased, publishers make their profits. We would love to see this imbalance corrected. But we may have to rebalance by finding liberal supporters who will bulk purchase, regardless of whether or not they are interested in reading.
What do you think? Protest the game? Or play the game? Please feel free to discuss in Comments.