Trump Struggling to Land Book Deal for Good Reason - How Publishers Should Handle Political Memoirs esquire.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from esquire.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
“We don’t let it directly determine what we publish, but the fact is, with every book, there is always fear that the book is going to be pulled. The authors feel very vulnerable,” said David Bernstein, publisher of Bombardier Books, a conservative imprint of Post Hill Press.
Conservative fears were realized this month when the book “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment,” by Catholic scholar Ryan T. Anderson, vanished from the Amazon website three years after it was published.
Four Republican senators, including Utah’s Mike Lee, called the action “political censorship,” saying in a letter to CEO Jeff Bezos that “Amazon has openly signaled to conservative Americans that their views are not welcome on its platforms.”
A purge of conservative book editors should worry anyone who cares about democracy
The sacking of a pro-Trump executive in the US threatens to have a chilling effect on the publishing industry
23 February 2021 • 6:00am
The pen is mightier than the sword. That phrase, coined by the author Edward Bulwer-Lytton in the 1830s and a powerful advocacy of the written language over direct violence, was once a source of comfort. Yet in the past 18 months, I have begun to feel that the strength of this statement brings with it a certain queasiness.
Words have always been weapons of course, yet while in the past they were used sparingly, they have now either become tools for a social media riot or in the case of much writing, undetonated hand grenades waiting to cause offence or anger.