So You’re Thinking About Boycotting Milo Yiannopoulos’ Book Publisher…

photo by Dan Thompson

It’s been a day since we found out about Milo Yiannopoulos’s $250K book deal, and people are understandably upset with the publisher that signed him up—Threshold, an imprint of Simon & Schuster specializing in conservative political nonfiction. Folks have been talking online about a boycott of Simon & Schuster, so I thought I’d organize some of the stray thoughts I’ve had on the subject over the last 24 hours.

1. Publishers like Simon & Schuster—well, let’s backtrack. There’s really only four other general trade publishers in the United States operating on the scale of S&S: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Hachette Book Group. And these “Big 5” houses publish a little bit of everything, in part because if one book, or even one type of book, fails, there’s plenty of other product to fall back on.
2. By publishing a little bit of everything, these publishers are also banking, even if it’s just unconsciously, on individual consumers being able to maintain a full boycott. You’re mad about Milo getting a book deal, for example, and you say you’re not going to buy any more books from Simon & Schuster or its various imprints. Are you going to stick to that when the new Stephen King comes out? Or the new Don DeLillo? Heck, two days before Milo’s book deal was announced, when I heard about the death of Richard Adams, I went out and bought a copy of the Scribner paperback edition of Watership Down. If Richard Adams hadn’t died until after Milo’s book deal was announced, I’d still have bought it, because, y’know, it’s Watership Down.
3. Then there’s the “big picture” argument: If you’re willing to boycott all of Simon & Schuster over one Threshold book, are you prepared to boycott all of CBS Corporation, S&S’s parent company? Are you prepared to stop watching CBS and Showtime and The CW? Of course, you don’t have to go that far: Earlier in 2016, when CNN hired former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski as a “political analyst,” I decided I was no longer going to watch that network—but I’m still watching shows on other Time Warner channels like TNT, TBS, and Cartoon Network. But if you’re thinking about inflicting economic damage on Milo’s publishers, well, how much damage do you want to inflict?
4. Because, ultimately, Simon & Schuster is just a component of CBS Corporation, which will continue normalizing the rise of fascism in myriad other ways, like Lesley Stahl’s softball 60 Minutes interviews with Donald Trump. And, let’s be honest, how many Simon & Schuster books did you buy in 2016 before you found out about Milo’s book deal? (Can you even answer that question without checking the spines of every book you bought in the last year?) So, if you really want to hurt the people who are normalizing Milo Yiannopoulos by giving him a book deal, you might want to expand the scope of your attack.
5. Are you really hurting the people who are normalizing Milo, though, or are you hurting a bunch of authors whose only “crime” is to be published by a Simon & Schuster imprint? S&S has a lot of authors at many different levels in their career, and while somebody like Stephen King could probably ride out a few hundred, or even a few thousand, missed sales because of a collaborative political resistance, for other writers, at the beginning of their careers, sales below expectations—or below a safe threshold—might make S&S decide to not continue publishing that writer.
6. What if we don’t go company-wide? How about only boycotting Threshold books? Well, let’s be honest, if you’re that pissed off about Milo Yiannopoulos getting a book deal, I can predict with 99.99% certainty you weren’t buying any Threshold books before now. Come to think of it, if you’re ready to boycott S&S over Milo, why weren’t you prepared to boycott S&S over Rush Limbaugh, or Dick Cheney, or, hell, Donald Trump? You want to talk about normalizing fascism? S&S published Trump’s Crippled America through Threshold. Shouldn’t “we” have called for a boycott then, if we were going to do it?

And yet, despite everything I’ve just said, I wouldn’t necessarily dissuade you from boycotting S&S, if that’s what you really want to do. As much as I want to protect other S&S writers, remember when I said I stopped watching CNN because they hired Corey Lewandowski, who’s just as evil as Milo if not moreso? Well, as part of that boycott, I gave up two shows by two people I respect and admire, W. Kamau Bell and Anthony Bourdain. I miss their shows, and I wish I could support them in their television endeavors without supporting CNN, but that’s not possible for me right now. (I can tell you that they’re good shows, and if you’re not opposed to watching CNN, you should watch them.)

I know that my not watching CNN is a drop in the bucket as an act of economic resistance. Maybe, if thousands of other people are joining me in not watching CNN, there’s a more significant impact. For me, though, it’s an act of moral resistance, and the impact making that choice has on me is far more important than the impact it has on CNN. It’s a way of reminding myself that I’m not going to stand for that shit (which is, by the way, not limited to the Corey Lewandowski thing), and a way to live with something a little bit closer to integrity.

I can well imagine that some of you feel the same way about S&S publishing Milo Yiannopoulos. If that’s the case, and if you’re prepared to give up on books by authors you otherwise admire, then go for the boycott. When you do so, however, recognize that it’s going to take a lot of people making the same decision for S&S to even notice, especially if y’all aren’t speaking out about it regularly. And remember that you’re not refusing to buy S&S books out of spite, because that’s never going to bring you anything but misery, but out of a moral integrity that ought then to be reflected in all your book buying choices.

As for what that means, well, that’s probably a whole other article in itself.