Publishers

If you’ve recently heard a collective intake of breath, it’s probably coming from a posse of publishers near you, bracing themselves for the deluge that’s coming. They know that those new year resolutions to get that novel published have been set in motion. Manuscripts have been retrieved from the dusty bowels of laptops and are being dispatched.

And in tandem with the arrival of the swallows, the rejection emails will start to wing their way into the inboxes of many of those hopeful writers. But if your life’s work is rejected, fear not. You are in the best of company, judging by a book I recently read. Rotten Rejections, by editor André Bernard, documents the in-house memos, letters and anecdotes involving the rejection of work by some very familiar names, including many Irish authors.

Back in 1895, poor WB Yeats was castigated for his offering, Poems. “I am relieved to find the critics shrink from saying that Mr Yeats will ever be a popular author,” huffed the person who received the submission – the book doesn’t cite the names of those who were so bold as to reject these titans of literature. “The work does not please the ear, nor kindle the imagination,” the publisher continued. “That he has any real paying audience I find hard to believe.”

As a new doctoral student at Cornell, Adam Szetela Ph.D. ’25 noticed an interesting trend in the book publishing world. Rather than criticism from people on the cultural right about the morals —or lack thereof — in current titles, authors and publishers were being slammed by folks on the cultural left, who were attacking books as racist or sexist, or questioning an author’s sensitivity.

“A lot of this is coming from a place of good faith,” Szetela said about the trend, which he writes about in “That Book Is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing,” published Aug. 12 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press and distributed by Penguin Random House. “But while the right is remaking the world in its image, the left is standing in a circular firing squad.”

Szetela said this new version of self-censorship is fueled by the vast reach of social media today.

Traditional book publishers. They were once known as the titans of the book publishing industry. In the Baby Boomer era, self-publishing was an unknown concept. You needed a traditional publisher if you wanted the best chance to succeed with your book.

During that time, there was significantly less competition for publishers and authors, meaning more book sales for both parties.

Over time, traditional publishers (especially The Big 5) gradually started to exploit authors by offering lower royalties and seizing the author’s publishing rights.

In 2021 author, poet and teacher Kate Clanchy gained an unwelcome new accolade: the award for the most liberal target of a cancellation yet. Clanchy’s much-celebrated Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, about her experiences of teaching poetry to disadvantaged children around the UK, won the Orwell Prize in 2020. But a year later, thanks to a handful of the book’s sentences being shared out of context on social media, she found herself publicly shamed by today’s self-appointed moral guardians. She went from being applauded for bringing poetry to working-class children to being humiliated into accepting sensitivity-reader approved rewrites of her work.

It might be a new year but Clanchy’s punishment beating continues. It was announced last week that plans for a woke rewrite of Some Kids I Taught had been dropped – not because it was a God-awful idea to begin with, but because Clanchy and her publisher, Pan Macmillan, have decided to part company ‘by mutual agreement’.

The publisher’s statement notes: ‘Pan Macmillan will not publish new titles nor any updated editions from Kate Clanchy, and will revert the rights and cease distribution of Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me and her other works.’ This is an astonishing attempt by a publishing company to distance themselves from an author and her work.