scottlynch78: notyourexrotic: wombatking:tikkunolamorgtfo:cassandrashipsit:thisiseverydayracis
scottlynch78: notyourexrotic: wombatking: tikkunolamorgtfo: cassandrashipsit: thisiseverydayracism: Remember this logo. If a book has this logo, boycott it. That’s the logo for publishing company Simon & Schuster who have given racist sack of shit Milo Yiannopoulos a $250,000 contract to write a book. Yiannopoulos is the “alt-right” editor at Breitbart News, who was banned from Twitter after launching a widespread attack on actress Leslie Jones. Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/milo-yiannopoulos-new-book_us_58653b28e4b0d9a5945a7247 If you want to boycott them (which I certainly support) make sure you check out all their imprints and divisions to avoid it ALL: http://about.simonandschuster.biz/divisions-and-imprints/ Okay, everybody. A friend of mine in the publishing industry just shared a post on Facebook about this, and has given me permission to share the information (with her name redacted): Hi. I’m someone who’s worked in publishing her entire career, and I’m here to explain the Milo Yiannopoulos issue (notorious troll just got a hefty book deal from Simon & Schuster; internet is freaking out) and how to handle it: BACKGROUND: Let’s get the “free speech” arguments out of the way: Yiannopoulos is an actively dangerous man who leads bullying mobs against selected targets, and spreads hate speech as a life ethos. Even a person as vile as Yiannopoulos has the right to speak his mind, but decent people owe it to the world not to give him additional platforms and the air of legitimacy. That’s doubly the case in this political climate, which insists that all opinions should be valued equally, regardless of whether they’re true or false, and whether they make the world a better or worse place to live in. This is rather like deciding to publish “Mein Kampf” - is that really what you want your legacy to be as an organization? WHAT NOT TO DO: No “I’m going to boycott Simon & Schuster” talk unless you are a published author and you’re talking about not contracting with them. This is not like buying toilet paper or leather jackets - they sell the work of real, living, struggling authors who really really want you to read what they’ve labored over for years, and it’s unfair to penalize them because their publishing company is being dumb. Print media is a fragile industry these days, and that’s why we’re seeing these big stupid controversial book deals - it’s because we no longer have a world where people walk into their local independent neighborhood bookstore and let the kindly old cashier recommend you a book of poetry with a 500-copy print run that speaks perfectly to your reading sensibilities. You gotta have your crossover blockbusters or the whole enterprise crosses the December finish line in the red. Insisting on a boycott just makes people who haven’t bought a book since college want to run out and pre-order this to spite you. Simon & Schuster knows you “I love books, here’s a shared image macro about how I would literally make gentle love to a piece of printed paper if it were socially acceptable” folks get all your books used from Amazon for $3.99 + shipping, anyway, so they don’t care whether you’re their friend. This is for the business traveler with gross views who needs something entertaining for the plane flight to the Atlanta conference. You gotta convince them not to sell to THAT guy. WHAT TO DO: Write them letters, hard-copy ones that need a stamp and an envelope. At any major publishing house, the people at the bottom are mostly clever, thoughtful, progressive gals who don’t like this sort of thing any more than you do. They want to be able to go to their bosses’ bosses’ bosses with a massive stack of post and say, “Hey, this is the only reader correspondence we’re getting now,” because that wastes time, and the easiest way to piss off a publishing house is to waste their employees’ time. Wasting time = less time for making books. Remember also that everybody who gets into publishing does it because fundamentally they love to READ, they READ anything that is put in front of them, even the guys at the top who spend more time on the phone and at cocktail parties than working with text believe in words as a magical conduit of ideas, and if you write them a long heartfelt letter, they may scoff at it but they will read it, and if they have 1000 heartfelt letters a day, then sooner or later all those words will sink in. This is not a plastics manufacturer, this is not a bank. This is a book company. Write to the people who are in the business of reading. CONTACT INFO: Corporate HeadquartersSIMON & SCHUSTER, INC.1230 Avenue of the AmericasNew York, NY 10020PHONE: 212-698-7000 And individual contacts here, best to address it to someone in particular: http://about.simonandschuster.biz/leadership/Normally, the best tactic is to write directly to a specific editor or the imprint, but Threshold is conservative, so they may not care. Still, perhaps try:Threshold EditionsGeneral Phone: 212-698-7006General Fax: 212-698-2858Jennifer RobinsonVice President, Director of [email protected] make the point that the views of this author are not conservative views, they are fundamentally hateful and aggressive views which seek to undermine the rights of other citizens. He did, after all, help lead the hate mob against Leslie Jones that got her hacked - they should ask themselves whether that’s something with which they want their otherwise respectable work to be associated, especially since the published book may end up becoming associated with additional hate crimes should readers take it too literally. Surely they don’t want their book to start making news for being repeatedly found in the homes of every homegrown militant for the next 10 years. I’ll also add that Louise Burke is president and publisher of the Gallery imprint, which Threshold falls under, so you could send to her as well. Good advice. A boycott in this case would be counterproductive. Milo is being published through a “conservative imprint” that has already published the likes of Dinesh D’Souza and Glenn Beck. However, Simon and Schuster has dozens of other imprints, many of which are rather progressive, and they actually have a strong reputation as a company that supports LGBT themes. A boycott would drive down sales for those progressive lines - while not affecting the sales for the conservative imprint at all. S&S would potentially take that and double down on this kind of disgusting content. ^^^^^^^^ Reblogged for all of it. Publishing houses are multi-limbed creatures with dozens of imprints. The very same conglomerate that edits and publishes paranoid authoritarian jack-off fodder probably edits and publishes green living diversity manifestos on the next floor up or down (and, for the record, despite my sarcastic capsule descriptions, I’m Team Green Living Diversity Manifesto). In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll add that this conglomerate in particular publishes a lot of hopeful young SF&F voices via Saga Press, which is run by friends (Joe Monti and Navah Wolfe) and will soon publish my wife, Elizabeth Bear.A blanket boycott is useless; declaring a boycott against something as sprawling as S&S is like declaring a boycott against radio waves or “the media.” It also sounds like a virtuous and heroic thing to sign onto when reblog time comes around, but let’s have a brief reality check– the proto-fascist noise machine that Milo represents eats empty gestures for breakfast. So get specific. Write polite but sharply-worded letters to the listed people of responsibility.The issue, as I see it, isn’t that poor little Milo has opinions we disagree with (the STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE of proto-fascists is to whine about how much people pick on them “just for having the wrong opinions”) but that he wants to be a court jester for white supremacists, neo-Nazis, violent nationalists, movement misogynists, and homophobes. Milo is exactly the sort of moneyed trans-national media elitist caricature his fascist bros have a hate-on for; the brutal irony of his life is that he wants to dance for the amusement of a demographic that wants to be able to drag people like him behind pickup trucks in a consequence-free environment. He’s a hypocrite and an enabler of violent, ignorant fucks who want to tear society down and rebuild it as a survival horror video game. In historical terms, he’s the sort of hilarious gadfly who would have enjoyed a protected existence in Nazi Germany until 1933, and then been hauled into the darkness for degeneracy in 1934. I guarantee his book will be a shit-tastic waste of any reader’s time, unless it’s subtitled “I Was A 33-Year-Old Helpmeet to the Forces of Fucking Darkness and I Can’t Believe What the Fuck I Was Thinking at the Time.” -- source link