Choose Your Circles Carefully, or Why Larry Correia’s Books Don’t Get Hate-Mobbed

Amélie Wen Zhao (Photo by Crystal Wong)

UPDATE: Benjamin Cheah responds.

UPDATE: Misha Burnett responds. See the end of this post.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I am part of a right-wing literary circle called the Conservative-Libertarian Fiction Alliance.

A few days ago, YA (Young Adult fiction) Twitter claimed another victim, this time a Chinese woman: Amélie Wen Zhao, pictured right. She was set to publish her debut novel, Blood Heir, in June, but when early reviewers accused her of racism against blacks, a mob sprung up to condemn her and her book. In response to the backlash, Zhao canceled delayed the release indefinitely and apologized to the public for writing it.

Rod Dreher of The American Conservative has a more detailed writeup, as does Alexandra Alter of the New York Times. (And to Slate’s credit, they find the racism charges questionable at best.)

Like Laurie Forest and Laura Moriarty before her, she got hate-mobbed on Twitter for alleged racism, often by people who didn’t even read the book. Like Keira Drake, she publicly surrendered to the mob — Drake by rewriting her book, and Zhao by withdrawing hers.

But there’s an interesting pattern here: despite the well-known bias against conservatives in publishing, these hate mobs rarely happen to right-wing authors, and they almost never happen when a book is released. Virtually every hate-mobbed author has been on the political Left.

Why?

Because left-wing and right-wing literary circles do not intersect at all. To illustrate this point, I will compare Zhao to six-figure conservative author Larry Correia.

As indicated by the Slate article, Zhao chose to enter a program for up-and-coming minority authors, and it got her an agent and a six-figure book deal. She expressed great joy at this, and it was like a dream come true for her. Traditional publishing (tradpub) in general is dominated by progressives, and tradpub YA is doubly so — the progressive wing of the progressive party. Zhao’s own politics strongly aligned with them, and at first, the book had positive buzz. At the time, Zhao had a solid base of support.

Then the accusations came in from early reviewers.

This support evaporated, turning into condemnation instantly. She had to “educate herself” and not be “defensive” as they bullied her, purely based on hearsay. A circle that once helped her now turned against her, either joining in the pile-on or staying silent to avoid harming their own standing.

Not wanting to lose this support that was so important to her, she caved to their demands. It’s clear from her apology that this circle is important to her, and that she feels genuine remorse for disappointing them.

Let’s contrast this with Larry Correia.

Correia first published his debut novel, Monster Hunter International, on a forum for gun nuts, a group dominated by conservatives. He then hand-sold the initial print editions of the book to other folks before being picked up by Baen Books, one of the few major center-right tradpub houses. Baen’s readership skews heavily to the right, and Correia’s politics align with theirs, so he had plenty of sales and plenty of support.

Thus, whenever he did get progressive hate-mobs, he would always defy them openly, knowing that he would retain his base of support from both his readers and his publisher.

So whenever Correia releases new books, he rarely if ever has to deal with progressives bothering him about it. Quite a contrast from tradpubbed YA authors, who must go through layers and layers of sensitivity reads before their books see the light of day, lest they be deemed un-woke and bigoted.

(For the record, he posted about the Amélie Wen Zhao controversy. I agree with him completely.)

Because Zhao already favored progressivism and depended upon left-wing influence networks to further her career, Zhao was a soft target. By contrast, because Correia cultivated a right-wing audience and traveled in right-wing circles, he was a hard target and thus not worth the energy.

As we’ve seen with the previous authors mentioned above, hate-mobs often target those they are likely to extract concessions from. In the case of tradpub YA, that means people who want to be seen as progressive and woke. Therefore, attacking a right-wing author is a waste of time since that author is simply not going to care about intersectionality or representation — their literary circles don’t care, their audiences don’t care, so they won’t care either, especially if it boosts their Amazon sales rank. By contrast, a tradpubbed YA author’s brand absolutely depends on being woke since that’s how you get huge publicity and big advances, to say nothing of behind-the-scenes support of various kinds.

Thus any author in the early stages of a career would do well to choose a circle carefully. Make sure they do right by you, rather than hate-mob you based on rumors. And when the hate-mobs do come, make sure they have your back.

EDIT: Misha Burnett had some comments of his own on MeWe. Here they are, quoted in full.

One aspect of the current cultural climate that has been thrown into sharp focus by the Amelie Zhao affair is the existence of what I call “the peristaltic tent”.

To recap the story, Ms Zhao is an immigrant from China who got a book deal with the Delacourte division of Random Penguin for a YA Fantasy novel called Blood Heir. Part of why Delacourte offered her the contract (not to impune her novel, which I haven’t read) was that Ms Zhao was a young, female POC, or “person of color”.

However, certain people on Twitter and Goodreads got upset about the fact–as near as I can determine–that the book deals with slavery and human trafficking in a Fantasy realm based on historical Asia and the characters are neither Negro nor American, which in some way insults Black Americans.

I honestly don’t intend to take the time to unpack the doublethink that went into the accusations, but rather to point out the way the definition of “persons of color” grows and shrinks depending on the context.

And I say this because I recognize an old familiar pattern. The “Big Tent” of the LGBTQect movement is tent with movable borders. When a Pride event needs to swell the crowd, it is open to anyone who identifies as the least bit odd sexually, from furries to polys to BDSM to plain old swingers.

But when it comes time for the “community” to give back and support a LGBTQect person or business, the definition shrinks to pretty much only male middle class homosexuals who are reasonably attractive and have the right politics.

It’s the same with POC. If someone is trying to make bank over the number of POCs they employ, Asians and Native Americans and Immigrants all count.

But in terms of who really gets the preferential treatment, POC means Black. And when the rants about “White People” come out, what they mean by “White” is “Non-Black”. Asians, Semites, Native Americans, Hispanics–when it comes down to it, you’re all White people and that means that you’re all expendable.