If You Are Conservative, You Must Go Indie

Reading through what goes on in the world of sci-fi and fantasy publishing, I’ve come to a very simple conclusion:

Anyone even mildly right wing must self-publish on Amazon if they hope to have a career.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a committed Republican ideologue or a simple housewife. It doesn’t matter whether you pack heat or just favor lowered taxes. It doesn’t matter if you wear a MAGA hat or just think America is a good place to live. Any inkling of non-progressivism is certain to get you excluded from the traditional publishing industry.

But there are plenty of conservatives doing well in tradpub SF/F! There’s John Ringo, Larry Correia, and Orson Scott Card.

All three of them are excellent authors at the top of their craft, but notice that they weren’t politically attacked until after they became major successes. By then, it was too late for the attacks to matter; they already had committed audiences who didn’t care much for political correctness anyway.

This isn’t about the superstars, who are rare even among the far left. This is about the up-and-comers, who are quite frequently shut out of tradpub. Non-leftist new authors will receive zero support from those heavily involved in tradpub. Note that this is deliberate; far leftists in the publishing industry have stated openly that they’re okay with a climate of fear.

Rawle, it can’t be that bad! It’s a free market; they’re all competing with each other.

Verdant Labs has a neat website which shows the political leanings of various occupational categories; for example, brain surgeons lean right while psychiatrists lean left. Resource-extractive industries have more Republicans than media industries, which have more Democrats.

Here’s their result for book publishing:

Look at that. Now look again. Solid blue; not even a sliver of red. They may be competing with each other, but they are united on one point: that conservatives shouldn’t be published by them.

Also consider the phenomenon of “sensitivity readers,” who check manuscripts for alleged bigotries no matter how slight; some are freelance while others are retained by publishing houses. This idea would not have gotten off the ground if there were any significant numbers of right-wingers in the traditional publishing industry. The travails of Laurie Forest, Laura Moriarty, and Keira Drake are instructive in this regard — and none of those authors even lean right!

Let me cap this off with an anecdote from Monalisa Morgan Foster, a Facebook friend of mine, when she went to get her story pitch critiqued at ConDFW in 2017. I’ve bolded some important points, and I cut out some of it; you can read the whole thing here.

Back in January 2017 I decided to submit a story to the Jim Baen Memorial contest and I got an e-mail back asking if I was going to ConDFW. Of course my response was, “I guess I’m going now.” I hadn’t been to a Con in ages.

So I bought tickets and signed up for a pitch-coaching session being offered by the GoH, a woman who writes fiction about vampires (bear with me, this is going to be important later on). I prepared an elevator pitch (nine words) and a summary of the novel I’d been working on, thinking this was a great opportunity to get some professional coaching.

I walked into this pitch “coaching” session fully expecting to be told my baby was ugly. And I’d already developed a pretty thick skin from getting tons of critiques, including ones telling me I needed to take some science classes (even though I was writing space opera, not hard SF; ever wonder if George Lucas got that kind of lip?)

What I did NOT expect was for the GoH to tear me a new asshole for fifteen minutes. Not because my baby was ugly, but because my story wasn’t politically correct.

Among other things, I was told that since 90% of editors were women, my story was never going to see the light of day AND I’d be blacklisted for writing a story where the FMC (female main character) was not superior to the MMC(male main character) in every way. Let me quote what she said. “Your female character has to be superior to the males in EVERY way.”

Never mind that the story involves a human woman and a genetically-engineered man. Never mind the world I had built to make this story was tight and required the initial power to rest with him. No, it must conform to the standard of the “strong female character” who must be the biggest, baddest, most kick-ass person in every situation, no matter what.

But that only took about five minutes. The next ten minutes were about dressing me down for cultural appropriation. You see, I had used the word “samurai” in the pitch. Because “space samurai” is a cool phrase that might—GASP!—catch someone’s attention. Never mind that the word doesn’t actually appear in the story.

I had no right.

You see, I’m not Japanese. I’m not allowed to appropriate Japanese culture. And if my initial concept didn’t get me blacklisted, the sin of cultural appropriation surely would.

BTW, I was the only one there who got this kind of treatment. The other four people were praised and not an unkind word was said to them. They had #rightthink. I had #wrongthink.

So I’m sitting there, with a smile, as this woman (who’d just shared a story about how if it wasn’t for her ex-boyfriend dragging her to her first con, she’d never have become a writer) lecturing me on how I can’t write a story where a man has power over a woman.

Ironic no? But wait, it gets better.

I’m a legal immigrant from Romania. She writes vampire novels. Here, a white, American-born liberal made her money and fame by appropriating something from my culture. And she’s doing it with full confidence because she knows there is nothing that I, a nobody, can do about it. Now, in all fairness, you can’t hear an accent when I speak, so there was no way she’d have known, but it wasn’t about that. It was about beating down anything that she, a liberal, didn’t care for.

There was nothing political in the nine-word pitch, or the one paragraph summary she read, and if she’d taken the time to look me up online, she’s have been hard-pressed to find anything, as at the time, I had no social media presence. I don’t even think I had a website at the time.

So why all the vitriol? Why all the hatred?

Because dissenting voices, dissenting opinions, anyone that doesn’t conform to their idea of what’s politically correct must be silenced.

We think the other side is wrong. They think we are evil.

And I, again, a nobody aspiring writer, had to be beat into the ground so that my ideas, my voice, would never gain enough volume to offer readers something they might actually like, something they might judge on its own merits, rather than through the lens of political correctness.

I left the Con and swore never to go back.

No, I wasn’t going to change my story, because fuck political correctness. Fuck this hypocrite.

Yes, I will appropriate Japanese culture. And Spartan. And Gurka. And Sikh. And anything else I damn well please, because no one sought my permission to get rich off MY culture, MY history. I will keep appropriating it because I will not be bullied by intolerant leftists.

[…]

No, I didn’t go after her on social media—the thought would’ve never occurred to me. I figured it would hurt me more than it would hurt her.

I didn’t have fans or fellow writers who would back me. I had no name, no reputation. I’m no ILOH, I’m no John Ringo, and given what happened to them, imagine what would’ve happened to me.

This kind of power to abuse doesn’t just trickle down.

It builds and trickles up too.

So before you submit that query letter thinking tradpub values grit, gumption, and skill, keep Monalisa’s experience in mind. If you’re not on the far left, you don’t stand a chance, no matter how skilled your writing is. It’s sad, but it’s true. Like life itself, the publishing industry isn’t fair, so don’t expect it to be some meritocracy.

And if you want to support a right-leaning author right now, get yourself a copy of Sword & Flower.