Schadenfreude was felt throughout the writing and publishing worlds last week – and shared by leftists everywhere – when the harshly critical editorial notes on Milo Yiannopoulos's planned book were released to the public as an exhibit in a court case.
To see this strident Donald Trump supporter get a tongue-lashing from a fact-conscious editor was satisfying to people who thought they were witnessing justice being done. I did not see that. I saw a publishing process that was badly flawed and an edit that made no sense.
The notes on the autobiography, Dangerous, were written by Mitchell Ivers, the editorial director of Threshold Editions, the imprint of Simon and Schuster that acquired the book. Threshold specializes in non-fiction by conservatives, having published books by Glenn Beck, Dick Cheney and Trump.
The publisher cancelled the contract after Yiannopoulos said some things that were too edgy – even for them – in a YouTube interview in 2016. Yiannopoulos then sued for breach of contract, and the edited manuscript has been presented as evidence in the case – perhaps because the publisher hopes to show that the book was too bad to publish in the first place. This is unconvincing. This man has long been saying – to pick one example – that all trans people are mentally ill, so this thought predictably appears in the book.
A book full of these views – and other familiar insults (feminists are ugly, Muslims are barbaric) – was expected to be a bestseller. These views are popular. Trump was elected, after all.
This is an important thing to remember. The author is said to have received a $250,000 (U.S.) advance. This means the book was expected to sell at least $2.5-million worth of copies. Indeed, after being dropped, Yiannopoulos self-published the book and watched it hit No. 1 on the Publishers Weekly non-fiction list and No. 2 on The New York Times non-fiction list. That was exactly what Simon and Schuster had been counting on. Yiannopoulos is suing for $10-million.
The angry notes on the manuscript have given his critics so much pleasure because they are so sharp and condescending. "Careful that the egotistical boasting … doesn't make you seem juvenile," Ivers writes. "Unclear, unfunny, delete," he says at another point. It is page after page of rejection and deletion and reprimand and scorn. The notes get rather emotional as they go on, with "NOT" and "DON'T" in capital letters. And of course, Ivers says reasonably enough: "I will not accept a manuscript that labels an entire class of people 'mentally ill.'"
This is confusing. Yiannopoulos's views are well-known. Why would this editor acquire a book he probably knew he could not stand?
Simon and Schuster declined my request for comment. But in the affidavit presented as defence in the lawsuit, Ivers says he was "involved in the decision to acquire" the proposed work. He claims to have been shocked when he received the commissioned manuscript, as it was "riddled with highly offensive commentary." The point of this statement is to argue that the contract was terminated because the work was unsatisfactory, not because of the alarming comments Yiannopoulos made in subsequent TV interviews. It tries to make the case that Threshold was not just shying away from its own decision here.
If I, as an author, received notes like this – notes that rejected every premise and attitude and stylistic tic in a book I had been commissioned to write, then demanded another book entirely be written – I would demand another editor. I would say: Where is the editor who acquired this, who apparently believed in it? Will this editor please stand up and help with it?
The repudiation of a cynically and greedily acquired book seems not very brave. Which is why I am not terribly impressed by these smug notes, no matter how clever and righteous they sound.