14 January 2019
When you see publishers and authors chatting chummily at book parties, you're likely to think that they're on the same side - the side of great literature and the free flow of ideas.
In reality, their interests are at odds. Publishers are marketers. They don't like scandals that might threaten their bottom line - or the bottom lines of the multinational media conglomerates of which most form a small part. Authors are people, often flawed. Sometimes they behave badly. How, for instance, should publishers deal with the #MeToo era, when accusations of sexual impropriety can lead to books being pulled from shelves and syllabuses, as happened last year with the novelists Junot Díaz and Sherman Alexie?
