Why We Walked Away from “Woke” Publishing

There’s a story the publishing industry doesn’t like to tell about itself, and it goes something like this. A memoir gets a seven figure advance because the author’s identity fits a trending narrative. The book comes out to a wave of glowing coverage and social media applause. Then, quietly, months later, the sales numbers leak. The book didn’t sell. Not close.

This isn’t a one off. It’s become a pattern, and it’s one of the biggest open secrets in publishing today.

We want to talk about why that pattern exists, what it says about how big publishing actually works, and why it’s a large part of the reason Writerful Books stepped away from general commercial editing to focus exclusively on Christian authors.

The Books Nobody Bought

In late 2023, The Times ran an investigation that publishing insiders had been whispering about for years but rarely said in public. It found that major houses had handed out enormous advances, some running into the millions, for memoirs and novels built around identity and progressive themes, only to watch many of them sell a fraction of what was needed to break even.

The most cited example is actor Elliot Page’s memoir “Pageboy,” which reportedly earned a three million dollar advance from Macmillan and sold around 68,000 copies. Industry commentators pointed out that a book at that advance level would typically need to shift several hundred thousand copies just to break even. Other titles told a similar story: a “queer feminist western” that commanded a $500,000 advance sold around 3,500 copies, and a novel about three girls held captive, praised by critics as innovative, sold just over 3,000 copies against a quarter million dollar deal.

None of this means the books lacked merit or that the writers didn’t deserve a shot.

The point critics were making is narrower and, frankly, more damning for the industry: publishers were repeatedly making commercial decisions based on optics rather than market demand, and the bill came due.

Why Editors Started Playing It Safe

The same reporting surfaced something else worth sitting with. Editors at major houses told journalists they had, in effect, stopped seriously considering manuscripts from certain writers, particularly white male authors, because acquiring that kind of work no longer looked good internally. One senior editor, asked directly whether this amounted to discrimination, didn’t really deny it. The language was softer than that, something closer to “is this the right time to be championing more traditional voices,” but the effect was the same.

This is the part that should worry anyone who actually cares about literature rather than optics.

When acquisition decisions are shaped by how a deal will look on social media rather than whether the writing is good and the story deserves to exist, you don’t get better books. You get safer ones, chosen for the same reasons regardless of whether they’re true or well told.

Writers have been saying this from the inside too.

Novelist Lionel Shriver has been one of the more outspoken critics of how far this caution has crept into the editorial process itself, describing the anxious, checklist driven mindset that “sensitivity readers” and internal review committees can produce as something that inhibits spontaneity and drains the confidence out of prose. Even journalists who cover publishing sympathetically have documented how quickly authors can face an online backlash mid contract, sometimes leading publishers to cancel books they’d already paid for rather than risk the fallout.

None of this is to say every sensitivity read or every diverse acquisition is cynical. Plenty of editors and readers in this space do genuinely careful, good faith work. But the pattern that critics keep pointing to is a structural one: a fear of backlash that has made big publishing risk averse in exactly the way art shouldn’t be, favouring formula and safe signaling over honesty and craft.

The Gap Between the Marketing and the Boardroom

Here’s the part that tends to get missed. While marketing departments at major publishing conglomerates lean hard into rainbow branding, pronoun campaigns and progressive messaging every year, the people actually running these companies, the boards, the executive suites, the P&L owners, remain some of the least diverse in corporate life. Academic researchers studying what’s sometimes called “woke brand activism” have found that audiences are increasingly skeptical of this kind of messaging precisely because it so often looks performative rather than sacrificial.

It costs a company almost nothing to put a flag in a logo. It costs a great deal to actually change who holds power or how profit gets distributed.

That gap between the public facing values and the private facing structure is the whole critique in a nutshell. A handful of enormous, publicly traded or private equity backed publishing houses control most of what reaches shelves. Their entry level pay is famously low, their staff overwhelmingly come from a narrow socioeconomic band that can afford to work those wages in expensive cities, and their leadership looks nothing like the “diversity” being marketed on the covers of their books. Progressive branding, in this reading, functions less as genuine transformation and more as a convenient shield, a way to look virtuous without doing the much harder and much less profitable work of actually redistributing opportunity within the industry itself.

What This Did to the Books Themselves

Step back far enough and you can see the shape of the whole problem.

When acquisition decisions get made by committee, when editors are worried about how a deal will read online, when marketing has more say than craft, you end up with a kind of algorithmic publishing. Books start to look like they were assembled from a checklist rather than written from conviction. And readers, it turns out, can tell. They keep buying independently published work, backlist classics and Substack fiction instead, exactly the outlets where a writer still gets to say something true without clearing it through six layers of institutional caution first.

That’s the real cost of all this, and it’s bigger than any single flopped memoir.

A publishing culture built around managing perception rather than serving readers slowly loses its nerve. It stops taking the kind of risks that produce a book someone actually needs to read. It optimizes for safety, and safety, in art, is rarely what moves anyone.

Why We Chose a Different Path

We didn’t build Writerful Books around a culture war. We built it, and have now reshaped it, around a much older and much simpler idea: that a book should be edited by someone who actually believes in what it’s trying to say.

For over a decade we worked across every genre, with writers of every background, and we’re grateful for that season. But watching the industry drift further into checklist publishing, where a manuscript’s chances often hinge more on how it will be perceived than on whether it’s honest, good and needed, we made a decision. We stepped back from chasing the industry’s usual approval markers and narrowed our focus to Christian authors, working across fiction and Christian non-fiction.

That’s not a rejection of anyone still playing the bigger, more corporate game. It’s simply that our own bar for taking on a project became something steadier than trend tracking: is this story honest, is it well written, and does it point toward something true. We’d rather put our name on a small list of books we actually believe in than a large list chosen to satisfy a marketing calendar.

If that’s the kind of editor, agent or publisher you’re looking for, someone who reads closely enough to actually vouch for your work rather than process it, that’s exactly what we’re here for.

Stay Blessed From the Team at Writerful Books