The internets give a lot of advice on how to get a book deal. Most give a variation of:
- Craft a book proposal
- Get an agent
- Create a publicity plan
- Create a "hook"
And 5: Get rejected.
Seriously, a LOT of extremely talented, creative writers—many of whom already have a large fan base—get rejection after rejection.
OR, this being the year where nastiness gets rewarded in spades, you could try the Milo Yiannopoulos approach:
- Become a "technology editor" (while knowing little about technology but a lot about misogynistic abuse) at any place that will hire you—like a white supremacist hate site.
- Subject a black female comic you don't like to racial epithets and online abuse.
- Get so over-the-top with your sadistic, bigoted attacks that you get actually banned from Twitter. (Again--this guy was deemed too racist for Twitter!)
- Meet with executives at Simon & Schuster/Threshold and spend, in Milo’s own words, "half an hour trying to shock them with lewd jokes and outrageous opinions."
And 5. Bingo! You get a quarter million dollar book deal:
“l thought they were going to have me escorted from the building — but instead they offered me a wheelbarrow full of money!”
Good for you, Milo. So the message here is that if you are a broken person with no social graces and virulently racist, you can be president—or at least get a book deal.
The book is entitled “Dangerous” because he’s just such a bad boy. I’m sure its filled with pages of insightful analysis of our current political environment. Sure, you could pay the 30 bucks to know what Milo thinks, or you could just listen to the unhinged rantings of any unemployed Klansman at a Trump rally. That would be free---and likely to be less racist.
First things first: if Simon & Schuster thought that $250K was a good investment for this filth, they might want to think again. It may not seem like it this year, since a lot of us apparently didn't bother to vote. (I really thought having three million more votes would have done it.) But there are a heck of a LOT more decent people in this nation than there are unstable bigots. It's the decent people in this country who came to the decision many decades ago that treating minorities with utter disdain is no longer cool in America.
Those who make it their life's work to treat people badly, aka the "deplorables," are shunned by civilized society—and we make no distinction between the hatemongers themselves and the businesses who have decided to support them. So if Simon and Schuster wants to go after that huge, untapped market for Neo-Nazi book clubs, please, be my guest.
The majority of us, those who actually read books instead of burn them, will go elsewhere. I promise you, I won't be the only one.
You are going to lose a heck of a lot more business with this deal than you could have possibly gained by giving a platform for pure, vile hate. Enjoy the fall.
And to the GOP “faith-based" conservatives defending Milo because they honestly can’t tell the difference between “opinion” and “targeted online abuse”, allow me to say this:
First of all, enjoy the book—gotta get your hate fix. Second, you own this now. ALL OF THIS. This is your party now. Your hate. Your filth.
S&S would never have put up so much money in the first place if they didn’t believe there was a market for it---a market entirely made up of the GOP. I disagree with people who want to ignore this book; in fact, I want everyone to see what the GOP has allowed itself to become. In a few years, when demographics irreversibly render your party obsolete, we will study the GOP’s fall. The people in the party today will always be remembered for standing on the precipice and casting their lot with the woman-haters, white supremacists, and foul-mouthed deplorables. Perhaps nothing signifies this as much as Milo.
He is the GOP in all it’s glory.