I like Lena Dunham. But her $3.7 million book deal with Random House, after a bidding war involving all of the major publishers, is emblematic of what is wrong with corporate publishing today. 
 
 My first publishing job, in 1987, was at Random House. Bennett Cerf’s publishing company, the home of Faulkner, Capote and Dr. Seuss, is now only one of a handful of “major” publishers, by which I mean publishers who are corporate, bottom-line-driven, freighted with massive overhead and generally reactionary. The Dunham deal smacks of a search for the "Barton Fink" touch -- as in, "get me the next 'Bossypants,' stat." I realize that Dunham is an easy target — she's only 26, from an artsy New York family and the creator, star and director of her own HBO show. And there is an element of sexism in the backlash — a young, strong, independent female scores a big deal — but I have no problem with her agent, Kim Witherspoon, shaking down the dinosaurs on her client’s behalf. It's what the market will bear. I imagine Dunham’s book will kick ass, yet it will also get its critical ass handed to itself because of the advance. If Random House is already hucking it as the next Tina Fey meets Nora Ephron meets David Sedaris (no pressure, Lena), then the critics will be expecting Fey meets Ephron meets Sedaris. 
 
 It has been reported that Tiny Fey received an advance of over $6 million for "Bossypants." A huge number, but at the time she already had nearly 10 years of "Saturday Night Live" plus two years of "30 Rock" under her belt, not to mention a visionary editor, Reagan Arthur, helping her. The genuinely sharp, funny and widely appealing "Bossypants" went on to sell more than a million copies. Rough math figures that Random House will need to sell a minimum of 500,000 copies of Dunham’s advice book to break even. Good luck with that. 
 
 Even if they do break even or if somehow every single person who watched the premiere of Dunham’s show “Girls” buys the book — all 872,000 of you out there according to Nielsen — is this any way to run a publishing company? Put aside the cultural impact question for a second. The whole approach seems short-sighted at best. 
 
 My publishing hero is Barney Rosset, the late, great founder of the Evergreen Review and Grove Press. Rosset was responsible for publishing Samuel Beckett, Pablo Neruda, Henry Miller, Jean Genet, William Burroughs and many other writers who have shaped our culture. They are also perennial sellers, forming a solid backlist that allowed Rosset to continually take risks and fight censorship battles. Rosset formed partnerships with his writers, was fiercely loyal to them and paid them small advances. But they were fighting the good fight together, and when the publisher made money, so did the writer. 
 
 Imagine what Rosset would have done with $3.7 million dollars? Let’s say he paid 370 writers $10,000 advances each. Odds are that 20 years from now, a handful of those books would have been cultural touchstones, each outselling Dunham’s advice book. Right now, off the top of my head, I could give you a list of 370 writers who would write books that would have longer lasting cultural impacts than Dunham's 15 minutes of publishing glory. Or, let’s be more generous and more selective: Let’s give 37 writers $100,000 advances. Most struggling writers I know would kill for that kind of advance and could easily stretch that amount out to finish their books. Let’s say only one of these writers turns out to be a Lorrie Moore, Dorothy Allison, Karen Russell or Denis Johnson. Over time, they would surely outsell Dunham. And if two of the 37 turn golden? Let’s be ambitious. What if there are five brilliant writers in the group -- roughly one out of every seven writers -- we’ve chosen to invest in? 
 
 This argument presumes time. Which is what corporate publishers don’t have. They have shareholders, parent companies or both, and they must justify their quarterly earnings. And this is why small publishers are thriving. Paul Harding’s 2010 Pulitzer prize–winning novel "Tinkers" was published by the micro-press Bellevue Literary after Harding was rejected by all of the major houses. There’s a good reason that small publishers like Graywolf, McSweeneys, Lookout Books, Soho Press, Wave Books and a handful of other indies are thriving and winning many of the awards the major houses used to regularly dominate. This is not to say that all of corporate publishing is dominated by versions of Lotto Fever and Ambulance Chasing. There are pockets of risk-taking, most notably with publishers like Calvert Morgan and his It Books, somehow hidden within the fortress of Murdoch’s HarperCollins; or Spiegel & Grau, a fiefdom inside the borders of Random House; or Reagan Arthur Books within Little Brown. 
 
 Yet Random House’s rash deal with Dunham is the rule, not the exception. These decisions are why the corporate publishers are losing cultural relevance and why they might soon lose solvency as well. ||||| If she scores this jaw-dropping book deal, Lena Dunham won't be just one of the "Girls" anymore. 
 
 Bidding for Dunham's upcoming book skyrocketed to $3.6 million on Wednesday, according to Deadline.com's Mike Fleming. Fleming reports that this number could climb even higher: 
 
 The numbers for the book of advice and anecdotes from the 26-year old creator of the HBO series Girls should go even higher as publishers see her as an influential creative voice for young women. She met yesterday with editors. Stay tuned. 
 
 Dunham's literary agent Kim Witherspoon of InkWell Management is working on the deal, which should be finalized soon, according to Deadline.com. Witherspoon is an ideal agent to contend for Dunham's deal, as she herself founded an agency at 26 years old and now represents the likes of Sophie Kinsella, Lionel Shriver and Anthony Bourdain, the New York Observer notes. 
 
 Slate's David Haglund reported on Monday that Dunham's book deal had a set an "in-house floor of $1 Million” for U.S. rights to the book. Dunham told the online magazine: “There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman.” 
 
 Dunham's book, tentatively titled "Not That Kind of Girl: Advice by Lena Dunham," is a collection of essays with an advice motif. 
 
 "In the intro, Dunham is self-deprecating about the idea that she has any wisdom to share, but says that if the book can help anyone avoid some of the mistakes she’s made it will be worth it," according to Slate. The proposal says the work will include candid accounts of "losing her virginity, trying to eat well (detailed diet journal included), obsessing about death, and so on, along with tips about how to stay focused on work, how not to ruin a potential relationship, and what have you." 
 
 Dunham's potential multi-million dollar deal is certainly impressive addition to her list of accomplishments. The 26-year-old filmmaker and actress has written for The New Yorker and Rookie. Her feature-length film "Tiny Furniture" won Best Narrative Feature at the 2010 South by Southwest festival. ||||| Milo Yiannopoulos — a leader of the racist, misogynist far-right fringe movement known as the alt-right, who built his career on being hateful to people on the internet and has been described as a professional troll and the leader of an online hate mob — recently signed a book deal with Simon & Schuster imprint Threshold Editions for a reported $250,000 advance, says the Hollywood Reporter. 
 
 The response from progressives was immediate and outraged. What is Simon & Schuster — reputable, legitimate book publisher Simon & Schuster — doing giving money to the guy who declared his birthday World Patriarchy Day? (“If you have female employees, refer to them exclusively as ‘darling.’ All day.”) The guy who received a lifetime ban from Twitter for inciting a mob into sending racist, misogynistic, threatening, and generally hateful tweets to Leslie Jones? The guy whose publication history includes such gems as “Science Proves It: Fat-Shaming Works” and “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy”? 
 
 The Chicago Review of Books vowed not to review a single Simon & Schuster book in 2017. The Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Karen Hunter, who publishes with Simon & Schuster, tweeted that she was “rethinking” her relationship with the company. Prominent progressives like Washington Post journalist Wesley Lowery promised to boycott Simon & Schuster books. 
 
 In response to this disgusting validation of hate, we will not cover a single @simonschuster book in 2017. https://t.co/NAJhTgdeyX — Chicago Rev of Books (@bookschicago) December 29, 2016 
 
 The surprise and outrage that greeted the Yiannopoulos news reflects the fact that book deals like his are unusual — right now, anyway. But as the Republican Party and conservative thought evolve in the Age of Trump, such deals are likely to grow increasingly common. 
 
 Most of the so-called Big Five publishing houses who make up the core of American book publishing have at least one imprint devoted to publishing right-wing authors. Although its writers might not always receive the awards or accolades afforded to liberal writers and non-political novelists, the niche of conservative book publishing has become an enormous money-maker — one that's flourished in the last decade especially. And as alt-right discourse becomes increasingly normalized within the conservative political sphere, there is every reason to think that figures like Yiannopoulos will continue to get major book deals. 
 
 Publishing 101: The Big Five houses are made up of imprints 
 
 To understand publishing’s right-wing imprints, first you have to understand how modern American book publishing is organized. 
 
 American trade book publishing is dominated by five publishing houses, known as the Big Five: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster. Of these, Penguin Random House is the biggest, Macmillan is the smallest, and Simon & Schuster sits comfortably in the middle. 
 
 Together, these five publishing houses make up over 80 percent of the US trade publishing market share — meaning that they produce over 80 percent of the kinds of general-interest books that get sold in Barnes & Noble. The remainder is published by smaller independent presses, and those independent presses usually have specific areas of specialty. But the Big Five houses don’t need to specialize, because they can do that on an imprint level instead of a company level. 
 
 Each of the Big Five houses is made up of smaller imprints, each with its own distinct brand identity. Penguin Random House includes under its roof such imprints as Knopf, which publishes prestigious literary authors like Toni Morrison and Kazuo Ishiguro; Firebird, which publishes sci-fi and fantasy for young adults; and Clarkson Potter, which publishes cookbooks and self-help books. 
 
 Generally, the imprints of a particular publishing house will share certain parts of each other’s infrastructure — things like printing and distribution, maybe a sales force. They’ll sometimes be clumped together into “publishing groups,” which might share a marketing and publicity team. But no matter what, the editorial side of each imprint is independent. Toni Morrison’s editor and Ina Garten’s editor both work for Penguin Random House, but there’s no reason they would ever need to talk or come into contact with each other. They’re in totally different areas. 
 
 Imprints operate like independent fiefdoms 
 
 There are a lot of benefits for publishers in keeping these imprints editorially distinct. For one thing, it makes it easier to acquire an imprint. The Big Five houses often expand by buying up existing independent imprints or by merging — as Penguin and Random House, formerly independent entities, did in 2013 — and promising each imprint editorial freedom helps smooth over those transactions. 
 
 For another thing, it makes it easier for each book find its designated reader. The person buying Toni Morrison’s book is not necessarily in the market for Ina Garten’s book, so the publishing team for Toni Morrison has one set of skills and priorities, and the publishing team for Ina Garten has another. The stuff they have in common — for instance, both books need to be printed, warehoused, and distributed — they can share. 
 
 Having a diverse group of imprints is also good for company stability. If one imprint is having an off year, another can compensate. And ideally, if one imprint is having a very good year, everyone else can benefit as well. 50 Shades of Grey was published by the Penguin Random House imprint Vintage Books, but when it sold 60 million copies in 2012, everyone working at what was then just Random House (pre-Penguin merger) got a $5,000 Christmas bonus, not just Vintage employees. 
 
 But looking in from the outside, things get confusing. As you’ve probably gathered by now, publishing houses often share names with some of their groups and some of their imprints, which means that it gets complicated to distinguish between them. For instance, Penguin Random House is the home of the Penguin Publishing Group, which includes Penguin Books, Penguin Classics, and Penguin Press, each of which does different things. It’s also the home of the Random House publishing group (the official title is just Random House, which seems willfully confusing), which includes the Random House imprint, familiarly known as Little Random. These groups and imprints are just small parts of a much larger company, but the names obscure that fact. 
 
 So when we say that Milo Yiannopoulos has a book deal with Simon & Schuster, that’s technically true. But he doesn’t have a book deal with Simon & Schuster, the prestigious imprint that publishes people like Bret Easton Ellis, Dave Eggers, and Hillary Clinton. He has a book deal with Simon & Schuster, the publishing house that includes such imprints as Enliven (New Age books) and Jeter Publishing, the official publishing imprint of New York Yankee Derek Jeter. 
 
 Specifically, Yiannopoulos has a book deal with Threshold Editions, the designated right-wing imprint for Simon & Schuster. 
 
 Threshold Editions is a welcoming home for the pundits of Fox News 
 
 Threshold Editions wears its political affiliations on its sleeve. Currently wrapping up its 10-year anniversary celebrations, it has adopted the oddly bitter anniversary motto “10 Years of Being Right.” It counts among its authors Dick Cheney, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and President-elect Donald Trump. In its mission statement, it declares that it exists to “provide a forum for the creative people, bedrock principles, and innovative ideas of contemporary conservatism.” 
 
 And for the most part, that’s more or less what it does. Trump postures about his policy plans. Cheney explains why we should go back to his policies. Glenn Beck gets invective on his pet issues, like education (the federal government should get out of it), and so-called Islamic extremism (he thinks violence is inherent to Islamic teachings). Ben Shapiro explains how the media is controlled by a liberal conspiracy. The occasional lay historian gets sentimental about a dead president or two. None of it is particularly intellectually rigorous, but it’s not far away from what you’d hear on, say, Fox News — mostly because most of these authors are regular fixtures on Fox News. 
 
 Simon & Schuster isn’t alone in offering these authors a platform for their work. Threshold Editions is just one of the most recent Big Five imprints created specifically to give right-wing authors a platform. 
 
 Conservative imprints are a relatively new addition to trade publishing 
 
 The idea of specifically right-wing imprints in the Big Five houses is a relatively new one. For years, the only major player in the conservative publishing field was Regnery Books, a Washington-based press founded in 1947. Most of the big-league conservative authors have published at least one book with Regnery — Trump, Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza, Newt Gingrich, and all the rest. It had some competition from The Free Press, the academic/trade crossover imprint that migrated from Macmillan to Simon & Schuster and specialized in scholarly conservative thought before it was absorbed into Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint in 2012, but otherwise, the Big Five houses stayed away from conservative publishing. 
 
 But then, in the early ’00s, Fox News started churning out right-wing pundits with what publishers call built-in platforms: They had audiences who cared about their thoughts and opinions, and were willing to spend money to hear more of them. As those pundits’ books became reliable players on the New York Times bestseller list, the publishers who made up what was then the Big Six decided that it was time for them to join the game, the New York Times reported in 2010. 
 
 Random House, at the time independent from Penguin and the largest publisher in the Big Six, kicked off the trend with Crown Forum. Founded in 2002, the same year that Fox News became the top-rated cable news channel, it publishes Ann Coulter’s books alongside titles like Enhanced Interrogation. (Waterboarding: worth it if you do it right!) 
 
 Penguin quickly followed suit with Sentinel, founded in 2003, which publishes Mike Huckabee and books like Your Teacher Said What?!: Defending Our Kids from the Liberal Assault on Capitalism. 
 
 The smaller Simon & Schuster prudently waited a few years before diving into the burgeoning conservative-imprint field. But as it became clear that major New York trade publishing houses could make money from conservative voices just as well as niche political presses in Washington could, it jumped. It established Threshold Editions in 2006. 
 
 And from 2010 to 2013, HarperCollins had Broadside Books, which published books like Eco-Fascists: How Radical Conservationists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage and Why ObamaCare is Wrong for America: How the New Health Care Law Drives Up Costs, Puts Government in Charge of Your Decisions, and Threatens Your Constitutional Rights. Broadside Books, which branded itself as the intellectual pinnacle of conservative publishing — the William F. Buckley to the other imprints’ Sean Hannity — is still listed on HarperCollins’s imprints page, but it has no homepage of its own, and its Twitter page hasn't been updated since 2013. HarperCollins did not reply to my questions about Broadside Books’ current status, but if it is now defunct (and all the evidence suggests that it is), then it was the only one of the Big Five conservative imprints to collapse. 
 
 The imprints that survived were all built specifically to appeal to conservative readers, but not out of any high-minded ideas about celebrating the great American belief in free speech for all, or out of deep commitment on the part of the publishing CEOs to conservative values. These imprints were established because conservative readers have demonstrated that they can put a book on the best-seller list, and the Big Five houses are in the business of trying to publish bestsellers. These imprints are cogs in a money-making machine. 
 
 And as conservatism evolves in the Age of Trump, these imprints are going to change with it in order to keep churning out books that sell. 
 
 Milo Yiannopoulos represents something new in conservative trade publishing 
 
 Milo Yiannopoulos is not a run-of-the-mill conservative thinker. His brand is ostensibly a winking, provocative, speaking-truth-to-power punk rock ethos — hence the title of his forthcoming book, Dangerous. But that image only rings true if you think that women, people of color, trans people, and other historically disenfranchised people have too much power over white cis men and need to be put in their place. 
 
 That is what Yiannopoulos believes deeply. And while many more mainstream conservative thinkers would agree with him that liberals have a stranglehold on the culture and bully those who disagree with them, Yiannopoulos’s tactics are extreme even by their standards. 
 
 He is scheduled to give a talk at Stanford on “female biological inferiority in science.” He has said that Saudi Arabia’s ban on women drivers is “the one thing” the country got right, because “behind every racist joke is a scientific fact.” He goes to a college campus and says “Feminism is cancer,” and then watches people melt down. His entire thing is to say something hyperbolically offensive that is designed to anger liberals, and then laugh at them when they take it seriously — and then he winks at his followers, so that you can’t quite tell how much he means what he says. 
 
 If, as Vox’s Aja Romano has argued, the alt-right knowingly masks sincerely felt ideals with ironic trolling, then Yiannopoulos is a master of the form. He spreads hatred and bigotry under the guise of hipper-than-thou trolling: Obviously he’s posting that swastika ironically, he’ll tell you. Can’t you take a joke? But the swastika is still there, no matter how much Yiannopoulos might posture about how hilarious it is, and it’s still spreading its intended message. 
 
 Ben Shapiro, a conservative in the more classic mold, cannot stand him. “If I can’t tell the difference between your ironic tweet and [Ku Klux Klan leader] David Duke’s, that’s your fault,” Shapiro told Bloomberg News. “He’s not making fun of racism. It’s clown nose on, clown nose off. It’s basic teenage bullshit by someone who is immature.” 
 
 Shapiro is an instructive figure because he is, in many ways, a more conventional mirror to Yiannopoulos. Like Yiannopoulos, Shapiro is published at Threshold Editions, where he wrote a book alleging that the left is strangling free speech — incidentally, the same general topic that Dangerous is slated to cover. He and Yiannopoulos briefly overlapped as writers for the right-wing website Breitbart before Shapiro left — in protest, Bloomberg News says, of its transition from far-right (more traditionally conservative) to alt-right (neo-Nazis). It’s a transition in which Yiannopoulos is considered to have been instrumental. 
 
 Now, Yiannopoulos is leading the same transition in conservative book publishing. Threshold Editions still thinks of itself as a place for the familiar Ben Shapiros of the world, but it’s also making room for the world’s Milo Yiannopouloses: for the people who perform their politics through trolling and hate speech. 
 
 “This book is the moment Milo goes mainstream” 
 
 Milo Yiannopoulos is a hateful person who has built a career on bigotry, but it is not hard to see why an editor at a right-wing publishing imprint might think it would be a good idea to sign him. He is loud, he has a loyal army of followers, and he knows how to get people’s attention. He has that all-important built-in platform. 
 
 All of that equals press attention — such as the flurry of articles the book deal prompted, including this one — and press attention usually means increased book sales. In Yiannopoulos’s case, it seems to have worked. Dangerous is currently a best-seller on Amazon. 
 
 And Yiannopoulos is a creature of the internet, which makes him attractive to an industry still trying to figure out how to survive in the digital era. In a time when YA publishers are encouraged to sign YouTube stars and see if their teen fans can be cajoled into buying books, an author who is fluent in the internet and its ways is a godsend. 
 
 But most importantly, he looks like a very possible future of the Republican party in the age of Trump. The white supremacists of the so-called alt right are ascendant right now, taking cushy White House appointments and featuring in swooning fashion profiles, and Yiannopoulos is part of their vanguard. It makes sense that an editor would make that kind of calculation and decide to bring him on. 
 
 But in identifying Yiannopoulos as a possible future of conservative thought, Threshold Editions is caught in a cycle. Because by giving him a book deal, they’re not looking at a figure who is already considered culturally legitimate and giving him another platform for his thoughts. They’re looking at a figure who is reviled in some corners of the culture and adored in others — a kind of threshold figure — and they are saying that they consider him to be legitimate. They are not just describing; they are prescribing. They have decided that Yiannopoulos seems like someone who is about to be mainstream, and so they have brought him into the mainstream themselves. When Yiannopoulos told the Hollywood Reporter that “this book is the moment Milo goes mainstream,” he was being entirely accurate. 
 
 And having brought in one Milo Yiannopoulos, it will be increasingly easy to bring in another, and then another, until all of the hatred and all of the rage of the white supremacists and misogynists and bigots on the alt-right is considered a valid part of the cultural discourse, and just another strain of thought, as legitimate as any other. It will become normal. 
 
 The imprint model means that boycotting Simon & Schuster is both difficult and ineffective 
 
 Normalizing the alt-right is incredibly dangerous, but that doesn’t mean that a boycott of Simon & Schuster is necessarily the best solution to this problem. It all goes back to that all-important imprint model. 
 
 Simon & Schuster is the home of Threshold Editions, and it is set to make a great deal of money by legitimizing and mainstreaming Milo Yiannopoulos and his hatred. But it is also the home of imprints like Salaam Reads, a Muslim-themed children’s imprint that was established with the laudable goal “to introduce readers of all faiths and backgrounds to a wide variety of Muslim children and families, and offer Muslim kids an opportunity to see themselves reflected positively in published works.” In its eponymous imprint, it publishes explicitly progressive authors like Rebecca Traister and E.J. Dionne. 
 
 That’s the basic business model of the Big Five: Publish as much as possible, as widely as possible, but keep different kinds of thinking and writing siloed off in different imprints to avoid diluting anyone’s brand. Simon & Schuster can found a new imprint dedicated to positive depictions of Muslim children in the same year that it publishes Glenn Beck’s book about how violence is inherent to Islamic teachings, and none of the people at the top will consider anything about that fact remotely contradictory. That’s just the way the business is set up, because conservative money spends just as well as progressive money. 
 
 And the imprint model makes a boycott difficult on two levels. For one thing, a would-be boycotter can’t just refuse to buy any book that has “Simon & Schuster” printed on its spine. He or she would have to keep track of which imprints Simon & Schuster owns, and any imprints they might acquire or establish in the near future. 
 
 For another thing, if progressives boycott Simon & Schuster, it’s not clear that the company will get any message from that action beyond the fact that their progressive books aren’t selling as well as they used to, but there seems to be real money in the conservative books. The imprint model’s built-in stability means that a boycott will probably not hurt the house as a whole, but it may well hurt the imprints designed to reach progressive audiences. 
 
 If progressives really want to undermine the increasing visibility of alt-right figures like Yiannopoulos, a blanket boycott of Simon & Schuster is most likely going to be counterproductive. A better response would be supporting progressive writers and writers of color and the imprints that promote them, to amplify voices that are too often undermined and ignored. 
 
 Update: This article has been updated to include the Free Press’s role in the history of conservative trade publishing, and to note that 50 Shades of Gray was published by Vintage Books, not Doubleday.
– Want to know what's wrong with the corporate publishing industry? Take a look at Lena Dunham's insane book deal, which Rob Spillman pegs at $3.7 million on Salon. Random House will need to sell at least 500,000 copies to break even, which Spillman thinks is a long shot. But even if the company pulls it off, "is this any way to run a publishing company?" Spillman wonders. "Put aside the cultural impact question for a second. The whole approach seems short-sighted at best." Imagine if Random House had taken that $3.7 million and instead given $10,000 advances to 370 writers—or even $100,000 advances to 37 writers. Surely a few of the resulting books would have been better and more successful than Dunham's book, and a few of the writers would have outsold her over time. But "this argument presumes time. Which is what corporate publishers don’t have," Spillman explains. "They have shareholders, and/or parent companies, and must justify their quarterly earnings." That's why small publishers are increasingly winning the big literary awards after taking chances on books that the major houses won't touch. "Random House’s rash deal with Dunham is … why the corporate publishers are losing cultural relevance, and why they might soon lose solvency as well." Click for Spillman's full column—or a column in defense of Dunham's massive deal.