In the time since Donald Trump returned to the White House, he has done more damage to the federal government’s ability to function than any president in history. He has lit the fuse on a half-dozen or more different crises, from general inflation, to the collapse of our food systems, to a total breakdown of international order, to the hobbling of medical research, to the deracination of immigrant communities in our country. It is easy to feel defeated. But we cannot be defeated.
Instead of acting like we’ve already lost, we should respond to the radical ambition of the Trump administration with our own radical ambition. For every dramatically destructive policy this administration attempts, we should attempt something as dramatically constructive. He is trying to completely remake society, so we should try to completely remake society. What’s the worst that can happen if we fail? A white supremacist rapist grifter with dreams of being a king becomes president for life with the support of both chambers of Congress and the Supreme Court?
So where the first two parts of this essay reframed and reemphasized things the book world should have already been doing for the current crisis, this last section will swing for the fences.
HELP REBUILD AMERICAN JOURNALISM
We elected Donald Trump the first time and re-elected him despite the failures of his first term, in part, because we do not have journalism that can show the American people that immigrants—no matter their method of arrival—are not a drain on our economy or a threat to our physical safety, or make enough people aware of the reports that showed a significant cause of what so many described as “inflation” was actually price gouging. American mainstream journalism has been unable to preserve political memory long enough for voters to understand that good economic times under Trump were the result of Obama-era policies, that most of the policies and practices that have led to today’s bad economy are based in Republican ideologies (or Democrat compromises and convergences with those Republican ideologies) that are being super-charged in front of our eyes by every harebrained economic decision of the Trump administration.
American media has been unable to show us that violent crime isn’t a society-wide problem, that blue cities are not hellholes, that vaccines work, that climate change is real. It also can’t seem to get Donald Trump to prove he actually knows how tariffs work or explain the cost of deporting 20 million people or clearly articulate any other policy position. So people vote for him because they think he’s going to end the war in Gaza, or solve inflation, or streamline the immigration process. American journalism created a world where online searches for the question “How can I change my vote?” surged as soon as people started realizing what Trump is actually doing
As alleged cultivators and purveyors of knowledge, wisdom, and empathy, the publishing industry should take this dangerously uninformed American public personally. Sure, we are not the only information industry at fault, but the problems of venture capital-managed and hyper-concentrated corporate media do not absolve us from the responsibility to do what we can. We have to start rebuilding the institution of American journalism and publishers have the resources to begin the rebuild.
As alleged cultivators and purveyors of knowledge, wisdom, and empathy, the publishing industry should take this dangerously uninformed American public personally.First and most simply, publishers should start advertising in local, independently-owned newspapers. Got a debut author? A couple of large ads in their hometown paper could directly result in hundreds of sales when people see a picture of someone they know. (Hey, isn’t that Beth and Ray’s kid? Kid who played hockey? Defenseman, right?) Depending on the size of the paper it could result in additional coverage. (The publicist’s dream!) Do the same for the remaining alt-weeklies. Not only are alt-weeklies often sources for investigative journalism, they also cultivate the kind of local culture that is so important to developing a sense of community identity. And if someone is reading a local newspaper or alt-weekly, they’re probably a book buyer.
But major publishers should be doing more than merely advertising in local newspapers or alt-weeklies, which have been struggling (to say the least) for the last 20 years to coexist with the internet. In Lit Hub, we already have a successful example of the collaborative, mission-driven power of publishing, with a website that reaches over three million readers a month, that is built on editorial independence and human curation.
But the billionaires row of tech moguls on the stage at Trump’s inauguration shows us that the digital distribution models of the last decade are now fully in the hands of self-interested oligarchs. And that’s scary.
Now imagine major publishers collaborating on a weekly newspaper based on the Lit Hub model, filled with long form and narrative journalism written by authors with forthcoming or recently released books, distributed to bookstores and libraries to give away for free. It can include the journalism that maintains political memory, the investigations that connect past policy decisions to present conditions, the critical thinking that exposes root causes and systemic forces. And let’s get totally wild and imagine this newspaper has regional editions, so it can provide local perspectives on the world’s issues. And, in the same way that Lit Hub engages with the world beyond books, why not have special editions around major events, like elections or climate catastrophes or the war on Gaza or whatever should reach a level of national consciousness.
Publishers already have access to writers, editors, and printers. Publishers already have distribution networks and warehouses. Yes, publishing a newspaper is different from publishing books, but those differences wouldn’t be hard to iron out when you’re not selling those newspapers.
Maybe if a national newspaper is successful it can inspire others. Maybe it becomes a model that is adopted and adapted. Boston and Minneapolis publishers could do their own. Maybe the American Booksellers Association. Maybe even the regional trade associations. All of them producing free-to-consumer journalism that, crucially, reaches people offline.
The cost of this project would not be without financial returns, because—as with Lit Hub—it would also generate publicity for your authors. Instead of spending money on pre-order gifts and sprayed edges that might show up on an influencer’s social media or concentrating all of your budget on a handful of massive media buys for your lead titles, you spend it introducing your writers to the reading public. Customers still bring newspaper and magazine clippings into the store with the featured book title highlighted.
Physical reading materials are vital to resistance movements. They can be shared without being tracked. They can’t disappear without a trace if a server is seized.One might object that the people most likely to read something like this are those who already have that political memory and sense of narrative continuity, who already act and vote with an awareness of the longer term impacts of certain policies and politics. One might also object that there probably aren’t going to be very many readers anyway, regardless of their state of mind. Though it’s true, the primary readership, especially in the beginning, would be, well, the same people reading this essay, its physicality would allow it to seep out into the world. It would make its way to waiting rooms, bus stations, coffee shops, subway cars, and kitchen tables, ending up in front of people who would not have sought it out.
This is one of the reasons why, as Writers Against the War on Gaza recently discussed in an email newsletter, printed, physical reading materials are vital to resistance movements. They can be shared without being tracked. They can’t disappear without a trace if a server is seized. They don’t drive traffic to a platform that then uses an algorithm to lock readers into that platform. Though I don’t envision this newspaper to be edited from a “resistance” perspective, all the powers of physical printed text applies.
Furthermore, one of the main reasons why it is so easy to stumble on right wing nonsense on YouTube, Spotify, Facebook, and Twitter, is that there is just so much of it out there. There is a flooding of the media zone that, coupled with the right wing bias built into these corporate media ecosystems, all but guarantees spending time any time in these spaces will result into being exposed to right wing nonsense. The percentage of Gen Z men who voted for Trump speaks directly to this phenomenon. One weekly newspaper does not constitute a flood, but every flood starts with a drop.
That idea of starting from one drop, also speaks to the critique that far too few people would actually read this to have any impact on national politics. Like losing our focus on local and state elections, I wonder if our focus on grand displays and gestures has actually hindered our ability to sustain the awareness and activism needed to keep fascism at bay. The Women’s March after Trump’s first election might have been a source for much of the organizing that lead to flipping the House in 2018 and, as positive as that was, Democrats couldn’t keep the House in 2022 and Trump has both chambers now. As big as Planned Parenthood is, it didn’t prevent the overturning of Roe v. Wade or the passing of abortion restrictions that followed. The Harris campaign raised record breaking amounts of money and still lost.
Maybe, rather than piling onto the biggest platforms available, we cultivate a ton of smaller ones that can be stitched together into something national when we need a national response. Maybe a loose network of newspapers, alt-weeklies, zines, journals, and other media both printed and online that only have a readership of a few thousand each, but who create passion, engagement, and action for those readers is the best response to the hyper-concentrated corporate media ecosystem that creates such a profoundly uninformed public. It’s also harder to squelch opposition expression or co-opt it, when it has thousands of outlets. Maybe being small is a strength.
People will make zines. And lit mags and journals. People will create as people always have. And that will do something. But that something will be a lot more significant if powerful actors, like Big Five publishers, create supportive, allied, and reciprocal media.
PUBLISH SO MANY TRANS, QUEER, IMMIGRANT, BIPOC BOOKS AND AUTHORS THEY’LL NEVER BE ABLE TO BAN THEM ALL
Publish so many trans, queer, immigrant, BIPOC books and authors they’ll never be able to ban them all.
BECOME CIVIC SPACES
We need to re-frame how we understand the tools of our trade. Yes, the books themselves can be and will need to be powerful actors in the fight, but if writing, publishing, and selling good books was all we needed to do, well, I wouldn’t need to write these essays. We need to see everything we use to make and sell books as potential resources in the fight for justice and sustainability. The writing, the editing, the printing, the publicity, the marketing, the handselling. All of it. And the space in which we do our work is one of those resources.
Bookstores have long been havens: spaces of comfort, support, relief, and community. That work will always be important, but that isn’t the only possible work that can be done in our spaces. How can you add mutual aid to your space? How can you make your space available to your community for organizing, mobilizing, and activism? How can you use your space to protect books? Do you have space for a little free library? How can you use your space to protect people? A number of stores around the country are offering low-cost wedding venues for queer couples who want to get married before the right to same-sex marriage is threatened. Do you have space for a food pantry? Can you partner with local farms to provide fresh produce to your community if the food system collapses? Can you ask your community for input, to find out how they would actually use your space?
If everything I’ve suggested in this series sounds really expensive, you’re right. Added up, we’re easily talking hundreds of millions of dollars a year. But some of you have a lot of money.This point about using space isn’t just directed at bookstores. How about all the space publishers have available since so many employees work from home or could work from home? How much effort would it take to rearrange a few things so organizations and associations have free office space to use for their administration? How valuable is an internet connection that isn’t attached to a personal billing address? A place to focus? A place to meet? If they’re already in the building, you might as well let them use the printer and some paper for zines. That conference room could be very useful space. And if it’s already set up for hybrid meetings that would be very useful for helping to connect local organizations to national movements.
As Pete Davis argues, we’re not just in a sudden crisis of ascending authoritarianism, we’re also in a long decline of civic engagement in general.There are many different causes to this decline as detailed by Davis, Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, and other sociologists and public thinkers. At best, this decline creates a disengaged populace, but we’re now seeing something more sinister. With nowhere else to turn, many people, especially men, have turned to the radical right. White supremacy, ethnonationalism, reactionary masculinity all offer, if not actual community, then a sense of camaraderie, and if not a true sense of self than a set of shared grievances that can equate to an identity. This is not to absolve the people who voted for Trump and it is certainly not to absolve those who’ve worked to empower him, but to continue imagining an America that is Trump-proof.
That Trump-proof America is filled with print. Newspapers, zines, journals. Print read by hundreds of thousands of people. Print read by dozens of people. Print supported by an online presence that makes it easy to share ideas across geographic distances without becoming digital ephemera. That Trump-proof America is also filled with meetings, gatherings, pot lucks, and block parties. Protests and celebrations. Marches and dances. Book readings. The book industry has the opportunity to be a driving force in that Trump-proof America. Why would we ever pass that up?
If everything I’ve suggested in this series sounds really expensive, you’re right. Added up, we’re easily talking hundreds of millions of dollars a year. But some of you have a lot of money. Some of you control a lot of money. If you’re not willing to spend it on saving civilization, why bother being rich? Furthermore, a handful of individuals and organizations have been spending billions of dollars to advance fascism. They care enough about their cause to put their money where their mouths are. I don’t think we need to match that expenditure dollar for dollar, or even use spending itself as a framework for understanding how we resist what’s arrived on our doorstep, but we need to work at least as hard at fighting fascism as those who support it. That work is not going to be free.
I don’t have a lot of faith that many of the few hundred people I’m writing to will do what I’m asking. Already, we’ve seen the launch of a new conservative imprint and a licensing deal with an AI company. And almost all of them have much larger multinational corporations they either defer to or can hide behind. Honestly, I don’t have a lot of faith any meaningful number of them will even read this. But they all live in this world. They have social lives. They have communities. They have cultural institutions they enjoy being a part of. They rely on our commerce. They rely on our labor. I may not be able to reach them via this essay series, but that does not mean they are unreachable. And if they refuse to change, if they refuse to be allies against fascism, we’ll have to find ways to build the new book world without them. Maybe another thing we should have already been doing. Maybe something a lot of us are already doing.
I don’t know if a radical change of heart and mind by the most powerful people in publishing will be enough to save American democracy. We are already watching many other people in power obey in advance. I mean, there is the real chance that many of those people in power, including Democrats and others who should not be allied with Trump, are actually more comfortable with risking the end of democracy to preserve our status quo than they are with risking the end of capitalism to preserve our democracy.
And if that’s the state of the world than that is the state of the world I will work in. And if there’s a choice between doing nothing and doing something that fails, I’ll choose doing something every time. And if we don’t fight we can’t win. And if the fight needs everyone, the fight needs you. And if twenty, thirty years from now, we live in a world where this moment is taught in history classes and my child asks me what I did, I’ll be able to tell him I did my best. I truly hope you’ll be able to give the same when you are asked the same question.
