How to Get a Book Published in 2024?

[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]

Yes, politically incorrect books do get published these days – almost exclusively by publishing houses and imprints that focus on works aimed at the conservative market. But they generally have a much tougher go of it, market-wise, than books that, shall we say, go with the flow. Not a small number of bookstore managers and employees, who tend to lean left, do their best to keep books that challenge the reigning woke ideology in any way out of sight – to relegate them to the back of the store or to decline to order them altogether. Meanwhile, the bestsellers lists in the New York Times Book Review and other left-wing media have long been known to fib about the numbers, refusing to acknowledge that this or that contrarian book has actually outsold everything else during the previous week.

In any case, it’s increasingly tough for a non–lockstep writer to land a book contract with one of the major publishers. In fact it’s not all that easy for an ordinary, everyday straight white male to get one of those houses to publish his memoir, however eloquent, or his novel about a marriage not unlike his own or about a family like the one he grew up in. Yes, the usual genre novels – thrillers, science fiction, historical romances, etc. – are still being churned out. But when it comes to what’s known as literary fiction or serious non-fiction about sociocultural matters, the major publishers are as allergic to the unorthodox as they are eager to snap up the right kinds of books by writers who belong to the right demographic groups.

For example, judging by their catalogs (and note well, this is not a review of the books themselves but an overview of the language that the publishers use to promote them), the five or six major houses today seem to be especially fond of books – whether they take the form of novel or memoir or reportage – about people from the developing world who migrate to America full of hope only to have their dreams crushed (or, at the very least, to find themselves confronted by almost insuperable challenges, including, of course, the racism that, as we all learned from the 1619 Project, is America’s founding premise). In the forthcoming memoir Dreaming of Home: A Young Latina’s Journey to Pride, Power, and Belonging (St. Martin’s), we’re invited to feel sympathy for the Ecuadoran-born author, Cristina Jiménez, who, with her family, entered the United States illegally when she was thirteen and settled in Queens. The publisher’s catalog characterizes this frankly criminal act as follows: “her parents courageously decide to seek a better life in the U.S.” They inhabit a cramped apartment, work “multiple jobs,” and live in “constant fear of deportation,” but Cristina, our valiant heroine, rises above all of it. When her “undocumented status” threatens to prevent her from attending college, she’s aided by “immigrant rights advocates” who “win a change in the state’s law.” Naturally, we’re supposed to be on her side, even though as an illegal alien she should have no such rights whatsoever.

But her troubles aren’t over yet. Attending Queens College and then Baruch College in Manhattan, “she struggles with shame at her accent.” In New York City? Really? Nonsense. She eventually co-founds United We Dream, “a national network that catalyzes a powerful youth movement to win DACA and protect over half a million young people from deportation.” According to the publisher, Cristina “opens our eyes to the reality that being a ‘good’ immigrant doesn’t protect you from systematic racism, and invites us to acknowledge the America that never was and recognize the power of everyday people to create a country where we all belong and thrive.”

In other words, America never really was a country that offered a bonanza of opportunities to immigrants. And the disapproval of many Americans toward immigrants who entered the country illegally is, we’re meant to understand, nothing more or less than a manifestation of “systematic racism.” Even though Cristina broke the rules, you see, she’s a “good” immigrant who’s striving to improve everything that’s bad about the way in which America supposedly treats foreigners. As the catalog copy informs us, she’s even the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and was named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People.” Why doesn’t any of this surprise me in the least?

Falling into essentially the same category is Jessica Goudeau’s non-fiction book After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America (Penguin). It tells of “two refugee families and their hope and resilience as they fight to survive and belong in America.” Mu Naw’s family, who are Christians from Myanmar, is accepted into the U.S., but Hasna, a Syrian Muslim, is “cruelly separated from her children” by the evil American government. Both families end up in Austin, but the book, to judge by the catalog copy, is principally an indictment of what Goudeau considers America’s “current closed-door policies.” It’s beyond bizarre to read such nonsense at a time when gangsters, rapists, aspiring terrorists, child smugglers, and assorted riff-raff from all over the world are being permitted to pour across America’s southern border without being vetted, are handed free plane tickets to various cities around the country, are housed in luxury hotels (where they complain about the food and accommodations), and are given ample monthly payouts to cover their expenses – even as working-class American citizens struggle to make ends meet.

Then there’s Ana Raquel Minian’s In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States (Viking). The catalog copy opens with a reference to “Americans watch[ing] in horror as children were torn from their parents at the US-Mexico border under Trump’s ‘family separation’ policy.” This attribution to President Trump of a practice initiated under his predecessor gives us a good idea of where we’re going here. Minian’s book recounts the stories of several individual immigrants who, during the last couple of centuries, have been detained at length before being admitted into the country. I’m not about to maintain that these stories aren’t worth telling, but when publishers are putting out one book after another about how abominably immigrants are treated in America – a country that has long accepted far more immigrants than any other, an act of generosity for which most of them have been immensely thankful and as a result of which most of them (and their progeny) have thrived, often beyond their wildest dreams – there’s something terribly wrong with the publishing world.

There are a good many more books about how cruel America is to immigrants, but let’s move on to gay books. For decades, the major publishers issued gay novels in abundance, most of them by and about gay white men. But these books seem almost to have disappeared, at least from the lists of the top publishers. As you may have heard, in the view of today’s woke left, gay white males are just a shade less despicable than straight white males. Perhaps this is why nowadays the gay novels issued by the major houses are mostly about lesbians or gay men who belong to racial minorities. Take Jenny Fran Davis’s Dykette (St. Martin’s), which is about a “professionally creative, erotically adventurous, and passionately dysfunctional” lesbian couple in Brooklyn who find themselves in a “debaucherous” ménage with two other lesbian couples, one of whom exudes “It-queer clout” (I have no idea what that means). The novel, we’re told, takes place “at the crossroads of queer nonconformity and seductive normativity” (I’m not sure what that means, either). Another St. Martin’s title, Kristin Russo and Jenny Owen Youngs’s Slayers, Every One of Us, isn’t a novel but a memoir, but it falls into pretty much the same category as Dykette: it’s about a lesbian couple whose relationship – and I’m not making this up – revolves around an obsession with the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’ll pass.

Scouring the major publishers’ catalogs, I did run across one book by a gay white male: namely Andy Cohen, the nitwitted host and producer at the Bravo network who famously spends his New Year’s Eves getting drunk on CNN with his equally unimpressive buddy Anderson Cooper. Cohen’s book The Daddy Diaries (Holt) is a memoir of his transition “from bottle service to baby bottles” – in other words, his struggle to fit “the responsibilities, joys, and growing pains of parenthood” into his “glamorous” life as a Manhattan “media mogul.” It’s depressing to think that there might be one person on the planet who wants to read this.

But forget about immigrants and gays. The big takeaway from the current book catalogs is that the top publishers are positively desperate to publish anything and everything about being black – so long as it’s written from the proper perspective. Joel Leon’s Everything and Nothing at Once (Henry Holt), a collection of personal essays, is described by the publisher as “a beautiful, painful, and soaring tribute to everything that Black men are and can be.” Brought up in the Bronx to value bling and cash and to believe “that white was always right and Black men were seen as threatening or great for comic relief but never worthy of the opening credits” (?), Leon gradually rose above this limited worldview and, in his own words, “learned that being Black is an all-encompassing everything.” Well, there’s another sentence I don’t get. (By the way, do you notice that almost all of these books take place in New York City?)

Then there’s Darrin Bell’s The Talk (Macmillan), which promotes the myth that police are “a lot more likely” to shoot blacks – even little boys – more often than they shoot whites, a notion passed down from generation to generation in many black families, who describe sharing this dreadful misinformation with their children as having “the talk.” Bell recalls having “the talk” with his six-year-old son and cites the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor as examples of racism on the part of police. Never mind that this myth has been definitively debunked.

The same myth is at the center of Keith Ellison’s Break the Wheel: Ending the Cycle of Police Violence. You remember Keith Ellison, don’t you? Since leaving Congress in 2019 and taking up the role of Minnesota’s Attorney General, he’s had a somewhat lower national profile than he used to. So perhaps it’s worth recalling that this is a dude who converted to Islam, hates Jews, praised Farrakhan as a “role model for black youth,” celebrated the murderer and Minneapolis gang leader Sharif Willis, and has delivered speeches to gatherings of the Muslim American Society, the Islamic Circle of North America, the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and the Council on American Islamic Relations, all of which have terrorist ties.

But on to his book. In Break the Wheel, Ellison offers a “riveting account of the Derek Chauvin trial,” which took place under his auspices as Minnesota’s A.G. The book supposedly illuminates “a defining, generational moment of racial reckoning and social justice understanding.” Here, as in Bell’s book, the guiding assumption is that white cops assault innocent blacks with outrageous frequency, but that “this chain of violence” can, if addressed properly, be replaced “with empathy and shared insight” that leads to “lasting change and justice.”

It’s not just white cops who are vehement racists, of course. In Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine (Viking), Uché Blackstock, M.D., who grew up in Brooklyn and attended Harvard Medical School, indicts the American medical system for its “profound and long-standing systemic inequities that mean just 2 percent of all U.S. physicians today are Black women.” Why do I have the feeling that Blackstock’s book utterly ignores the comprehensive research of Heather MacDonald and others, which reveals that, far from being biased against black applicants, leading medical schools are so desperate to have more black students that they routinely admit – and graduate – blacks with unsettlingly low test scores even as they reject whites and (especially) Asians with extraordinary qualifications? The unfortunate lesson of MacDonald’s work is that any patient who goes to a black doctor who’s received his or her M.D. at any time in the last few years undergoes a significant risk of being treated by someone who, if not black, would never have gotten into med school in the first place and who may well have graduated at or near the bottom of the class. Caveat curandus.

Want some poetry about racism? It’s hard these days for even a first-rate poet to find a decent publisher – most poets are thrilled to have their books put out by some one-horse outfit in Pocatella, Idaho, or Natchitoches, Louisiana, but Phillip B. Williams managed to get Penguin, a top-level New York publisher,  to take his collection Mutiny. No wonder: Williams’s poems are about how blacks are “erased, exploited, and ill-imagined” and about “the transformative power of anger.” Yes, it sounds exactly like the sort of garbage Amiri Baraka (Le Roi Jones) was churning out half a century ago – when, that is, he wasn’t busy smearing Jews and gays and arguing that white women who resisted rape by a black man were racists. To be sure, Williams is not only black but gay, and Mutiny has been celebrated in the New York Times Book Review as “a wholesale rebellion against a culture that too often erases Black queerness.” Sorry, I’ll stick with Yeats and Stevens.

Still more racism. The biography His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Viking) won the Pulitzer Prize. Well, of course it did. How could it not have? In it, two Washington Post reporters, Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, show “how systemic racism shaped George Floyd’s life and legacy—from his family’s roots in the tobacco fields of North Carolina, to ongoing inequality in housing, education, health care, criminal justice, and policing.” Viking describes Floyd as “a father, partner, athlete, and friend who constantly strove for a better life…a beloved figure from Houston’s housing projects [who] faced the stifling systemic pressures that come with being a Black man in America.” No mention of his career as a thug.

Predictably, the catalog copy includes a reference to America’s “enduring legacy of institutional racism” and concludes by noting that “a man who simply wanted to breathe ended up touching the world.” The three major pre-publication review outlets all gave the book starred reviews: Publishers Weekly called it “a moving testament to Floyd and a devastating indictment of America’s racial inequities,” Kirkus Reviews praised it for capturing Floyd’s “humanity” and for its “searing indictment of this country’s ongoing failure to eradicate systemic racism,” and Booklist called it a “wrenching chronicle of one of the most devastating events of our time.” Sorry, but to call the death of George Floyd “one of the most devastating events of our time” is an insult to uncountable innocents who have perished of childhood diseases, in natural disasters, or at the hands of, well, violence-prone creeps like George Floyd.

There’s plenty more where all that came from, but I’ll close with Irvin Weathersby Jr.’s In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space (Viking). The book takes on what is obviously one of America’s most critical issues: the fact that “our art, monuments, and public spaces” offer an “enduring specter of white supremacy.” You see, “scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot the country’s landscape, while schools and street signs continue to bear the names of segregationists.” These, we’re told, are “sites of lasting racial trauma.” Are they really? As a gay man, I’m sure that almost everybody of whom there’s a statue somewhere in America that’s over a century old would’ve cursed me out – if not beaten me up – for being a sodomite, but somehow I’m able to get through the day without giving this fact the slightest thought. And it certainly wouldn’t occur to me to write a whole book about the subject – although now that I think of it, this might be the chance for my big payday.