There's been some speculation on whether publishing society will become less woke due to the election. I believe the answer is obviously less, peak woke was actually 2020 and it's been on the decline ever since. That decline will likely accelerate in large segments of society. Now some people are thinking that this is about to happen to pop culture as well. I think this might happen with video games, and Hollywood may become more neutral in their tentpole films, but with publishing, I think we have to manage our expectations...especially with YA and YA-adjacent spheres. There are in fact several warning signs that books are about to get a lot more woke.
First, let's discuss the evidence of publishing becoming less woke.
Publisher's Weekly published a report a couple days ago that Hachette Book Group is expanding their Basic Books subdivision with two new imprints: Basic Venture (a business and economics imprint) and Basic Liberty - a conservative imprint. The latter will be headed Thomas Spence, the former president of the hard-right Regnery Publishing. There's been a bunch of authors on X and TikTok outraged over this, using it as proof that the big pub houses are abandoning minorities, etc. Whether or not this choice was related to Trump's victory (I'm skeptical because I'm sure these guys were in talks for this business venture for months before it was announced) but obviously the end result will be more conservative books are going to be published by one of the big five going forward.
What most of the outraged authors and influencers seem to be missing is the fact that Basic Liberty is intended to be a non-fiction imprint. They will mostly be publishing philosophic musings on liberty as well as publishing economic agendas such as those espoused by the founder's former employer Heritage Foundation - the same people who made Project 2025. I'm sure there will be autobiographies by Sean Hannity, and, if they're feeling, maybe something by Jake Paul. But what it seems they will be publishing is anything fiction. If fiction becomes "based" or non-woke in the coming years, it will have nothing to do with Hachette's latest imprint. What Hachette is doing is nothing new. Most of the Big Five have a conservative imprint wherein they publish non-fiction stuff. Hachette is just getting in on the action, and people are only talking about it because of the timing. If Hachette had announced a new "apolitical" fantasy imprint or a YA imprint targeting men, then it would be a different story. But so far, this is nothing that I think wouldn't have happened under a Kamala presidency. During the Obama years, conservative imprints of the big five flourished. Opposition to a party often sells better when that party is in power, because people are fearful or/and mad and want to find others who agree with them.
That brings us to the final point: The first Trump term escalated the dominance of woke, so why should we expect the second term to have the opposite effect? 2020 was the absolute height of woke (so far!) and this was when Trump was President. This was when you were most likely to be canceled. Starting in late 2021, there was a backlash to woke that influenced nearly every aspect of society. Look at how difficult it is to cancel anyone today. Biden is still president. Sure, talk about Sweet Baby Inc all you want, but the same stuff was happening under Trump's presidency. The only difference is people weren't talking about it as much then.
The very fact that Sweet Baby Inc got in trouble is proof of the weakening of woke.
What are we seeing today? Browse the Booktwt community, browse anywhere where agents are posting, and you will see agents announcing that they are only going to take on clients that are minority women. You'll see authors and reviewers saying to unfollow them if you voted for Trump. You see authors talking about how before they were afraid to write their angry (left-leaning) political novel, but now everything is going to be political with them and that novel is coming fast and hard. I have not seen a single person say, "Now that I see how many people like Trump, I'm going to stop putting politics in my books," nor have I seen anyone say, "Now I'm going to write that based YA fantasy I was too afraid to write before."
This leads me to conclude that we are going to see a doubling down within fiction of all the woke themes we've been reading for the past several years. If anything, some of it will probably be much angrier. I think we'll have fewer sappy tolerance stories and a lot more "kill all the bigots in gruesome ways but first make them eat their loved ones" type of story. Whereas before, you could find a feminist protagonist roll her eyes at a boy skeptical of feminism and tell him that feminism is good for boys too because it means boys can cry or whatever, now you will find male bullies in these books shouting, "Your body, my choice!" and the feminist protagonist will respond by shooting his balls or something else aggressive.
This is because the exact same people who populate the YA and YA-adjacent world today will also populate it next year. This is not like gaming where a company can fire its whole team and get new coders and still market their game to an audience of tens of millions of gamers. YA publishing is more niche and there is a sense of community between reviewers, readers, and authors. A publishing that fires all or even half of their known authors because of political concerns is going to be boycotted. Keep in mind that the existing audience for YA is mostly women who either voted for Kamala Harris, or are apolitical but have friends who voted for Kamala Harris. And don't forget the third camp, that didn't vote for Kamala Harris because they were pro-Gaza. None of these camps are going to support a top-down approach from publishers trying to make things less woke.
Maybe there will be a top-down approach to try and expand the market of YA to a different group, but I think publishers will be too afraid to lose the audience they have by overreaching.
