Who Knew? People Don’t Want to Read Trans Memoirs

It’s a shame to see what actress Ellen Page has done to herself. She’s been in a few movies that I like, but I can’t watch anymore because it disturbs me to think about the way she’s mutilated her body in the pursuit of happiness instead of getting the mental health treatment she really needed.

Since coming out as transgender, Page has been celebrated by the media for her bravery, and we were all expected to ooh and ahh when she posted a shirtless photo of herself post-top surgery. Naturally, she got herself a lucrative book deal out of it, too. Heck, that wasn’t even all the surprising. These days, even a nobody can become an influencer by coming out as transgender. I imagine publishers were all over Page, trying to cash in on her Frankenstein-esque transition.

And boy, did she get a good deal.

Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan Books, reportedly paid her a more than $3 million advance for her transgender memoir, “Pageboy.”

Who exactly wants to read a memoir from a young actress who is now more famous for getting a double mastectomy than for her work in Hollywood?

Despite all the publicity Page received and all the promotion behind the memoir, the book has reportedly sold 68,000 copies. While most authors would love to sell 68,000 copies of their books, most don’t have the advantages Page had. Her book got Hollywood endorsements and write-ups in the media. It had every possible advantage to sell at least five times as many copies. I’ve written a few books myself and have never had the kind of publicity that Page got. Yet despite her advantage, Flatiron Books lost big money on the project even before taking into account the money spent on promotion. A publishing industry insider told The Free Press that when it comes to book advances, "if you paid $7 per book sold, you paid the right amount.”

Flatiron Books paid Page $44 per book sold.

They literally paid $3 million for a book that the vast majority of people don’t want to read. They should have just paid me $2 million to tell them it wouldn’t even come close to making back the advance and it would have cost them less money.

It sounds an awful lot like how Disney keeps putting out woke content and losing big money for not understanding what the market wants. But what’s happening with these big publishing houses is more than that. They aren’t just putting out woke content; they are actively discriminating against white male writers.

In June 2022, best-selling author James Patterson called the difficulty white male authors were facing “just another form of racism.” After a backlash, he quickly apologized and said: “I absolutely do not believe that racism is practiced against white writers. Please know that I strongly support a diversity of voices being heard—in literature, in Hollywood, everywhere.” But one month later, acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates made a similar point. In a tweet, she wrote: “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested.”

A senior editor at a big publishing house essentially confirmed this to The Free Press. "I don’t think it was worded quite as blatantly as that. It was worded more like, ‘Is this the right time to be championing authors of more traditional backgrounds?’ Often, the language was a bit opaque," the editor explained.

From Hollywood to the publishing industry, they’re going woke and going broke.