Why today’s publishers fear Goodreads more than government

Earlier this year, Bloom Books canceled the release of best-selling author Sophie Lark’s new romance novel, Sparrow and Vine. The decision came after advance copies met an online backlash regarding a character readers argued was racist, MAGA-coded, and fangirled over Elon Musk (persona non grata of the progressive left for, well, obvious reasons).

In response, Lark posted a statement on Instagram. While the statement has since been removed, according to reporting at the time, Lark apologized and promised to revisit the book “to ensure that [her] work doesn’t contribute to harm” and listen “more closely to our sensitivity readers” in the future. Though she added, her character was intended to be “flawed.”

The incident, as the New York Times recounted, was “the latest example of the influence that readers can exert over authors and publishers, and how negative campaigns on social media can torpedo a book before it hits stores.”

Another example: In 2023, Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love fame, decided to indefinitely delay her novel The Snow Forest. The story followed a Russian family ostracized from society in 1930s Soviet Russia. The unreleased book garnered a slew of one-star reviews on Goodreads from readers upset over its setting and characters in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Let’s do one more: In 2019, Amélie Wen Zhao’s then-unreleased novel, Blood Heir, ignited a firestorm when online influencers accused the book of being “anti-black.” Complaints included that the fantasy story’s depiction of a slavery system not based on skin color was racially insensitive and amounted to cultural appropriation. Zhao issued an apology for the pain and harm she caused. She also delayed the publication of her novel to revise it with the help of sensitivity readers. (It was released later that year.)

Similar stories have played out many times in the past decade. Adam Szetela opens his new book, That Book Is Dangerous (2025), discussing them to introduce readers to what he calls “the Sensitivity Era.” According to Szetela, this era of expression has seen authors and publishers — many committed to progressive ideals — choosing to self-censor to appease a moral panic roiling the political left. 

To do otherwise is to risk sales and careers at a time when traditional publishing is shedding jobs and faces stiff competition from new media. Negative reviews can heavily influence the purchasing decisions of readers, librarians, teachers, and booksellers, even if the accusations in those reviews are unfair and unwarranted. Pressure campaigns have even led to traditional media outlets retracting previously positive reviews, further harming book sales and author reputations.

“Given the progressive commitments of these authors, and the nature of the charges hurled against them, the old joke about progressives who form circular firing squads devoted to politically irrelevant issues does not sound like a joke. It sounds like someone trying to describe the Sensitivity Era,” Szetela writes.

I recently spoke with Szetela about his new book and what he learned about the Sensitivity Era after years of interviewing authors and industry insiders who are trying to create within it.

Clowns to the left of me, censors to the right

Arguing that the progressive left engages in censorship may seem counterintuitive for many. Counterproductive even.

Peruse any list of the most banned or challenged books of recent years, and you’ll find them filled to bursting with the usual right-wing bugaboos: profane language, drug use, queer-plus identities, and the controversial idea that sex is a natural part of human life and has a place in art. 

The conservative right in the United States also owns the patent on government censorship*. Today’s Republican-led state houses overwhelmingly propose and pass more legislation aimed at banning books than Democrat-led ones. Notably, Florida’s HB 1069, a 2023 law, has led to the removal of hundreds of books from school libraries across the state. (The law is currently being challenged in the courts.)

Given this, I asked Szetela why he chose to focus on the left front of the culture wars. He said he agrees that the U.S. right has a monopoly on legislative censorship, and it is absolutely a danger to freedom of expression. However, there are already numerous organizations and researchers “doing amazing work tracking and combating” this type of censorship. He didn’t think he had much to add to their substantial contributions.

However, he noticed a lack of honest discussion about a complementary trend happening on the political left. While U.S. progressives currently lack power in the legislature, they still attempt to silence the authors and ideas they find vexing. They just do so through the cultural institutions where they hold the most influence, such as museums, universities, and, of course, publishing.

“I think there is a very direct relation between right-wing political power and left-wing cultural power,” Szetela tells me. “I don’t think it is a coincidence that a lot of wokeness, political correctness, cancel culture — whatever you want to call it — comes to prominence [when] a lot of people on the left understandably feel powerless in the political sphere.”

This culture-based approach may stretch the definition of censorship too thin for some, so I asked Szetela for his thoughts. He agrees that there are distinctions between government censorship and grassroots efforts such as Change.org petitions or review-bombing campaigns on Goodreads. But, he points out, those differences don’t alter the ultimate intent, which is to tell people who may want to read a book that they can’t.

“That’s censorship,” he says, adding, “If censorship is about rendering books inaccessible to interested readers, then the difference between Amazon censorship and government censorship is more semantical than practical.”

Return of the moral panic attack

While Szetela takes issue with the Sensitivity Era’s current excesses, he does point out that it started from a good place: the desire to see more diverse characters in stories and more diverse writers being published. It also led to a groundswell of support for writers of all stripes to be more thoughtful of the stereotypes and cultural assumptions that could unintentionally make their way into their stories. 

These were welcomed cultural shifts in an industry that has historically not been great about either, especially in children’s and young adult literature.

But as things often do, the movement grew increasingly extreme. The vocal outcries of small groups of readers on social media were intensified by polarization and algorithm amplification. Since negative expressions are more likely to be shared online, Szetala notes, critical and dismissive takes became the “very grist of book reviews on Twitter, Goodreads, and other platforms,” especially among book influencers. Many of these influencers are themselves writers, sensitivity readers, or other members of the industry who may cynically find faults to curry favor within the community or sell their own services.

These incentive structures led people to not only overlook “an author’s good intentions” and instead ascribe “malevolent intentions where there are none” — as we saw earlier with the backlashes over Lark, Gilbert, and Zhao’s unpublished works.

“One thing that you’ll see throughout my book is that the people who are carrying the torches often ascribe the worst possible intentions to authors,” Szetela explains. “Now, it’s not just the case that you wrote a book that is purportedly offensive, harmful, whatever. It’s that you yourself have nefarious motives.”

Because of this, Szetela argues that those initial intentions have evolved into a full-blown moral panic, one fueled by a call-out culture that targets anything less than ideologically pure. In fact, he points out that many aspects of the Sensitivity Era align with a past moral panic: the comic-book scare of the 1940s and 50s. 

Both moral panics perceived a threat in society. In the 1950s, it was juvenile delinquency; today, it’s discrimination and systemic injustice. Both also blamed those who were not responsible, traded in the language of contagions and moral certitude, and believed that controlling the medium could solve the problem — or, at the very least, not deepen the problem further.

During our conversation, Szetela took particular issue with that last one. Today’s moral crusaders assume an elementary cause-and-effect relationship between books and readers. Namely, if a book has problematic content and people read it, then they will either be harmed or it will lead them to adopt problematic views. Because of this, books must be labeled “dangerous” or “safe,” and the dangerous ones should be removed from circulation or fixed to protect readers. 

As Szetela shared with me, a colleague of his once even compared the process to safety recalls for hazardous cars. Szetela doesn’t buy it. 

For one thing, there’s not a lot of robust research on how books affect people in the long term. Books certainly have an impact on readers, and some research indicates that reading fiction fosters prosocial feelings, such as empathy. While the effect sizes tend to be small, they can also be meaningful. However, the research tends to focus on small groups of mostly students, short-term effects (from days to a few weeks), and self-reported attitude changes rather than actual behaviors.

The conditions matter, as well. For instance, one study found that fiction heightened empathy in students but only if they were emotionally transported into the tale. No emotional transportation, no empathy gains.

In other words, there is little evidence to support the notion that certain books will be dangerous. They may present us with ideas we disagree with. Their characters and subject matter may make us uncomfortable. But that doesn’t make them psychologically equivalent to a Ford Pinto.

Another reason Szetela doesn’t buy the argument is that it oversimplifies the “complicated relationship people have with the things they read.” 

When he taught at Cornell, he introduced students to works by authors as diverse as Emily Dickinson, Maya Angelou, and LL Cool J, and he was always surprised by which books spoke to which students. A football player may find a kindred spirit in a poem by Alfred Tennyson, or a young woman from a rural community would be stricken with the heartache of The Great Gatsby.

He was also struck by how students would read the same book and take something completely different away from it. One may read Orwell, for instance, and see the warning signs of Trump and modern-day fascism, while another will see predictions of left-wing cancel culture, and a third may not understand how a book published in 1949 and written about the year 1984 has anything relevant to say to those living in 2025. And these different readings mean the book will impress upon readers in various ways.

“My problem is not a rejection of the idea that books can affect people,” Szetela tells me. “I’ve certainly been affected by innumerable books that I’ve read. [My problem] is when people start making very strong claims about how one book is going to affect a person or even an entire group of people.”

Collateral damage in the circular firing squad

Ironically, the chilling effect the Sensitivity Era has on expression may be harming the very authors it claims to be representing. As Szetela recounts in his book, many progressive and minority authors have found themselves in the crosshairs of the Sensitivity Era. A few examples:

• Kosoko Jackson, a gay, Black man, had his book A Place for Wolves canceled after a review-bombing campaign took issue with a story about the Kosovo War not being told from a Muslim perspective. 
• Ramin Ganeshram and Vanessa Brantley-Newton, both women of color, faced a similar fate after their picture book A Birthday Cake for George Washington was accused of “whitewashing slavery.” 
• Becky Albertalli, a clinical psychologist who works with LGBTQ+ teens, found her debut novel, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (2015), under attack for depicting a closeted gay teenager questioning his sexuality. (It was later released to much acclaim).

Similarly, many authors struggle with being pigeonholed into writing only stories that match what others perceive to be their “on-brand” identities.

As Szetela shares in his book, Alberto Gullaba Jr. once had his agent attempt to remove all the Black characters from one of his books because Alberto was Filipino. Author Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez was turned down by a famous agent because her writing wasn’t deemed “authentically” Latina enough. And an anonymous gay author Szetela interviewed said he was told his stories “aren’t gay enough” to sell.

All this at a time when minority writers are also disproportionately the targets of censorship by Republican state houses and right-wing interest groups. 

“[I]f anything can be learned from literary history, it is that there are always multiple interpretations to a text,” Szetela writes. “Crusades that seek to enforce their interpretations on everyone else, through public pressure and de facto censorship, raise real problems for writers and readers. […] If the movement for more diverse and sensitive books is to have any future at all, it will have to stop alienating the very people who want to write and read these books.”

An American psychosis

While talking with Szetela, he shared with me that one of his favorite books is American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. If you’re unfamiliar with the story, it’s about a mentally deranged Wall Street banker who commits heinous acts of violence (well, maybe). Its characters also express racist, sexist, homophobic, and just plain disturbing sentiments. Even when the book came out in 1991, it caused quite a stir. By today’s standards, Szetela says, it wouldn’t get past the slush pile.

The book isn’t a celebration of racism, sexism, homophobia, or class privilege, though. It instead uses these to craft a “phenomenal satire of the excesses of late capitalism and the moral depravity of Wall Street.” To argue that their mere presence is proof that the book is dangerous or its author must be as immoral as his characters misses the point.

That said, Szetela isn’t going to bat for American Psycho. He simply wants you to have the opportunity to read it and make up your own mind. Same with Vine and Sparrow. Same with The Snow Forest and Blood Heir and any other book that someone says you can’t read because it is dangerous. 

Because what passes for criticism in the Sensitivity Era is ultimately the exact opposite. Genuine criticism seeks to further the conversation surrounding a book and its ideas. But proponents of the Sensitivity Era want to keep others from joining that conversation. They want to have the final say.

“Above all, That Book Is Dangerous is a case for reading books,” Szetela writes. “That one has to make a case for reading books should indicate the stakes of this moral panic.”

And what should you do when you come across a book you violently disagree with — even if it is Szetela’s own work?

“Don’t burn it,” he requests. “Maybe use it to fix that wobbly leg on your office chair or maybe do some erasure poetry with it.” Whatever you do, at least give others the chance to read it and make up their own minds.

*Author’s Note: It’s worth mentioning that the U.S. right also engages in social pressure campaigns, while Democrat-led state houses aren’t above using legislative power to silence expression (e.g., California’s Title 5 “DEIA” amendment has been labeled an effective “educational gag order”). Generally speaking, however, the reverse seems more often the case.