Yesterday Entertainment Weekly ran a piece about debut novels with six-figure advances and why publishers are willing to take big financial risks on (relative) literary unknowns. The answer is, among other things, “because they believe they will make even more money later,” but the part that really leapt out at me was this:

You can’t count on selling a book on the writer’s talent alone—so while factors like being photogenic or savvy with social media won’t make or break a deal, they can definitely sweeten it. “I actually knew very little about [Sweeney] when I bought The Nest,” says her editor at Ecco, Megan Lynch. “I didn’t know that, for example, she knew Amy Poehler well enough to approach her for a blurb. That was a happy bonus.” Lynch stresses that while she would never “decline a book I loved because I felt like the author wouldn’t be able to handle an NPR interview, it would certainly affect how determined I might be: Am I going to hang in for another round at auction, or drop out?” Herr, for her part, acknowledges that an author’s appearance can affect an advance — “We look at all of that stuff” — but insists, “We would have paid her the same money if she weighed 500 pounds and was really hard to look at. That’s my firm belief [emphasis added].”

“We would have paid her the same money if she weighed 500 pounds and was really hard to look at.”

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It says a great deal how common this attitude is within publishing that Herr did not think twice about having this quote attached to her name, that she did not wish to be quoted anonymously. Everyone will know what I mean. She likely will end up offering a public apology of some sort, something like, “What I meant to say was that we would pay any author of any size the same amount if the book was good; I merely acknowledged we live in a world where women’s appearances are often counted strongly for or against them.” And that will be fine, in its own way, but it’s also an extraordinary opportunity for the people working in publishing to look at how easy or how difficult they make it for fat writers, for queer writers, for writers of color, for writers with disabilities (especially those with immediately visible disabilities), to stop seeing size as a setback or a deviation from the norm that must be overcome with some additional, extra-special qualities.