Is Twitter Ruining Book Publishing?

Lionel Shriver, Spectator: Why do authors have to be ‘moral’? Because their publishing contracts tell them so

My compulsion to rub strangers up the wrong way in a political sense grows only more enticing.

Suppose you’re a writer with a self-destructive proclivity for sticking your neck out. Would you sign a book contract that would be canceled in the instance of ‘sustained, widespread public condemnation of the author’? Even cautious, congenial writers are working in an era when a bland, self-evident physiological assertion like ‘women don’t have penises’ attracts a school of frenzied piranhas. So journalists would be fools to sign a document voided if, in a magazine’s ‘sole judgment’, they were the subject of ‘public disrepute, contempt, complaints or scandals’.

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WNU Editor: With the world wide web nothing is secret anymore. Hence the morality contracts to accommodate cultural changes.