(C) Common Dreams
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Skyhorse Publishing’s House of Horrors [1]

['Condé Nast', 'Keziah Weir']

Date: 2020-09-17 15:40:46.297000+00:00

“If I had to do that over, I would definitely not have hired so many people,” Lyons says. “Downsizing is always a difficult and complicated thing.”

While book publishing can be an arduous process—two years from acquisition to publication is typical for both fiction and nonfiction; 10 years for reported books is not unheard of—for authors like the intrepid Dershowitz, speed and an anti-dogma dogma are Skyhorse’s biggest boons. “I did my book on Defending the Constitution, the Trump defense; they had it out in three or four days after I finished it,” Dershowitz says. “[Skyhorse is] basically the publishing industry’s response to social media. Social media is too fast. You think of something and you put it out there without even a second thought.” His books, he says, require “a second thought—but not a third thought. So it’s halfway between a long tweet and a long book.”

“All my books are first drafts,” he goes on. “I believe you don’t aim for perfection when you write a book, you get it out there. And then if people criticize it, you write another one.”

Dershowitz says that his Skyhorse advances are “a tenth of what I get from major publishers,” and former editors say that many advances range from $1,000 to $4,000, with $20,000 being the highest end of the spectrum. (Skyhorse declined to comment on this.) Yet the publisher has also, at times, erred on the side of over-ordering books that end up greatly underperforming expectations—a gamble in an industry where it’s common practice for publishers to eat the cost of bookseller returns.

In June 2017, two Asian American employees reported to management that Skyhorse author Oliver Stone made racist and sexual remarks to them at a party Lyons hosted at his own Upper West Side apartment.

In early 2017, boxes of Roger Stone’s The Making of the President 2016: How Donald Trump Orchestrated a Revolution, which Publishers Weekly reported had an initial print run of 200,000 copies, sat piled in the Skyhorse office until, one day that spring, a member of management caught wind of a protest against the president at Trump Tower. The publicity team—mostly young, mostly women—was directed to head to the protest and hand out copies to members of the media. All but one refused. To date, NPD BookScan reports U.S. sales of the book to be just shy of 22,000.

Throughout its history, Skyhorse has seemed caught between the identity of a large, legacy house and that of a scrappy start-up. Certain details align with some Silicon Valley stereotypes: According to a Skyhorse representative, Lyons “worked exclusively on a treadmill desk” for a little over a year, walking on it while eating lunch and during interviews with potential employees; another representative lists a Ping-Pong table as an office perk. But former employees note that company culture contradicted company policy. In a Skyhorse document from 2015 that compiles exit-interview feedback, reviewed by V.F., one answer to “any other issues” reads, in part: “no flexible hours, not everyone has a say in things, no stock options or other perks of start-ups.”

While publishing is one of the few industries in which even executive-level positions are typically dominated by women, multiple former employees—men and women—refer to the Skyhorse management team as “the boys’ club,” and point to sexism playing a role in dissatisfaction with the job. During one publicity meeting, employees claim a male manager suggested that women in bikinis holding books be posted on the company Instagram. (Lyons says that this was brought up as an example of something another publisher or author did. “This was not—and never would be—discussed as a Skyhorse marketing strategy.”) A former employee describes another manager, who is still employed by Skyhorse, talking about junior female staffers with whom he had had sexual relationships. (“To my knowledge there is no basis whatsoever to this claim,” writes Lyons via email. “No one made such a claim to HR.” )

Lyons says that the perception of a male-dominated management team is a problem of optics. “Of the five most senior people beneath me,” he says, “three of them are female and two are male.” But of those three women, two work permanently from their homes in Connecticut and Vermont. Lyons says that in recent years a formal career mentoring program has been implemented in which senior female employees are paired with entry-level staff.

In June 2017, two Asian American employees reported to management that Skyhorse author Oliver Stone made racist and sexual remarks to them at a party Lyons hosted at his own Upper West Side apartment. (In October of that year, Playboy model Carrie Stevens accused Stone of groping her at a party when she was 22, and Patricia Arquette described an uncomfortable professional encounter.) The two employees, both publicists, had been assigned to work with Stone before and during the party as he signed materials for his book, The Putin Interviews. In a recording of a meeting among the two employees, Lyons, and Skyhorse controller Ann Choi on the Monday following the party, the employees, audibly emotional, describe Stone repeatedly calling one of them “Wing” (not her name), joking that one of the women had a nighttime job as a prostitute, making other references to Asian women and prostitution, suggesting that one of the publicists give him a massage, and specifically requesting that an “Asian girl” help him out. When contacted by Vanity Fair both publicists stood by these characterizations of the event.

“He was saying a lot of awful things that made me really uncomfortable,” one of the women told Vanity Fair. “I didn’t tell him to stop because I was young at that time; it was still my first job.” Other party attendees have corroborated the accounts. Stone’s assigned Skyhorse publicist, Madeleine Ball, who was present at the signing table, says, “He was talking about ‘factory hands,’” and remembers Stone suggesting that one of the women give him a massage. Another party attendee says Stone made a “really grossly sexual innuendo” about Asian women and white men.

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[1] Url: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/09/skyhorse-publishings-house-of-horrors

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