In 2021 I began to follow an account that became more essential to me on Instagram than even The Pugdashians (it’s exactly what it sounds like; the outfits are wild). Xoxopublishinggg is a publishing gossip site with a name that references Gossip Girl, and it does a lot of silly memes (my favorite is “having a passion for books” vs. “working in publishing”) and provides an outlet for people who work in publishing to vent and laugh at some very inside jokes.
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In a 2022 interview with the New York Observer, a member of the anonymous collective behind xoxopublishinggg describes the site‘s mission: “We want people to laugh, let out some steam, find community, and know that they’re not screaming, crying, throwing up into the void alone. We can all scream and meme together.”
But xoxopublishinggg also does something more vital: what started as a clever meme account became so much bigger when it began to solicit stories from its readers. It then became a place where rumors of layoffs could be addressed, where information about salaries and negotiating could be shared, where solidarity could be expressed during the HarperCollins Union strike in 2022, and where allegations of malfeasance could be reported and shared.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of those xoxopublishinggg stories since a British media company put out a podcast about beloved author Neil Gaiman and the multiple sexual assault allegations against him, including one from a woman who has violated her non-disclosure agreement to the tune of $275,000 in order to tell her story. These are explosive charges from a news source that isn’t entirely well known and is explicitly interested in marketing an entertainment property, so perhaps it’s not entirely surprising that American media, particularly publishing media, has been slow to pick up the story.
There are few spaces where people with very little power in book publishing can talk somewhat freely about the problems they face.
It wasn’t until I saw Instagram stories from the community on xoxopublishinggg that it all clicked for me: multiple users affirmed that young women in publishing have been warning each other about Gaiman for a while. The whisper network around Gaiman appears to have been robust, yet this was the first time I learned it existed. (I screenshotted only one of those stories for my own personal records, and I will not share it here. Instagram stories are made to disappear after a day, and I respect the ephemerality of those stories.)
I do not want to report any of the allegations I saw on the account as fact. I’m just happy to note they exist. There are few spaces where people with very little power in book publishing can talk somewhat freely about the problems they face. In a post-MeToo world where it seems that very little has changed and corporate HR has not been known to be particularly helpful, it’s comforting to know that there is an outlet for staffers to air grievances that go beyond that notorious 2018 Shitty Men in Media Google Doc.
All of the caveats about getting information from an anonymous gossip site apply. We can’t qualify any of the user-generated accusations as facts. They are not actionable, they wouldn’t hold up in court, and on (very rare) occasions they may come from an unreliable source that has their own axe to grind. But for all of the post-Shitty Media Men slippery slope arguments that worry about the dangers of making public accusations against poor, defenseless men, we have still not figured out a way to make the book publishing world safer for the women who work in it.
Xoxopublishing is still regularly posting memes. Their bio still leads to a donation page for We Need Diverse Books (in light of recent firings in the book world that feels more dire than ever).
For a moment in 2023 the gossip site announced that it would “be going on hiatus with stories for the indefinite future,” and I understood their hesitancy. The people behind the site work in the industry so everything that the site puts out is a risk. There are jobs at stake. Which is why I’m so grateful that they decided to come back shortly thereafter.
Book publishing industry is rife with inequities. Until the industry can do better as a whole (unionization across publishers would certainly help!), we need sites like xoxopublishinggg and their abilities to share stories. They’re imperfect and messy and we can’t count on them as fact, but they’re still invaluable.
