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Notes -
I’ve sometimes heard that the left wing takeover of corporate America is a hollow one - they don’t REALLY cars about minorities, just look at umm their Middle East twitter accounts! They care about $$$ and aren’t true believers
I found an interesting counter point recently.
https://upstreamreviews.substack.com/p/high-republic-low-sales
This is what a corporation that has no idea what their audience is about, but does in fact know clearly what it’s ideology is about.
I’ll summarize the link but you really should read it for yourself, it’s astounding how bad Disney gets the Star Wars franchise: for instance, the books need to be (in addition to all the old touchstones of diversity etc) ANTI WAR. And then there’s the characters, who are somehow all androgynous.
The sales figures reflect an enormous lack of interest of enthusiasm. But it doesn’t matter for Disney - they get to spread the Good Word of gender ideology and anti fascism/anti traditionalism.
If it weren't for the alleged billion dollar marketing campaign those would be decent sales for these books. Like, what figures were they expecting? The average traditionally published book gets in the low thousands of sales (and the median, worse). All the books listed here range from very good sales to mediocre but still acceptable sales. We can't tell the exact deals offered, but at a fairly typical 10% royalty per book, Daniel José Older would have gotten $39k from Midnight Horizon, and at the rate he writes he'll be making a fairly decent income from this. (I don't know the exact details of what sort of contract you'd get for this work, however. I imagine writing books for an established franchise like this will involve more payment up front, less royalties.)
I guess you missed the part where the previous expanded universe series sold TENS OF MILLIONS of copies.
And no, selling a few thousand books isn’t “very good”. Like, cmon.
“Alleged”. This isn’t a law court, this is just a fact.
If it’s a fact, perhaps you can prove it, then?
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