In August, boxes filled with copies of a novel about a sex worker who assassinates a right wing politician arrived at the midtown Manhattan offices of the publisher Simon & Schuster. The books were galleys — paperbacks printed before final publication and sent to booksellers, influencers and the media to drum up interest. On each cover, in boldface capital lettering, were the words, “SOMEBODY HAD TO DO IT.”
A few weeks later, the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated.
Margo Shickmanter, an executive editor at the Simon & Schuster imprint Avid Reader Press, was out of the office when she heard that Kirk had been shot. Shaken, she texted the book’s publishing team and told them everything had to stop. No posting on social media. No galley mailings. She didn’t want anyone to think the novel was some kind of comment on Kirk’s death.
The novel, “Murder Bimbo,” by Rebecca Novack, is a satire. It skewers all its characters, not just those on one political side, and they aren’t modeled on real-life figures. And works of fiction often address some of the uglier aspects of their eras.
But publishing and marketing such titles is complicated and sensitive work for publishers as they navigate stark cultural and political divisions and varying audience appetites for challenging books. Against the backdrop of the Kirk assassination, the Avid Reader team asked itself how timely even the most media savvy publisher wants a novel to be.
“I did not immediately make the connection to my book,” Novack said in an interview. “But people in my life immediately made the connection to my book, and I got a number of ‘just checking in’ calls that made me think something else had happened. Like, is a relative OK? Then as soon as they said it to me, I thought, ‘Oh.’”
In each of the three sections of “Murder Bimbo,” the book’s 32-year-old title character tells a very different version of the same story. In the first act, readers quickly learn that the pseudonymous Murder Bimbo has killed a politician she calls “Meat Neck.” She tells her story to a podcast host, casting herself as a folk hero in an effort to save her own life.
In the second section, Murder Bimbo tells another story to her ex-girlfriend, with a very different set of “facts” and motivations. In the third, she tells something apparently closer to the truth.
Novack said she wrote the book to explore the stories we tell about ourselves, and how sometimes “you maybe need to lie in order to get the truth across.” She also wanted to show how those stories reflect, and affect, the United States today.
“There is so much ambient violence curdling under the skin of America,” Novack said. “What’s going to happen to all this bubbling violence — and is this purely American?”
Novack, 41, grew up in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, the eldest of three siblings. After graduating from college, she spent about four years working toward priesthood in the Episcopal Church before the bishop in charge of her progression told her to attend a divinity school graduate program, which would have cost at least $150,000.
“I believe you can be called to poverty,” Novack said. “But I don’t believe you can be called to debt.”
Novack walked away from priesthood and spent years working in academic and technical publishing. On the side, she wrote novels, five of which she shelved. The sixth was “Murder Bimbo,” which she started writing during the Biden administration, years before the assassination attempt on President Trump in July 2024..
“American culture is pretty reliably, pretty consistently violent,” Shickmanter said. “You can, very unfortunately, rely on these things to keep happening.”
Still, while editing the book, Shickmanter had never imagined sending out advance copies amid a major news event. But she knew her publishing history. Satires had made the wrong kind of splash before.
In 1990, Simon & Schuster canceled its plans to publish “American Psycho” following public outcry over its portrayal of a serial killer on Wall Street. It cost the publisher the $300,000 it paid the novel’s author, Bret Easton Ellis, who put the book out with another publisher, Vintage Books, just months later.
“Murder Bimbo” also had significant interest from the publishing industry. Avid Reader pre-empted the book during an eight-way auction for what Novack’s literary agent, Claudia Ballard, said was a six-figure sum.
While the team looked into what it would cost to print new galleys and combed through every post and email it had ever sent about the book, Kirk’s death made more headlines. Jimmy Kimmel delivered a divisive monologue on his late-night show that provoked backlash from conservative media, Elon Musk and the chairman of the F.C.C., resulting in a temporary suspension from ABC.
The day Kimmel returned to air, as debates continued over what the situation meant for free expression, the “Murder Bimbo” team convened on Zoom to decide what to do next. They had already mailed about 800 galleys to booksellers. Should they pulp the remaining ones and reprint them with new covers before sending them to influencers and the media? Should they put giant stickers over the existing covers? Should they stick with the original plan?
“It would be bad publishing not to take it into account and strategize around it, considering how intensely it was shaping the media conversation,” Shickmanter said.
The main move the publisher made was to conceal Novack’s personal information. The author’s biography, which was listed on the publisher’s website and planned for the finished book jacket, included the name of the town where she lived with her family. Though Avid Reader hadn’t received any threats against Novack, Shickmanter wanted that information gone, just in case.
“We wanted to do what we could to protect her from, of course, any physical threat,” she said. “But what felt even more likely was something like doxxing, or causing damage to a writer’s reputation at the beginning of her career.”
Otherwise, Shickmanter said, the team decided to roll out the galleys as planned, cover and all.
“We have a comedic piece of work that speaks truth to power, that speaks to the ongoing political situation, and that isn’t about Charlie Kirk,” she said.
The circumstances surrounding “Murder Bimbo” were particularly extreme. But any publisher putting out a book in the current news environment faces significant marketing and publicity challenges.
“Choosing the right moment to publish any book right now is a really hard endeavor, because the news keeps changing,” Ballard said. “I don’t know when the chaos of the moment ends.”
Elizabeth A. Harris covers books and the publishing industry, reporting on industry news and examining the broader cultural impact of books. She is also an author.
The post The Book Jackets Were Ready. Then Charlie Kirk Was Shot. appeared first on New York Times.
