Less than three months after his #1 Amazon best seller Dangerous was cancelled by Simon & Schuster, free speech advocate Milo Yiannopoulos has announced a bold plan to hasten the demise of the Big Five publishers while building a new platform for authors who never would have made it past the ideological gatekeepers in New York.
Former Breitbart Senior Editor MILO has announced the founding of his new $12 million dollar media company, MILO, Inc.
In a Facebook post, MILO outlined his new business plan and the $12 million investment funding that it has received from undisclosed investors. He has reportedly hired a seasoned media executive to lead the new 30-person team that will be based out of Miami, Florida. The new company will manage MILO‘s books, tours, merchandise and radio and TV opportunities.
In a statement, MILO said, “This isn’t some vanity nameplate on a personal blog. This is a fully tooled-up talent factory and management company dedicated to the destruction of political correctness and the progressive left. I will spend every waking moment of the rest of my life making the lives of journalists, professors, politicians, feminists, Black Lives Matter activists and other professional victims a living hell. Free speech is back — and it is fabulous.”
Further details emerged at the recent Cinco de MILO event in Miami, where Yiannopoulos unveiled his vision for the new media company. MILO Inc. will not only publish Dangerous, which soared to the top of Amazon thanks to pre-orders, only to be pulled before launch; the company will seek out other conservative rabble-rousers who would otherwise have been ignored by the legacy media.
Skip to the 1 hour mark. And turn down the volume. The crowd is enthusiastic, to say the least.
My comment: MILO Inc. is awesome on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to begin. At last, a top selling author has said “screw you” to the censorious New York publishing establishment by founding his own publishing house. Milo’s increased sales and bigger profits will wreak sweet revenge against S&S while destroying the last shreds of their credibility.
Delightful twist of the knife: Milo is also suing S&S for $10 million. Yes, the Big Five publishers’ contracts are fortified with ironclad boilerplate that lets them weasel out of contracts pretty much whenever they want. But unless they can prove that the content of Dangerous was somehow unsatisfactory–a hard line to sell, considering that it was available for, and going like Gangbusters in, pre-order–there’s a chance that S&S could be found in breach of contract.
Even if S&S wins the lawsuit, the time and expense of litigation will compound their losses from the portion of Milo’s advance they already paid and the massive sales they forfeited. There’s also the entertainment value of the court proceedings themselves if Milo testifies.
Best of all in the long run, dissenting authors will have a major outlet for works that would never have passed muster with the PC police. The fact that this wouldn’t have happened if the big NY publishers hadn’t played their usual blacklisting games is icing on the cake.
I wish MILO Inc. all success, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see more high profile authors and media personalities ditching the Big Five for their own publishing initiatives.
Dangerous should be back on the market soon. Until then, you can whet your appetite with Milo’s provocative foreword to the best selling science fiction anthology Forbidden Thoughts, which also includes a well-received short story by yours truly.
