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Is "Based" Publishing Harmful?
With Rebekah Edwards & Seth Cordle
We ask whether building books for an underserved audience means we're excluding everyone else — a question a drive-through conversation somehow turned into an existential crisis. We get into politics as religion, boycotts, age-appropriate books, and why "I don't want to read that" gets treated as a character flaw. Then: why we don't call Lion a Christian publisher, and why we want good stories from across the spectrum rather than another bubble.
Show notes
- The drive-through conversation that started an existential publishing crisis
- Why we’re creating books for an audience that feels left behind
- Free speech, political litmus tests, and “books are inherently political”
- Representation, disagreement, and whether not celebrating something equals hate
- What actually belongs in children’s and school libraries?
- Why smut gets less pushback than saying we don’t want LGBT themes
- The “little old lady test” and our problem with Christian fiction
- Why Christian movies have a storytelling problem
- Bringing back heroes who can face a broken world without becoming part of it
- Why we aren’t Christian publishing—even though our faith is inseparable from our mission