2025 and the return to a GOP president, as well as ongoing efforts to ban books by and about LGBTQ+ people across the country, have created a chilling effect in the publishing industry, according to a new report from The Hill.

Several industry professionals told the outlet that over the past year, more publishers have rejected queer book proposals and manuscripts, while authors have seen a drop in royalties for their queer books. The anti-LGBTQ+ right’s fixation on children’s books has made things particularly difficult in children’s book publishing.

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As The Hill notes, PEN America tracked over 10,000 book bans across the country at the height of the book-banning craze — which has targeted books by Black authors along with LGBTQ+ titles — during the 2023–2024 school year. During the 2024–2025 school year, the group identified nearly 7,000 bans across 87 school districts in the U.S.

Some authors of banned books have reported spikes in sales in recent years, and at least one bookseller told The Hill that sales of queer novels remain steady.

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But that may not be enough to reassure publishers of children’s and young adult titles. Young adult novelist and LGBTQ Reads creator Dahlia Adler noted that publishers are more likely to invest in books that will not get banned, while Irene Vázquez, an associate editor at independent publisher Levine Querido, explained that children’s and young adult publishers rely on wholesalers that sell books to schools and libraries for the majority of their sales. Those wholesalers, she said, have become “more hesitant” to purchase LGBTQ+ books.

Darius the Great is Not Okay author Adib Khorram blamed book bans for a recent 70 percent drop in his royalty checks, and said he and other queer authors have turned to writing adult fiction because of the fraught climate around LGBTQ+ children’s and YA books. While Khorram said he intends to keep writing queer books for young readers, the current political climate “has certainly led to more anxiety about how I will pay my bills.”

“This is the first year in like a decade that I’ve had [rejection] responses from editors specifically citing that it’s difficult to place queer books in stores, and they’re being selective about acquiring queer stories,” author and literary agent Rebecca Podos told The Hill.

Similarly, Jim McCarthy, vice president at literary agency Dystel, Goderich & Bourret, said that one editor who passed on a project specifically told him “that in the face of so many book bans and so much concern about decreasing school library sales of queer content that they were passing.”

“This really feels like it’s been the first backwards step in terms of publishing, worrying that they can’t access enough readers because of sort of broad cultural concerns about queer content,” McCarthy said. “I can’t imagine that five or 10 years ago, I would have received a response like the one I received.”

Adler told The Hill she’s noticed fewer new queer novel announcements in Publishers Weekly and an increase in coded language when it comes to descriptions of Young Adult novels in particular.

“I think that language is kind of being more intentionally left out to keep it from being a target,” she said.

“I feel like that’s kind of my biggest takeaway of this round” of the current administration, she continued. “[Publishers] are not necessarily not buying [LGBTQ+ books], but they’re not necessarily being loud about the fact that they did buy them, and they’re letting people find out they’re queer in other ways.”

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