Quiet Erasures: How Publishing Makes Its Problems Disappear
- David Salariya
- 1 day ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 59 minutes ago
From David Walliams to The Salt Path, Kate Clanchy - and the moments when publishing suddenly acts fast
When a phrase like “after careful consideration” is deployed, readers are meant to hear thoughtfulness, balance, and moral gravity. What they are usually hearing instead is the soft click of a filing cabinet closing.
Here we have the gap between what publishing says it is doing - and what, with remarkable consistency, it actually does. It is not about guilt or innocence. It is about vanishing acts. About how people, problems, and explanations are quietly removed from view, while institutions glide forward, freshly laundered.
Read on, not for scandal, but for pattern.
A revealing week in publishing - and a familiar pattern
This week has felt oddly instructive in British publishing - not because of what has been said, but because of how little has been explained.
Within days, several long-circulating issues resurfaced or crystallised:
The Telegraph’s investigation into David Walliams and allegations of inappropriate behaviour towards junior women at HarperCollins
The Observer’s renewed scrutiny of The Salt Path, following claims about Raynor Winn’s past, which she denies
The continuing reverberations of the Kate Clanchy affair, now re-examined in the podcast Anatomy of a Cancellation
Different people. Different books. Different alleged harms.
Yet the institutional response across these cases feels strikingly consistent: careful distance, procedural language, and an eagerness to “move on”.
This is not cancellation culture.It is something quieter, colder, and far more embedded: erasure culture.
What is a “quiet erasure”?
Quiet erasure is not public accountability.
It is what happens when publishing resolves discomfort without explanation, removes risk without narrative, and protects institutions without memory.
It typically involves:
Internal investigations with no published findings
NDAs and confidential settlements
Neutral, legally cautious press statements
Authors or staff quietly sidelined
Books continuing - or disappearing - without context
No shared learning, no visible structural change
The problem doesn’t explode. It simply fades.
David Walliams - erasure by delay
The most revealing aspect of the Walliams story is not the allegation itself, but the gap between knowledge and action.
According to The Telegraph:
A junior employee raised concerns in 2023
HarperCollins conducted an internal investigation
The investigation concluded in 2024
Staff were advised to work in pairs and avoid visiting the author’s home
A junior woman received a five-figure settlement and left the company
And yet:
Walliams continued to publish
Continued to tour
Continued to be marketed
Continued to generate revenue
Only now - following a leadership change and a steep decline in sales - has the publisher decided not to publish further titles.
Since accurate records began, Walliams has become one of the most successful authors, selling 25.7 million books through NielsenIQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market for £153.3 million since he began publishing with HarperCollins in 2008. In the BookScan era, only three other authors - JK Rowling, Julia Donaldson, and Jamie Oliver - have generated more revenue for British booksellers.
What is missing is explanation:
Why did the author continue to be promoted?
Why did the junior staff member leave rather than the situation being resolved structurally?
Why were the investigation’s conclusions not put to the author?
Why did time, rather than principle, determine the outcome?
This is not transparency. It is containment followed by erasure.
The Salt Path - erasure through ambiguity
The renewed scrutiny of The Salt Path operates differently, but the pattern is familiar.
Here, the discomfort lies not in workplace behaviour but in truth, memoir, and narrative authority - a genre publishing has enthusiastically monetised while quietly avoiding its ethical limits.
Raynor Winn denies the allegations made about her past. The books remain in print. The industry response has been cautious, procedural, and restrained.
What’s notable is not the presence of doubt - but the absence of dialogue.
Publishing has long sold memoir as emotional authenticity while knowing that:
Memory is selective
Narrative is shaped
Trauma is curated for readers
Truth is often negotiated rather than absolute
When those tensions surface, silence is allowed to do the work.
This is another form of quiet erasure — not of a person, but of critical scrutiny itself.
Kate Clanchy - erasure by reputational fog
The Kate Clanchy affair, revisited in the podcast Anatomy of a Cancellation, offers perhaps the clearest example of erasure masquerading as resolution.
There was:
No legal finding
No formal disciplinary process
No agreed definition of harm
No institutional explanation
Instead, there was:
A rapid withdrawal of professional support
A collapse of public confidence
Prize culture retreating into silence
A narrative vacuum filled by implication rather than fact
Clanchy was neither clearly defended nor formally condemned.
She was left in reputational limbo - a state in which the work becomes suspect, the author becomes untouchable, and institutions decline to speak.
This is not accountability.It is abandonment without explanation.
A revealing contrast: when publishing acts fast
At this point, a counter-example becomes impossible to ignore.
When Charlie Redmayne departed HarperCollins, the response was swift and decisive. Senior leadership intervened directly, with the head of the company flying in from New York. There was no prolonged ambiguity, no years of managed distance, no reputational fog.
Action was taken quickly and visibly.
This matters, because it exposes a central myth: that publishing is slow to act because it is cautious, careful, or procedurally constrained.
It is not.
Publishing can move at speed when it perceives risk as immediate, central, and reputationally acute — particularly when that risk sits at the top of the organisation rather than below it.
Delay elsewhere, then, is not necessity.It is choice.
One pattern, different speeds
Taken together, these cases reveal three distinct modes of erasure — and one revealing exception:
Case | Institutional Response |
David Walliams | Delay, containment, procedural exit |
The Salt Path | Ambiguity, silence, narrative withdrawal |
Kate Clanchy | Reputational fog, institutional retreat |
Charlie Redmayne | Swift senior intervention, visible action |
The difference is not morality.It is where power and risk are perceived to sit.
The hollow language of virtue
Across all these cases, the same phrases recur:
“After careful consideration…”
“We take wellbeing seriously…”
“We do not comment on internal matters…”
“The author is aware of the decision…”
These are not explanations.They are narrative dead ends, designed to close discussion rather than illuminate it.
Privacy becomes a shield. Process becomes a substitute for ethics.Silence becomes policy.
A revealing contrast: when publishing acts fast
There is, however, an instructive counterexample - one that exposes the myth that publishing is always cautious, slow, or procedurally bound.
When Charlie Redmayne departed HarperCollins, the response was swift and decisive. Senior leadership intervened directly, with the head of the company flying in from New York. There was no prolonged period of ambiguity, no reputational fog, no years of managed distance. Action was taken quickly and visibly.
The contrast is telling. It demonstrates that publishing can move at speed when it perceives risk as immediate, central, and reputationally acute. Delay elsewhere, then, is not structural necessity - it is a strategic choice.
Quiet erasure is not about incapacity.It is about where power sits, and who is considered expendable while time does its work.
https://www.thebookseller.com/news/harpercollins-ceo-charlie-redmayne-resigns-as-kate-elton-steps-up
One thing struck me in the Chloe Hadjimatheou's Observer’s recent discussion about memoir and truth: the reminder that when you change the truth in someone else’s story, you take responsibility for the consequences. That line stayed with me because it names something publishing rarely acknowledges. Institutions are very comfortable changing narratives - about books, authors, origins - without explaining why. But those changes are not abstract. They land on real people, real careers, real lives. Silence does not make that ethical. It merely makes it convenient.
Who disappears - and who doesn’t
In quiet erasures, consequences fall unevenly.
They tend to land on:
Junior staff
Freelancers
Authors without institutional power
Readers seeking clarity
Institutions remain intact.Leadership rotates.Catalogues move on.
The lesson absorbed by the industry is a dangerous one:
Speak up, and you may vanish. Stay silent, and the system survives.
Why publishing prefers erasure to reckoning
Reckoning would require:
Admitting delay
Naming power imbalances
Publishing findings
Accepting precedent
Changing behaviour
Erasure requires only:
Time
NDAs
Carefully worded statements
That is why it keeps happening.
What’s lost when publishing “moves on”
When publishing erases instead of explaining, it loses:
Trust
Moral authority
Institutional memory
Safety for staff
Confidence from readers
Most damaging of all, it loses the ability to tell the truth about its own culture.
A final thought
Castaway Truths
From Robinson Crusoe to The Salt Path
In 1719, a man was shipwrecked, alone, penniless, and entirely self-reliant.
In 2018, a couple lost their home, their money, and their future - and walked the coastline to survive.
Both stories were sold as true. Only one of them ever needed to be.
The First Bestseller Lie
When Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, he didn’t call it a novel. That word still had a whiff of lies.
Instead, he presented the book as a memoir. A factual account. A survivor’s testimony.
The title alone was doing heavy lifting:
Written by Himself.
Readers believed Crusoe was real - or half-believed, which was enough. This was an age when pamphlets, sermons, trial transcripts and adventure narratives blurred together. Truth was not a legal category; it was a moral one.
Crusoe’s story mattered because it worked.
Truth Didn’t Used to Be Fragile
Eighteenth-century readers were not naïve. They knew authors embroidered. They knew stories travelled faster than facts. What they wanted was reassurance.
Crusoe reassured them that:
the world could be mastered
effort would be rewarded
chaos could be organised
God noticed industrious men
It was a survival story for an expanding world, a handbook for people who believed the future was theirs to shape.
Truth, in Defoe’s time, meant usefulness.
Fast Forward: The Path Instead of the Fort
Nearly 300 years later, The Salt Path arrived quietly and then spread everywhere.
Two people. No money. Illness. Homelessness. A long walk.
No building. No conquering. No island claimed.
Just endurance.
This was not a manual for mastery. It was a votive offering, proof that survival itself could be meaningful.
Readers didn’t read The Salt Path to learn how to dominate the land. They read it to learn how to keep going when the systems fail.
And crucially, they read it because it was sold as being true.
Or at least, because they believed it was.
Why Modern Readers Care So Much
When questions were raised about the book’s accuracy, the reaction was fierce. Hurt.
Personal.
That tells us something important.
Modern nonfiction does not trade on instruction.It trades on trust.
Today’s reader is not asking:
“Does this story explain the world?”
They are asking:
“Can I trust this person?”
The author is no longer a distant guide. They are a moral proxy. A witness. Sometimes a confessor.
Which makes truth brittle.
When that trust cracks, readers don’t feel misled - they feel betrayed.
No one ever felt betrayed by Robinson Crusoe.
None of this demands instant judgement or public trials.
But it does demand clarity.
Until the business of publishing learns to explain its own actions - not just curate its public image - it will keep repeating the same story:
Problems contained. People erased. Institutions untouched.
And the silence will continue to speak louder than any statement.
David Salariya
David Salariya is an author, illustrator, and publisher who has spent a career making children’s books that assume intelligence, curiosity, and a tolerance for complexity.
He founded The Salariya Book Company in 1989 and originated globally successful series including You Wouldn’t Want To Be… and A Very Peculiar History, books now read worldwide.
Trained in book design, Salariya believes design is argument, not decoration, and that books are physical objects with moral weight.
He lives in Brighton, draws daily, and remains stubbornly interested in who makes things — and who gets forgotten.