BookCon returned to the Javits Center in New York on April 18-19 after a six-year hiatus. Tickets sold out. Author signing reservations were gone within hours. The attending guest list included Leigh Bardugo, Holly Black, Cassandra Clare, Veronica Roth, R.F. Kuang, Andy Weir, Matt Dinniman, Emily St. John Mandel, and Jodi Picoult. Six years after the convention was retired in 2020, the publishing community had its flagship fan event back.
The boycott had started months earlier.
In February 2026, a group of BookCon authors including Olivie Blake, Alix E. Harrow, TJ Alexander, Casey McQuiston, and Kennedy Ryan published an open letter addressed directly to RELX CEO Erik Engstrom, CFO Nick Luff, and Chair Paul Ashton Walker. The letter read: “We are some of the authors that make events like BookCon — run by your subsidiary, ReedPop — possible. Another of your subsidiaries, LexisNexis, has a $22.1 million contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
In the first seven months of that LexisNexis contract, ICE conducted over 1.2 million searches of databases holding records on an estimated 276 million people in the United States. However, it’s a large gap between ICE and BookCon to draw an association, not that it stops social justice warriors from boycotting.
The open letter stated: “We, as authors, intend to honor our immediate commitments to BookCon and to our readers. If RELX chooses to renew their current contract with ICE — which expires on February 28, 2026 — we will be forced to reevaluate our association with all future ReedPop events.”
RELX renewed the contract. Carmen Maria Machado and Sabaa Tahir subsequently announced they had withdrawn from the event entirely. Bleeding Cool
ReedPop issued a statement stressing it operates independently from LexisNexis and “does not sell customer information” to ICE. ReedPop organizer Brady Rogers told Variety: “We’ve worked really closely with our author guests, and we really support their decision. This is a personal decision that everybody makes, and we’re here for the community and our authors, and it’s our job to support them. At the end of the day, a boycott choice is a personal choice.”
The broader boycott campaign extended beyond BookCon. A petition from Action Boycott asked Lucasfilm to divest from ReedPop ahead of Star Wars Celebration 2027, which ReedPop is contracted to run. That petition gathered over 1,200 signatures. The boycott pressure extended to New York Comic Con, C2E2, Emerald City Comic Con, MagicCon, PAX, MCM Comic Con London, and EGX, every major convention ReedPop organizes.
The chain of corporate relationships at the center of this is worth documenting clearly. ReedPop runs the conventions. ReedPop is owned by RELX. RELX is a British multinational corporation with £9.6 billion in annual revenue. RELX owns LexisNexis. LexisNexis Risk Solutions holds the $22.1 million ICE contract. Neither BookCon nor ReedPop has a direct contract with ICE, handles immigration data, or shares attendee information with any government agency. The activist argument is that attending any ReedPop event generates revenue that flows upstream to RELX, which funds a subsidiary that assists ICE operations.
That argument requires accepting that consumer spending four corporate transactions removed from a government contract constitutes meaningful complicity in that contract. Most people making purchasing decisions do not trace the ownership structure of every venue, publisher, or event organizer they interact with. Applied consistently, this principle would prohibit participation in most consumer commerce, given how extensively multinational corporations are intertwined with government contracts across defense, healthcare, and data services.
The traditional publishing industry built the infrastructure for this kind of political pressure over years. The same authors who organized campaigns against conservative and Christian voices in publishing, who pressured publishers to drop authors for wrong political statements, who created the social dynamics that drove FIYAH magazine’s DEI mandate and the BookCon author open letters — they built a mechanism that does not distinguish between ideological targets. A convention the community spent six years mourning came back and was met with a boycott before the first panel began.
BookCon ran. Thousands of readers attended. The authors who withdrew made their statement. The mechanism the community built responded to a corporate parent’s government contract the same way it responds to everything else it opposes.
What do you think the long-term effect of political boycotts on fan publishing events is? Let us know in the comments.
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