Former Wargate Books Author Ryan Williamson Lost His Publisher And Following Over Trump Derangement, And Now He's Throwing In The Towel

Former Wargate books military science fiction author Ryan Williamson has announced that after fighting with most of his audience on X, he’s throwing in the towel and flouncing for BlueSky.

Wargate Books is a company founded and co-owned by Nick Cole and Jason Anspach, who parlayed their success from their Galaxy’s Edge military science fiction series into a full-blown publishing company. They came to prominence with their action-packed fiction and by boldly hosting right-wing personalities in the field of science fiction, like Cole himself, as well as Blaine Pardoe and Mike Baron, among others.

While Jason Anspach is a hard leftist, he’s done a good job of keeping his politics private and not agitating his audience in the process. However, as the company grew and he needed more authors, he naturally gravitated toward hiring another, Ryan Williamson.

(UPDATE: A Wargate employee tells me Anspach is not hard left, though this article was based on recollections from the 2016 election. The intention was to show Wargate does not blacklist people over politics and not cast aspersions. If he’s updated or changed his politics we are unaware of it.)

Much like Baen Books and several other outfits, Wargate Books has expanded its output and revenue by having other authors “co-write” for them, which generally means the big-name author provides a loose concept or outline and has the other contributor do the heavy lifting of drafting. This yields more revenue, as an author can output more of their ideas under their name and not be limited by the amount of time in the day.

Many companies and enterprises have been very successful with this, though the co-written works tend to sell slightly less than when an author wrote the book themselves. Such was the case with Anspach and Williamson when they released Doomsday Recon in early 2024.

Doomsaday Recon is a military fantasy and fits well within Wargate’s arsenal. By all accounts, Williamson is a competent writer who did a good job.

However, a lot when it comes to book selling happens in the realm of branding. With a military sci-fi readership, most of the readership involved are right-wing, middle-aged men.

Ryan Williamson mostly kept his Trump derangement in check while Doomsday Recon was coming out, but as 2025 went along, after the trilogy was released, he began to get more and more agitated toward his audience with his postings.

Naturally, as most of his readers voted for Trump, they took exception to this. He lashed out passive-aggressively at the readers rather than stopping the incessant political ranting, tarnishing the brand.

When this occurred, Wargate Books decided to stop publishing Williamson’s work because he was tarnishing their brand with his behavior.

Undaunted, he continued on with anti-Trump posting, getting more and more aggressive ad unhinged on X as he tried to get attention with it. Apparently, the book audience from WarGate didn’t come over and check out much of his other work and were not being loyal to him after his being axed from the publisher.

Now, he’s announced that Substack and X are not getting him the discoverability he desired and he’s dropping both platforms because it’s not selling him books. Like usual with leftists in entertainment, he hasn’t looked at the fact that his constant anti-Trump ranting turns off the target demographic he wants to buy his books.

He posted, “Substack’s discoverability has effectively collapsed. There’s no meaningful algorithmic discovery, the feed is stagnant, and the platform is functionally unusable for reaching new readers. I’m not going to waste my time maintaining a silo that serves no one.”

So, where will Williamson be going in hopes of selling his military sci-fi and fantasy books? Bluesky, for what he says is “daily presence, witty banter, updates, water cooler stuff.”

Though, hoddly, he doesn’t seem to be getting much engagement either.

The lesson is never agitate your audience, and don’t politically countersignal people because people do take it personally and don’t want to deal with a lecture from someone on how they voted when they’re looking to read fun sci-fi and fantasy books.

It’s the same lesson the industry learned as they’ve collapsed in recent years. But will they ever learn?

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