A Field Guide to Increasing Book Sales by 300%

If you had asked me one year ago to comment on the importance of Sarah Wynn Williams’s memoir, Careless People, to the genre, I wouldn’t have had all that much to say. It’s an exposé of Facebook. Facebook (now Meta) has proven itself to be a pretty shitty company. Mark Zuckerberg makes an ass of himself every time he posts or speaks or launches a new initiative or compromises his integrity.

Last fall, Roxane Gay was a guest on the Memoir Nation podcast, and she casually mentioned that Careless People was one of her favorite books of 2025 (she wrote about it on her Substack in March 2025). That got my attention enough to download the audiobook. I listened to about three chapters before not exactly losing interest, but more feeling like, I’m sick of these people already. And I didn’t finish the book.

Well, damn if I didn’t go and revisit it after Sarah Wynn-Williams made headlines last month at the Hay Festival in Wales, when she sat silent on stage—not only not speaking, but not nodding or shaking her head, not reacting at all—for a full hourlong discussion that was meant to feature her and Tim Wu in conversation with moderator Carole Cadwalladr on “The Power of Tech.”

Why didn’t she speak? On the advice of her lawyers, after Meta warned (threatened) that her appearance on the panel would violate the arbitration award it had obtained against her (barring her from promoting the book) when the memoir was first published in March of last year.

Ah, the hubris of Zuckerberg and Co. I’m a person who follows memoir closely, who bought this memoir and didn’t finish it, who has loosely been aware of this memoir for over a year and still, it hadn’t penetrated. After all, there are a lot of books to read and who need more confirmation of how awful Big Tech is?

After the Hay Festival silent protest, I and thousands of others read the book. The action spiked sales by over 300%. I finished the audio version, read by Wynn-Williams. It’s true that it’s mostly a confirmation of what I already knew, but it’s one thing to watch all these stories zip past your feeds, and it’s another to absorb the entirety of their recklessness in a book.

Facebook’s “carelessness” includes:
• facilitating Chinese censorship of its own people;
• 2016 election interference;
• destabilizing Myanmar and fueling violence that killed roughly 10,000 people, and included brutal gang rapes that will make your stomach turn;
• harming teens by directly feeding them targeted ads that prey on them when they’re at their lowest moments.

This is a short list of the most troubling indictments, for their brutal and in some cases deadly impact on other human beings.

Some of the specifically less consequential but infuriating stories include how:
• Leadership on Facebook falsely inflate their own numbers on the platform, which explains why Zuckerberg has 121 million followers on Facebook and why I have to see posts from him when I don’t follow him;
• Sheryl Sandberg’s sexual impropriety with her female subordinates, including demanding that Wynn-Williams “come to bed” with her on their private plane when Wynn-Williams was seven months pregnant;
• Zuckerberg asking Chinese President Xi Jinping for the honor of naming his unborn child (Xi declined);
• Zuckerberg mounting his own presidential campaign (obviously realizing at some point this would never fly).

One anecdote that turned out to be pretty prescient is when Wynn-Williams shares that Zuckerberg does an annual “personal challenge.” His 2016 personal challenge was to make an AI assistant for his home. He’s brainstorming how he’ll do a video of it and post it on Facebook. There will be a video from his perspective, and then it’s suggested, from his wife Priscilla’s perspective.

Zuckerberg thinks is this funny and says: “Maybe Priscilla would learn that the AI only listens to my voice. Like she’s trying to command it in different places and it just ignores her.”

I have thoughts on “Priscilla not having her voice heard” in her own home but I know enough about expectations of women at Facebook to keep silent. Mark thinks it’s hilarious.

On June 25, Sarah Wynn-Williams sued Meta for “coercive surveillance” for their tactics, which have involved flying staff to wherever she’s going to be to make sure she doesn’t promote or publicize her book.

Maybe you’re a person who agrees with the premise that Wynn-Williams signed an NDA so she shouldn’t have published this memoir in the first place. A well-known fact of NDAs, however, is that they’re always the result of massive power imbalances. Wynn-Williams argues that she felt pressure to sign the NDA because of how much money was on the line—for her, a $780,000 severance package. She says she was fired in retaliation for reporting her boss Joel Kaplan’s sexual harassment; Meta says she was fired for poor performance and toxic behavior. Either way, $780,000 is a lot of money, but also a paltry amount to buy a woman’s silence.

I’m not a reporter, but I do believe in presenting things as fair and balanced, so I’ll note that I read a critique of Wynn-Williams’s memoir/defense of Facebook by Katie Harbath here on Substack. The main points she takes issue with are timeline-focused, and things she herself didn’t witness. Joel Kaplan was one of the best bosses she ever had, she writes. The most interesting part of her post is the comment from Ryan Heath, Launch Editor of POLITICO Australia and formerly of Axios, who has some pretty damning personal anecdotes about Sandberg, and writes about her actions:

. . . with great power comes great responsibility. It’s not easy, and it’s not supposed to be. And you don’t get credit because you took on a hard job that made you a billionaire and you found it was, in fact, really f*ing hard. You get credit for being responsible, for learning from mistakes and slowing down, and breaking as few things as possible. Which is not really the way careless people operate, and not the track record - overall - of Facebook.

A few weeks before this Hay Festival situation put Careless People back on the best-seller list, Sarah Wynn Williams received a Freedom to Publish prize at the British book awards, alongside Virginia Giuffre, Epstein’s most famous victim who died by suicide in April 2025, one month after Careless People came out and several months before her own book, Nobody’s Girl, was released posthumously.

In receiving the award, in which she was not allowed to speak about her own book, Wynn-Williams focused on Giuffre. Her 7-minute speech is worth watching. She homes in on two points: the power of a book and what the efforts to silence someone say about guilt and complicity. Here are two excerpts:

We live in an age where web pages disappear, where a single politically aligned billionaire can spike a news story or delete a viral video. But once a book miraculously makes it out into the world — onto a shelf, into a library, into a home — it cannot be disappeared. With analogue tenacity a book endures.

But here’s a strange thing. When you try that hard to silence a woman who is telling the truth, you announce to the whole world that the truth must be very dangerous indeed.

The most tragic thing about Facebook is what it could have been under different leadership. Mark Zuckerberg truly did create something amazing. But growth and money were always the goal, never community and connection, and he seems incapable of reckoning with the human cost of what he’s done. The title of Careless People comes from The Great Gatsby—and Nick Carraway’s judgment that Tom and Daisy move through the world breaking things, relationships, promises, other people’s lives, and then retreat into the insulation their wealth provides, letting others absorb the wreckage.

Watching this story unfold, another classic novel pops to mind: The Scarlett Letter. For those who haven’t read it in a while, Hester Prynne is publicly punished for refusing to be silent about a truth the community would rather not confront, and how she’s treated is meant to land as a warning to everyone else to keep quiet. This backfires in the end, which is why this book is such a feminist anthem. Hester could leave the town, but instead she stays, continuing to wear the scarlet “A,” which eventually becomes a symbol of dignity rather than shame.

In memoir, authors are the protagonists of their own stories, and Sarah Wynn-Williams is my new favorite heroine.

Further Reading and Watching:

All Things Memoir: Why You Have to Read Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Careless People

The Atlantic’s Careless People Won

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/careless-people-won/682145

Wired’s Meta’s Pursuit of the Careless People Author Is Relentless and Self-Defeating

https://www.wired.com/story/metas-pursuit-of-the-careless-people-author-is-relentless-and-self-defeating/

The Guardian’s extensive coverage of this story:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/may/11/sarah-wynn-williams-and-virginia-giuffre-jointly-win-freedom-to-publish-prize-at-british-book-awards

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/31/meta-legal-action-forces-facebook-whistleblower-to-stay-silent-at-hay-festival

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/09/meta-threats-sarah-wynn-williams-stronger-rights-whistleblowers