At this point, the publisher presumably hopes, everyone can move on, without the shadow of author boycotts or review boycotts or even large-scale protests against not just Threshold Editions, the conservative imprint that purchased Dangerous, but Simon & Schuster itself. It’s hard, however, to imagine the controversy going away altogether. Yiannopoulos’s book, which reached the #1 spot on Amazon while available for presale, seemed a transparently cynical moneymaking effort that appeared to be paying off—at substantial cost to the publisher’s brand. Now, Simon & Schuster has no bestseller, while its asserted reasons for publishing Yiannopoulos in the first place have been substantially undermined. As the author Roxane Gay wrote on Tumblr, “My protest stands. Simon & Schuster should have never enabled Milo in the first place.”

Dangerous, announced in December by Threshold Editions—which has previously published books by Donald Trump, Dick Cheney, Glenn Beck, and Michelle Malkin—provoked a hefty outcry from authors and readers. Gay pulled her upcoming book, How to Be Heard, from the S&S imprint TED Books, while several authors and critics expressed their dismay that the company would reward Yiannopoulos, who was banned from Twitter last summer after igniting a torrent of racist and sexist abuse against the Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones. The furor seemed to take Simon & Schuster by surprise, possibly because many of Threshold’s authors are controversial figures. Rush Limbaugh, for example, once labeled a law student a “prostitute,” while Malkin has referred to President Obama in racially coded language as the “thug-in-chief.”

But Yiannopoulos was different, in part because he himself touted his book deal as “the moment Milo goes mainstream.” Calling feminists “fat dykes,” transgender people “terribly broken,” and Anita Sarkeesian a “cunt” is one thing at Breitbart, a publication known for its far-right views. But it’s another at one of the Big Five publishing houses. Giving a writer who’s called for women to be banned from the internet and the legal hunting of obese Americans for sport a larger platform under the guise of free speech struck many commentators as ill-conceived. “In identifying Yiannopoulos as a possible future of conservative thought, Threshold Editions is caught in a cycle,” wrote Constance Grady at Vox. “Because by giving him a book deal, they’re ... looking at a figure who is reviled in some corners of the culture and adored in others—a kind of threshold figure—and they are saying that they consider him to be legitimate. They are not just describing; they are prescribing.”

At the height of the controversy, Simon & Schuster’s CEO, Carolyn Reidy, issued a statement to authors assuring them that Yiannopoulos’s book would contain no hate speech. “I must reiterate that neither Threshold Editions nor any other of our imprints will publish books that we think will incite hatred, discrimination, or bullying,” she wrote. But she also framed the decision to publish Dangerous as a free-speech issue, stating that when Threshold met with Yiannopoulos, he expressed interest “in writing a book that would be a substantive examination of the issues of political correctness and free speech, issues that are already much-discussed and argued and fought over in both mainstream and alternative media and on campuses and in schools across the country.” In other words, to decry his platform is to suppress his right to be heard.