BookCon 2026 Controversy | Should Everyone Boycott? | The Gilt List

BookCon 2026 is having controversy. Honestly, there is something almost poetic about the fact that the biggest controversy in the book world right now has nothing to do with a book. Here is what happened with BookCon, who said what, what the numbers actually say, and why the most common response to this story might be the one that does the most damage to the exact communities people are trying to protect.

Takeaways

• BookCon 2026 runs in April at the Javits Center, New York. It is sold out.
• BookCon is run by ReedPop, which is wholly owned by RELX, a British multinational corporation with £9.6 billion in annual revenue.
• RELX also owns LexisNexis, whose Risk Solutions division holds a 22.1 million USD contract with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
• In the first seven months of that contract, ICE conducted over 1.2 million searches of LexisNexis databases holding records on an estimated 276 million people in the US.
• In February 2026, a group of BookCon authors — including Olivie Blake and Alix E. Harrow — published an open letter calling on RELX to end its ICE contracts.
• ReedPop confirmed that no attendee data goes to ICE and that it operates independently from RELX.
• The book community split…to boycott or attend?

At a Glance | The Corporate Chain of Bookcon

Company	What It Does	Role in This Story
RELX	British multinational, £9.6bn revenue	Ultimate parent company
ReedPop	Global fan convention organiser	Runs BookCon, NYCC, ECCC, C2E2
BookCon	Annual US book fan convention	The event in question
LexisNexis	Legal research and data platform	Also owned by RELX
LexisNexis Risk Solutions	Personal data brokerage and analytics	Holds the ICE contract

If you’re new to The Gilt List and want more deep-dive publishing explainers after this, you might like my piece on the Wolf Boy book deal drama or my breakdown of Freida McFadden’s Nibbies nomination.

How BookCon, ReedPop, RELX, and ICE Are Actually Connected

Most readers encountered this story via a 60-second TikTok in January 2026, which means most readers have a vague sense that BookCon is connected to ICE somehow and almost no idea what that actually means in practice. So let’s break this down…

The summary: RELX owns Reedpop and LexisNexis. LexisNexis gives ICE everyone’s data.

RELX is a British-Dutch information and analytics corporation, listed on both the London and Amsterdam stock exchanges, with annual revenue of roughly £9.6 billion. It operates across four divisions: scientific publishing (Elsevier, one of the most controversial names in academic publishing), risk and data analytics, legal research, and exhibitions and events. That last division is ReedPop. 

ReedPop runs some of the largest fan conventions in the world. New York Comic Con, Emerald City Comic Con, C2E2, Star Wars Celebration, and MCM Comic Con UK. And, since its post-COVID return, BookCon. If you have been to a major book or pop culture event in the last ten years, there is a better than average chance ReedPop ran it; their response to the current controversy is to reassure you that none of your data from those events is being shared with ICE. Where’s the proof they’re telling the truth? Who knows.

LexisNexis is also a RELX company. If you have ever studied law, worked in journalism, or done serious research, you have probably used LexisNexis to access case law or news archives. But that is its public-facing identity. Its Risk Solutions division is a different thing and one to side eye… Essentially, it is a data brokerage operation that aggregates personal records — addresses, social connections, financial data, vehicle registrations, property records, incarceration histories — on hundreds of millions of people. The details of its work with ICE come from law review and human rights analysis.

In February 2021, LexisNexis Risk Solutions signed a 22.1 million USD contract giving ICE access to its databases for “investigative and enforcement purposes.” In the first seven months alone, ICE ran over 1.2 million searches. As the Colorado Law Review bluntly puts it, this level of use confirms fears that the data broker is “enabling the mass surveillance and deportation of immigrants.”

A 2021 article in the NYU Journal of International Law & Politics examined LexisNexis’s human rights responsibilities in the context of the same contract. LexisNexis was also sued in 2022 for alleged violations of Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act in connection with selling personal data to immigration authorities; the complaint is discussed in the same law review scholarship.

RELX’s total revenue from Department of Homeland Security contracts — of which ICE is one agency — has been cited in community discussion as approaching 200 million USD.

These are the numbers. And they don’t look good for Bookcon.

The TikToks, Posts, and Petitions That Made The BookCon Controversy Explode

The LexisNexis–ICE contract is not new. It was signed in 2021, litigated in 2022, and written about in academic journals in 2022 and 2025. What changed in 2026 was the temperature of the broader conversation around immigration enforcement in the United States…for obvious reasons that we can all figure out. 

On 17 January, an Instagram post circulating in the book community flagged the RELX connection for the first time to a mainstream readership. Two weeks later, on January 29th, author Diana Rodriguez Wallach posted a TikTok explicitly naming the chain — ReedPop’s parent company, RELX, LexisNexis, ICE — and directing the book community to the facts. A Change.org petition titled “ICE Out of Our Conventions — Tell ReedPop to Cut Ties with ICE” launched the same week, calling on readers to pressure ReedPop to push RELX toward terminating the LexisNexis contract.

Then came the open letter.

The Open Letter to BookCon

On 8 February 2026, a formal letter was published via Reactor Magazine and distributed across the author social media. It was signed by authors already confirmed as BookCon attendees. Olivie Blake — The Atlas Six, A Strange and Stubborn Endurance, one of the most commercially successful names in speculative fiction right now — was among the signatories. So was Alix E. Harrow — Hugo Award winner, The Once and Future Witches, a writer whose entire body of work is explicitly concerned with the erasure of marginalised voices. Additional signatures were still being added through early March; a partial list has been captured in community threads and by outlets like Reactor.

The letter called for RELX to terminate all contracts with ICE. Not for BookCon to be cancelled, or for a total BookCon 2026 boycott.

That distinction matters, and we will come back to it later.

If you like this kind of long-form unpacking of internet book drama, you may also want to join my mailing list.

ReedPops Response to BookCon 2026 Open Letter

ReedPop responded. Their statement made three points:

• ReedPop operates independently from RELX as a business unit.
• No attendee or customer data from any ReedPop event is shared with DHS, ICE, or any government agency.
• BookCon is committed to creating safe, inclusive spaces for all who attend.

There is no documented evidence that contradicts point two. Your ticket data is not going to a government database. At least, I don’t think so. Don’t hold me to that! However, BookCon ticket sales generate revenue that flows up through ReedPop to RELX. RELX is a corporation that profits from a LexisNexis contract worth 22.1 million USD with ICE. 

Whether those two revenue streams ever touch each other is almost beside the point. The question being asked by the book community is whether readers are comfortable with their consumer spending existing within that corporate ecosystem at all.

BookCon’s Accessibility and Inclusion Issues, Pre‑ICE 

Look, BookCon can tell us all day long that they are inclusive, and to ignore their evil daddy overlords. But let’s actually take a look at the history here, shall we?

• The FAQ incident. Promotional materials used a Twilight reference that was flagged as a racist microaggression toward Indigenous communities. Pretty messy for an event simultaneously claiming inclusive values.
• The Rosh Hashanah ticket launch. General ticket sales went live on Rosh Hashanah, a scheduling oversight that a more careful event team would have caught. For those not in the know, Jewish readers and professionals were thereby shut out of the initial on-sale window. AKA: nobody in the room was empowered to say “hey, this is a bad date to pick.”
• Librarians? Messing with Librarians! The single most important professional infrastructure in the book ecosystem was not included in discounted professional passes at launch. This was later corrected, but how did they manage that one?
• ADA accommodation failures. Disability accommodation processes were widely flagged as inadequate for an event of this scale, with readers and advocates documenting their concerns in detail.

None of these individually constitutes a crisis, I mean, it’s a few missteps. But together, it paints a pretty ugly picture of an organisation scaling faster than its cultural competency. So when the ICE story hit, it was the last straw for many.

Who Actually Backed Out of BookCon 2026?

A lot of people pulled out, but no one made fanfare.

Instead of big “I’m withdrawing from BookCon” statements, most of what readers saw were disappearing Instagram stories, archived posts, and line-up pages that changed without comment. A handful of authors confirmed they were no longer attending, but the pattern was more silence than announcement.

BookCon’s panel and signing reservations opened on 16 March. The event remains sold out. The author lineup adjustments happened largely below the radar of mainstream book media coverage, which is, itself, impressive, particularly when you compare it to how fast BookTok pile-ons usually travel.

Should You Boycott BookCon 2026?

Here is where most coverage of the BookCon 2026 controversy stops. Boycott or attend? Dealer’s choice, good luck.

Despite all that’s said above, I’m on the side of everyone attending. Here’s the thing…there is documented evidence from other identical situations that boycotting doesn’t bother corporations…it hurts the authors using fiction, fantasy, and whimsy to speak out against injustice. 

In 2025, a significant number of readers cancelled their Kindle Unlimited subscriptions as part of a broader Amazon boycott. Amazon reported no material impact on its revenue, but the authors who reported a very material impact were the self-published and indie writers — specifically and disproportionately BIPOC writers, disabled writers, and queer writers, of course — who rely on KU because traditional publishing gatekeeping has historically made the mainstream route inaccessible to them. A YouTube documentary from April 2025 tracked individual authors watching their royalty dashboards crater in real time.

The BookCon mechanic is structurally identical. RELX does not attend BookCon. Debut authors do. Authors for whom a single weekend of convention visibility can mean the difference between a second book deal and losing the love of their life. The community of readers who travel to New York specifically to put money directly into the hands of the writers whose work has mattered to them also loses.

I mean, just look at who has historically filled BookCon’s programming: Angie Thomas, Kwame Alexander, V.E. Schwab, Leigh Bardugo — authors who built mainstream readership through exactly the kind of in-person, fan-direct exposure that conventions provide. 

And look at the documented work being done right now to bring Black authors, Latine authors, immigrant authors, and debut authors of colour into these spaces. An empty BookCon does not send a message to RELX’s board. No. It tells publishers that diverse voices do not draw crowds. 

When publishers act on the data that minorities cause controversy, shocking enough to lose millions in sales, we’ll move backwards.

The Romance Con boycott of 2025 played out the same way. Authors withdrew in solidarity, but the convention ran anyway. The readers who came specifically to see themselves represented in that room — queer readers, readers of colour — found a more homogenous lineup than the one they had bought tickets for. It’s the readers and authors who lose.

We need more community right now, more conventions, more get-togethers, more voices…

What To Do Instead of Boycotting BookCon 2026?

The open letter from Olivie Blake and Alix E. Harrow did not ask readers to stay home because we should be standing together. It asked RELX to terminate the LexisNexis ICE contract.

The Change.org petition — “ICE Out of Our Conventions — Tell ReedPop to Cut Ties with ICE” — is the appropriate pressure instrument for the actual target. It goes directly to ReedPop and, by extension, to RELX’s reputation management. Large corporations with publicly traded stock are sensitive to reputational pressure in a way they are not sensitive to reduced convention footfall. A petition with 50,000 signatures from the book community is a news story. An empty Javits Center ballroom is a line in a quarterly report that RELX’s events division absorbs and moves on from.

If you are going to BookCon in April, here is a list of what you can do to help us all thrive together:

1. Sign the petition before you go: sign it here
2. Choose your favorite debut authors, authors of colour, immigrant authors, LGBTQ authors, authors who signed the open letter and showed up anyway because their readers needed them there. Buy their books at the event. Fill their panels. Make the purchasing data scream what we actually want as a community.
3. Spend money thoughtfully. The royalty pipeline from a book sale at a convention signing goes more directly to an author than almost any other purchase mechanism. Use that.
4. Talk about it openly. The most lasting pressure the book community can apply to any corporation is a loud, sustained, well-informed conversation that does not go away after the weekend. 

Fiction is one of the most documented tools we have for building empathy across cultural and experiential divides. It is how people who have never crossed a border understand what it costs to cross one, or how people who have never navigated an immigration system understand what it feels like to be reduced to a database entry. It shows one culture what it’s like to see through another’s eyes. It celebrates humanity, good and bad. The books that do that work need rooms to be discovered in. 

Boycotting those rooms does not protect the people whose stories those books tell. It removes one of the few mainstream spaces where those stories reach the readers who most need them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is my personal data at risk if I attend BookCon?

According to ReedPop’s official statements, no attendee data from its events is shared with DHS, ICE, or any government agency. There is no documented evidence contradicting this.

Is ReedPop the same company as RELX?

ReedPop is a wholly owned subsidiary of RELX. It operates as an independent events division, but its revenue flows to RELX as its parent company.

Is LexisNexis connected to BookCon?

Both ReedPop and LexisNexis are subsidiaries of RELX, but they are separate divisions with no documented data-sharing between them; RELX’s ownership is the only connection between LexisNexis and BookCon.

What does the LexisNexis ICE contract actually cover?

It gives ICE access to LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ personal data databases — including address histories, social connections, financial records, vehicle registrations, and more — for investigative and enforcement purposes. The contract is worth 22.1 million USD and was signed in February 2021.

Who signed the open letter?

Olivie Blake and Alix E. Harrow were among the most prominent signatories. The letter, which was published via Reactor Magazine on 8 February 2026, has continued to gather signatures from authors and industry professionals.

Did ReedPop respond to the open letter?

Yes. ReedPop confirmed that no attendee data is shared with government agencies and reaffirmed its inclusive values. The statement did not address the broader question of RELX’s corporate contracts.

Is BookCon still happening?

Yes. BookCon 2026 is confirmed for April at the Javits Center in New York and is sold out. 

Where can I sign the petition?

The Change.org petition “ICE Out of Our Conventions — Tell ReedPop to Cut Ties with ICE” is still active. If you attend BookCon, signing it is the baseline, bare-minimum action.