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 ommentators
of high standing, including Michael Kinsley and a reporter from
the New York Times, have noted that right-wingers are producing
non-fiction bestsellers at an alarming rate. Currently, five of
the top 15 books on the Times list take up standard conservative
topics, including the sins of the Clintons and liberal media bias.
Four were written by brazen wingers, including Pat Buchanan, Peggy
Noonan, the late Barbara Olson, and Bill O'Reilly (who professes
neutrality but fools no one). Experts were called in to explain
what all this means, and among things they announced that, if nothing
else, it proves that right-wingers are not shunned by the publishing
industry.
Kinsley, himself
a noted author, made the point. "If the shoe were on the other
foot, conservatives would be screaming that book publishers were
biased against them," he wrote in his Washington Post
column. "The people in book publishing probably vote Democratic
even more heavily than people in the news media. They would measure
further left than journalists, on average, by other tests. The fact
that conservative books dominate the bestseller list demonstrates
how bogus such measures are as evidence of bias."
That's one
way of looking at things. Another is to note that it is the buying
public that elevates a book to the bestseller lists, not simply
"people in the book industry," though of course it is
necessary to get one's book published for that to happen. In that
regard it is also worth pointing out that two of the five books
in question are published by an apostate in the publishing world:
Al Regnery. Al no doubt has a good nose for profits, but there's
another explanation for his successes as well. He's publishing books
his open-minded competitors reject for ideological reasons.
As it happens,
the New York Times reports that the number-one bestseller
— Bias:
A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, by
Bernard Goldberg (who is not a right-winger) — was turned down
by other publishers before being taken up by Regnery. Regnery is
also publisher of Barbara Olson's Final Days, also on the
top-15 list. It is reasonable to suggest that were it not for Regnery,
a decidedly right-wing house, these books might not have been produced
at all. It is certainly true that the supposedly open-minded editors
at mainstream houses knew they were passing on a sure winner with
the Goldberg book.
Any fool could
have spotted Bias as a cash cow (it is now Numero Uno). Here
you have a theme — media bias — with a built-in audience
of rabid purchasers. Better yet, the author once worked alongside
Dan Rather, who is widely considered the epitome of the biased news
anchor, as countless "Rather Biased" bumperstickers attest.
Selling this book was about as difficult as selling nickel beers
at a NASCAR race.
Yet it seems
safe to assume that no heads are rolling because of the decision
to take a pass on Goldberg. There is no ridicule by peers, sneers
at Manhattan dinner parties or buzz about gross incompetence. It
is far more likely that turning down Bias is considered an
act of heroic purity. Mammon beckoned — but principle triumphed.
This isn't
the first time Regnery has struck gold while his competitors held
their noses. "Leo Damore's The Chappaquiddick Coverup
was turned down by 16 publishers before we got it," Al tells
me, "and it was on the New York Times list for 19 weeks.
After we did Bill Gertz's Betrayal, which was also a New
York Times bestseller, he shopped around his second book, The
China Threat, which was turned down everywhere so he came back
to us. I doubt if anybody would have touched Barbara Olson's books
with a ten-foot pole. Both were bestsellers: Final Days will
be number three this week and it's been on the list for about 12
weeks. Mark Fuhrman's book, which was not exactly conservative,
I guess, was turned down by at least a dozen New York publishers,
we did it and it was number one on the list. Nobody else would have
touched Gary Aldrich's Unlimited Access. It too was number
one, has over 600,000 in print, and it still sells."
That, says
Al, is only a partial list — there's no sense in rubbing it
in.
Michael Kinsley
is right to suggest a longstanding suspicion that right-wingers
are not particularly welcome in the mainstream-publishing world.
Personal experience on my part is slim, though a successful agent
did once advise that any book proposal — for a work of either
non-fiction or fiction — would be greatly enhanced by not mentioning
some of the publications which have, across the years, generously
published my voluminous hackwork. This tip-off was appreciated,
though it was also a bit unsettling. After all, when one's writing
history disqualifies one from writing a book, that can be taken
as a bad sign. There is always the possibility that one's work is
not up to snuff, but that suspicion is put to rest after perusing
the bookshelves at the local library or bookstore. One finds good
books but also more than enough dreck to make even the most humble
hack swell with possibility. This is a world, after all, in which
Anna Quindlen is hailed and promoted as an accomplished novelist.
Right-wingers
have created their own publishing world, which is what the marketplace
is supposed to do. For all that solution's vitality and usefulness,
however, most authors would rather have their work published by
a mainstream house. In this sense they are in the same boat as Christian
rockers — ghettoized. When a few break out, especially simultaneously,
that's news. It isn't a sign that open minds run rampant through
Manhattan.
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