Publishers meeting political storms in their turn to right
MILO Yiannopoulos – the infamous internet troll, Donald Trump supporter and editor at Breitbart News – has compared Islam to cancer, mocked transgender people and suggested that women who are harassed online should stay off the web. In July, he was permanently barred from Twitter for violating the platform’s rules against hate speech and harassment.
So when Threshold Editions, a conservative imprint at Simon & Schuster, gave him a six-figure publishing contract, the blowback was furious. There were calls for a boycott of all of the company’s books, a vast catalogue of some 2,000 titles from 50 imprints. Some of Simon & Schuster’s authors denounced the publisher on social media.
The criticism highlights the minefield publishers face as they try to court an emerging market of young conservatives who identify with extreme right-wing stances on issues like immigration and gender equality that they feel are undermining the nation. Many liberals and moderates say, however, those positions amount to outright racism and misogyny.
And the issue has cast an uncomfortable spotlight on a lucrative but often overlooked niche within the largely left-leaning publishing world. Every major publishing house has a conservative imprint – Penguin Random House has two, Sentinel and Crown Forum – and maintains a stable of right-wing authors who may not attend literary festivals or mingle at the National Book Awards but command a sizeable audience.
Most mainstream publishers try to claim neutrality and publish books across the spectrum. (Simon & Schuster, for example, published Hillary Clinton’s memoir and campaign book, as well as Trump’s Crippled America.) But occasionally, publishers get dragged into a scrum.
For publishers, the books have been reliable cash cows. Bill O’Reilly’s his- torical Killing series has more than 17 million copies in print. In the weeks leading up to the election, the bestseller lists were dominated by partisan polemics by Dinesh D’Souza, Michael Savage, Edward Klein and Gary J Byrne, whose anti-Clinton book Crisis of Character sold some 247,000 hardcover copies.
But now, without conservatives filling the role as the voice of opposition, the potency of right-wing books will almost certainly be diminished. And with the political principles that conservative writers have advocated – the repeal of Obamacare, a crackdown on immigration and the dismantling of environmental regulations – set to become the policy goals of a Republican-led government, the commercial future of conservative publishing looks far more unsettled.
Publishers are proceeding cautiously. After the election, many editors quietly scrapped plans to publish books attacking Clinton and cancelled other sober reflections on the future of the Republican Party in the wake of a Trump defeat. Some are planning to release fewer titles in 2017. Others are returning to safer topics, like Ronald Reagan or the founding fathers.
“Conservative publishing is always a better business when the other side is in power,” said Adam Bellow, editorial director of a new political imprint at St Martin’s Press.
Bellow, who read Yiannopoulos’s proposal but did not bid on the book, said he was open to publishing other new voices from the so-called altright at St Martin’s.
“Donald Trump has brought into politics a lot of people who were previously excluded, and the boundary of political speech has shifted to the right,” Bellow said. “This is a new force in American politics, and they deserve to be heard.”
Simon & Schuster was far from alone in its willingness to embrace Yiannopoulos, according to his literary agent, Thomas Flannery, who said “virtually every major conservative imprint expressed interest”. Threshold – which has published books by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney and, recently, Trump – was appealing to Yiannopoulos because “they don’t shy away from publishing controversial figures”, Flannery said.
But the fury Simon & Schuster has encountered underscores the perils publishers face as they tailor their publishing plans to reflect volatile new political realities.
Yiannopoulos, who is gay and describes himself in interviews as more of a cultural figure than a political one, is unlikely to appeal to more religious conservatives. His book Dangerous – which will address his relationship to the alt-right, his self-proclaimed role as a free-speech crusader and his banishment from Twitter – is more of a memoir than a conservative manifesto.
Marji Ross, publisher of Regnery, a conservative publishing house, said she didn’t pursueYiannopoulos’s book because she felt it would be polarising among mainstream conservatives.
“Some of our market would have loved it, and some of our market would have been very uncomfortable with it,” Ross said.
Right-wing authors are also losing a reliable driver of book sales – the Clintons. Last year, Regnery alone had three best-selling books that took aim at Clinton, including its first graphic novel, Clinton Cash, adapted from the book by Peter Schweizer, and Hillary’s America, D’Souza’s book, which sold more than 200,000 copies.
“We had certainly planned to take advantage of those opportunities if Hillary Clinton had won the election, and we looked at several books that we had signed up or considered the day after the election and thought, well, those aren’t going to work,” Ross said. “Often times, we have said here that what’s bad for America is good for Regnery book sales.”
Regnery has instead pivoted to courting Trump voters with forthcoming books like How Trump Won, by Breitbart editor-at-large Joel Pollak and Larry Schweikart, and a series of Deplorables Guides to issues like immigration, gun control and climate change, using a moniker Trump’s supporters adopted for themselves.
“The mood of our market is far, far different with Trump as president than it would have been with Hillary Clinton as president,” Ross said. “It’s hopeful, but cautious.”