The Right Time For The Right Books

From the spring of 2003 until the spring of 2007, I ran American Compass, a commercial book club that was part of the same company that operates Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Guild, the History Book Club, andÑat the timeÑmore than 30 others. I’d been a senior editor at Bantam Books and HarperCollins and a literary editor at National Review, but I’d never worked for “the Clubs,” as they’re known in the publishing biz, and it was a mostly pleasant experience. For one thing, the job put me pretty much at the center of conservative publishing in the United States.

I’d been asked to launch a conservative book club, since Bookspan (the corporate entity behind the book clubs, then a joint venture of Time-Warner and Bertelsmann) was frustrated by the success of the Conservative Book Club, which is owned by Eagle Publishing (owners as well of the most venerable of conservative publishers, Regnery), and obviously not a part of the Bookspan family. American Compass actually premiered in January of 2004, and we were a welcome adjunct to the conservative imprints that were introduced (just before and after) by some of America’s major publishers: Crown Forum at Random House, Sentinel at Viking-Penguin, Nelson Current at Thomas Nelson, and Threshold at Simon & Schuster.

Suddenly the publishing establishment was paying serious attention to the conservative-libertarian point of view, accepting that there is a literary marketplace implied in conservative successes in other mediaÑin talk radio and cable TV; of Rush Limbaugh and FOX News Channel.

In August of 2004, American Compass hosted two panel discussions by a dozen authors (including David Frum, Michael Barone, Hugh Hewitt, and Sen. Zell Miller) about the state of conservative publishing and the affect of conservative books on the political process. C-SPAN aired the event from our offices in the Time-Life Building, which was a few blocks north of where the Republican National Convention had just begun. The New York Times reported on the event. At the end of the afternoon, a colleague came up to me and said: “You did it. You’ve destroyed the Conservative Book Club.”

Apparently not.

Towards the end of 2007, when Bookspan was . . . restructuring, I was fired, and American Compass was shuttered and then sold to . . . Eagle Publishing. (I should mention that it was never our intention to put the Conservative Book Club out of business, and we maintained a spirited, friendly competition during our co-existence.) And as I write (December, 2008) the fate of the several conservative imprints is uncertain: Mary Matalin’s Threshold seems to be gaining momentum after a slow start, but the founding editors of both Forum and Sentinel have moved on and have not been replaced, Nelson has eliminated most of its separate imprints, and several prominent conservative editors have left other houses where they’d had some success. This is not to say the companies in question will not continue to publish their successful conservative authors or even that the remaining imprints themselves won’t survive and thrive, but I can’t shake the feeling that a great many liberals up and down Publisher’s Row are breathing a collective sigh of relief that the industry’s conservative experiment is mostly over. (Such sighs are probably preferable to conservative hyperventilating, but that’s another story.)

This uncertainty is amplified by the . . . restructuring that has begun in earnest at just about every publishing company, and we’re clearly going through the kind of economic contraction during which vacancies are made and then left unfilled.

But now is exactly the wrong time for publishers to be diminishing their commitments to conservative books, if that’s what’s happening. It’s an axiom (and, I think, truth not mere shibboleth) that in the world of opinion journalism you always do better in opposition. Over the last decade, The Nation magazine, arguably the bible of the Left, has seen its circulation soar, and National Review and The Weekly Standard may reasonably expect to grow in the new, liberal climate represented by the ascendancy of Barack Obama and the Democrats. Of course, it’s long been my impression that conservatism is by definition the philosophy of outsiders, and that even when Ronald Reagan was in the White House or, after 2001, when both the Presidency and the Congress were briefly in Republican hands, conservative books thrived if and when conservative readers were riled up in hostility towards the “liberal agenda.” Indeed, most conservative books are written in attack mode. (Ann Coulter’s success derives from her assault on the new orthodoxy, liberalism, in the same way that a generation earlier Lenny Bruce was famous for satirizing the “conservative” establishment.)

We may soon see a conservative awakening of sorts, and many bestselling political books will almost certainly be from the “Right.” Introspection is a path to profit.

We may evenÑalthough this depends upon eventsÑcome to see an expansion of conservatism (or libertarianism or Americanism or whatever you want to call it), although that will require books that do more than simply preach to the choir; that do more than just attack..