Imprint speaks for the right

PRESIDENT Bush, who largely owes his election to a conservative Supreme Court, now has popular approval ratings so high you need oxygen to read them.

Bill Frist is running the Senate and Tom DeLay is honcho of the House. Don Rumsfeld has made short-tempered pugnacity the leadership style of the moment and Paul Wolfowitz suddenly has the sort of name recognition rock stars covet.

It’s a curious moment, therefore, to make the case that conservative voices are going unheard anywhere they care to speak. But it’s precisely the argument publisher Steve Ross makes to explain why his employer, the Crown Publishing Group -- a division of America’s largest purveyor of general interest books, Random House Inc. -- will launch in June a new imprint devoted exclusively to conservative authors.

In the 15 years since the dissolution of Free Press, no mainstream New York publisher has distributed a line of books written solely by conservative authors. The new imprint, Crown Forum, will be overseen by Ross, who as the group’s senior vice president also publishes Crown Publishers, Crown Business and Three Rivers Press, a trade paperback unit that will provide a softcover outlet for the new conservative titles.

According to Ross, the idea for Crown Forum grew out of his relationship with one of the group’s stars, Ann Coulter, whose “Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right” spent 20 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than 400,000 copies.

“Ann and I began talking while I was working with her on ‘Slander,’ which posits the existence of a liberal slant so organic to so many of our American institutions that we don’t even recognize it as such,” Ross said. “In working with her and thinking about the meticulous way she made her case, I came to recognize that what she was saying is fundamentally true with regard to book publishing.

“Most, if not all, of my peers are very liberal. I have come to believe that most trade publishers see it as their job to publish books for people of similar inclination. The result is an enormous disparity between the number of liberal and conservative books published. Most mainstream houses don’t publish any conservative titles at all.”

Right-wing authors, Coulter told an interviewer this week, have long found it difficult to get in the door at major New York publishers. “Conservatives read books, but amazingly, liberal editors don’t care,” she said.

“We publishers inhabit a very culturally sheltered island called Manhattan,” Ross agreed. “But until we declare ourselves a sovereign state, I think we should publish for the whole country. It’s our job, in other words, to publish what people want to read.”

Crown Forum, Ross argued, represents the sort of great awakening that occurred more than a decade ago, when the success of Terry McMillan’s “Waiting to Exhale” alerted mainstream publishers to the existence of African American readers. “There was a sudden realization,” he said, “that this 15% of the population would buy books they found interesting, if only we would publish them. Now there is a plethora of African American imprints. The same thing is happening today with Latinos.

“Now we also have ironclad evidence from our election results and public opinion polls that 50% of the country is -- in one way or another -- conservative, but we don’t publish books for them.”

Filling that void, according to Ross, “is a civic responsibility and a major market opportunity.”

While a look at the New York Times’ list of nonfiction bestsellers for the past year doesn’t do much to support the notion that there’s a dearth of conservative titles on the shelves of American bookstores, it leaves no doubt at all about the market’s appetite for their work.

There are 15 slots on the Times’ nonfiction bestseller list, and for 44 of the past 52 weeks one or more of them has been occupied by a conservative author’s book. For 42 of those weeks, one or more of the top five titles was written by a conservative (including Coulter, Michael Savage, Bernard Goldberg and Mona Charen). For nine of the past 52 weeks, three of the five top sellers were on a conservative topic. And for nearly half the year -- 23 weeks -- a book by one or another conservative author was No. 1.

To Ross, those figures add up to a “sufficiently broad readership that is exclusively conservative.” At the moment, however, it is being served mainly by small, independent publishers, like the Washington, D.C.-based Regnery and an imprint recently acquired by Crown, Prima Forum.

One of Prima Forum’s titles, “The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values” by Tammy Bruce, was published Tuesday and currently is on Amazon.com’s Top 10. Bruce, the controversial one-time president of the National Organization for Women’s Los Angeles chapter, is a self-described lesbian, pro-choice feminist. Her book is a denunciation of the now-familiar list of right-wing demons -- multiculturalism, identity politics, moral relativism and “the malignant narcissism” of the “Left Elite.” There are all sorts of nasty elites in Bruce’s moral schema, including black ones, academic ones and an entertainment one whose “moral depravity is beyond measure.” Ozzy Osbourne, by the way, is “a moral terrorist.”

Stu Spencer, the brilliant political consultant instrumental in Ronald Reagan’s electoral success, once explained to an interviewer that contemporary American conservatives -- unlike such fastidious traditional conservatives as English Tory squires or German Junkers -- are a fire-breathing, meat-eating crowd. “The trick to keeping them happy,” he said, “is figuring out how much red meat to throw them and when to do it.”

Carnivorous conservatives will find no lack of substance on Crown Forum’s list. Among the titles already agreed upon are Coulter’s forthcoming “Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism” and memoirs by right-wing columnist and television commentator Robert Novak and conservative film critic and radio talk show host Michael Medved. The latter is to be titled “Right Turn.”

All these conservative authors, according to Crown’s Ross, now will benefit from the powerful distribution, marketing and promotional resources of the sprawling Random House publishing conglomerate. It surely has not been lost on Random House that its new enterprise will benefit from the powerful synergy that has been established between right-wing authors and the talk-radio and cable chat shows that now are overwhelmingly dominated by conservative voices. In fact, nearly all the conservative authors who made it onto the New York Times bestseller list over the past 52 weeks are either the hosts of or regular guests on a radio or TV chat show.

The economics of contemporary publishing make for many strange conjunctions.

When Ross was asked about his own politics, he answered, “I would have to say I am not a conservative.” And last week, for example, four of the top 10 books on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list were by conservatives and two more were memoirs by former military men. The No. 2 book, however, was Michael Moore’s “Stupid White Men,” which has been a bestseller for 52 weeks.

Its publisher? Regan Books/Harper Collins, a division of News Corp., which is owned by Rupert Murdoch.