Book bandwagon

GIVEN the generally liberal world of book publishing, it’s hard out there for a conservative author -- and yet it’s starting to feel a little crowded too.

As she appears on TV shows, discussing her life as a gay woman who is also Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter, Mary Cheney has said over and over, “My dad is not Darth Vader.... He’s a loving father and grandfather.” Cheney’s media blitz on behalf of her first book, “Now It’s My Turn: A Daughter’s Chronicle of Political Life,” also represents a coming out of sorts for her publisher, GOP strategist Mary Matalin, who hopes to send many more conservative authors in Cheney’s footsteps.

Tonight, Matalin will be throwing a party at BookExpo America in Washington, D.C., the nation’s largest book fair, to celebrate the launch of her new imprint for conservative books at Simon & Schuster. She is the first political celebrity to be named head of such a venture by a major New York publisher. But her fledgling imprint, Threshold Editions, is entering an increasingly competitive market. Indeed, Simon & Schuster is the last of the big four publishers to jump into the hunt.

Spurred by the success of bestsellers by the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter, Random House and Penguin formed their own conservative-oriented imprints, Crown Forum and Sentinel, three years ago, joining right-leaning publishers such as Regan Books, a division of HarperCollins, and Nelson Current. All are competing with Washington-based Regnery Books, the granddaddy of them all, which has been publishing conservative books since 1947.

Matalin is unfazed by the growing competition. “I could be dreamy-eyed about this, but I think there’s room for all of these books in the publishing market. If I’m right, we’ll be augmenting each other. It’s natural for a political movement.”

Conservative publishers and authors, however, can throw sharp elbows when it comes time to parcel out media attention. Last week, Matalin and Cheney made separate appearances on the same edition of Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes.” Cheney spoke amiably about her experiences in the Bush campaign. But columnist John Podhoretz, who has just published a book critical of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), “Can She Be Stopped?,” stole their thunder, clashing energetically with co-host Alan Colmes over Podhoretz’s attacks on Clinton’s looks.

TV appearances may be helpful, but this week there’s a lot of competition for conservative readers in the bookstores: Nelson Current has had four bestsellers in recent weeks, including radio commentator Michael Savage’s “The Political Zoo.” Podhoretz’s book on Clinton came out the same day as Cheney’s book. Penguin’s Sentinel has just launched “The U.N. Exposed” by Fox News commentator Eric Shawn; Regnery has just published Carrie Lucas’ “Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex and Feminism.” Next month, Crown Forum will release Coulter’s “Godless: The Church of Liberalism” with a 1-million-copy first printing.

“The problem is we’re eating each other’s lunch,” said Joel Miller, associate publisher for Nelson Current. “We’re all competing for the same conservative media, the same scarce money in every book buyer’s wallet.” Others wonder whether President Bush’s declining poll numbers may portend a diminishing demand for such titles.

But Matalin and others insist the conservative audience is perennial. Readers will be there long after Bush has left the political stage, they say, and nothing would bring them into the bookstores more than the election of President Hillary Rodham Clinton.

With the big New York publishers now firmly in the mix, the real question is which houses will best be able to reach conservative readers over the long haul. The larger houses have deep pockets, yet they are widely identified with liberal beliefs.

“I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence so far that New York publishers really ‘get it’ when it comes to conservative publishing,” said Marji Ross, publisher of Regnery. “I don’t think they really understand the readers. I don’t think they like the readers, which can be a fatal flaw when you’re trying to sell books to a whole group of people.”

Simon & Schuster perceived this gap when the company launched its new conservative line, according to Louise Burke, executive vice president and publisher of Pocket Books as well as Threshold. By naming Matalin editorial director, she said, the company reached out for someone who had instant credibility with the world of conservative readers. Burke, who jokingly describes herself as the company’s “resident conservative,” said Matalin is someone “everyone wants to meet, from the right and the left, and when they meet her, they’re surprised, because she’s a savvy businesswoman.”

On a gray afternoon last week, Matalin -- also known for her marriage to James Carville, the equally outspoken Democratic Party consultant -- was fielding questions about Threshold in the kitchen of her Alexandria, Va., town house. She was also racing the clock to produce a batch of sugar cookies before her two preteen daughters, Emma and Matty, got home from school. She was barefoot, wore a baggy sweatshirt and periodically sniffed a carton of milk to make sure it wasn’t sour.

“I’m trying to multitask here and I’m doing a lousy job,” said Matalin, 52, who until 2003 was an assistant to President Bush and a counselor to the vice president.

The folksy kitchen scene looked almost staged -- a sarcastic riff, perhaps, on Clinton’s comment that she didn’t like to stay home baking cookies? Matalin broke into a grin when she was asked why a liberal house like Simon & Schuster -- the publisher of Hillary Clinton’s memoir -- was trawling for conservative readers.

“Oh, I love it,” she said. “Scratch a liberal and you’ll find a capitalist pig.”

Most of her bosses, Matalin added, “don’t really like conservative ideas. But they like the concept of fomenting a public debate through books. And they want to know whatever happened to the Democratic Party. It’s been 34 years that conservatives have been winning in this country, and they wonder -- who are these people?”

The rise of conservative publishing was especially noteworthy during the last two presidential elections. According to Bob Wietrak, vice president of merchandising for Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest book chain recorded double-digit increases in sales of political titles from the left and right since 2000, and the company’s top 24 political titles during the 2004 election were evenly split between conservative and liberal authors. Conservative books “sell everywhere,” Wietrak said, “in New York and California as well as other parts of the country. Just as liberal books sell in Colorado, Texas and North Carolina. It’s not just a regional thing.”

Publishers and booksellers are drawn to these books because, unlike many titles from the left, they have a built-in advantage when it comes to media publicity. The Fox News cable network, a host of like-minded talk radio shows and a growing number of websites such as the Drudge Report can offer valuable exposure.

Like their liberal counterparts, some conservative books are famous for nasty, no-holds-barred language. The jacket blurb for Regnery’s just-published “Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex and Feminism,” for example, boasts that author Carrie L. Lukas “sets the record straight, correcting the lies women have been told and slamming the door on the screaming harpies of NOW, feminist professors, and the rest of the bra-burners who have done so much to wreck women’s lives.” Podhoretz’s new book on Hillary Clinton features serious policy analysis, but it also calls Clinton “pathologically unsexy ... not a raving beauty.” In summing up the tough political persona that he says Clinton needs to project, the author adds: “Just for vulgarity’s sake, let me put it this way. She’s got to be a bitch. And Hillary is a bitch.”

Matalin is no stranger to tough language. As a high-ranking campaign official for former President George H.W. Bush, she drew fire during the 1992 election for mocking Bill Clinton’s “bimbo eruptions.” On the night Bush lost, she berated her future husband, a top Clinton political strategist, by telling him: “I cannot believe that you could live on this Earth and know that you were responsible for electing a slime, a scum, a philandering, pot-smoking, draft-dodging pig of a man,” according to “All’s Fair: Love, War, and Running for President,” the bestselling 1994 memoir she wrote with Carville.

But now she’s singing a different tune. As she hesitantly tasted a bowl of vanilla frosting, Matalin delivered a quick lecture on recent American political history: Conservatives have been ascendant for more than 30 years, she said. They control the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court. To sustain this power, they must promote a more thoughtful discussion of issues. Without naming names, she said her imprint would feature a less confrontational brand of conservatism.

“As much as I like some of the polemics, I don’t need them at this stage of my conservative journey,” Matalin said. “The nasty, slimy politics of personal destruction, the smash-mouth stuff, I like it, but it’s not what I sit down in a library to read.... I think the era of angry is over. People don’t want anger, they want practical solutions.”

“Now It’s My Turn” is a good example, Matalin suggested. Although the book blasts Democratic candidate John F. Kerry for bringing up Cheney’s sexual orientation in a presidential debate (calling it “a cheap and tawdry political trick”), it mainly offers a daughter’s-eye view of the 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns, with anecdotes about Sept. 11, the Florida recount and affectionate glimpses of her father. Cheney’s “deeply human tale” is exactly the kind of book that Matalin believes many conservatives want to read.

Matalin’s core political views mirror the Bush agenda. She supports his tax cuts, backs the war in Iraq and believes the government’s eavesdropping program was designed to catch terrorists, not snoop on law-abiding Americans. Even if Republicans lose the midterm elections, she argued, “liberals are never going to be ascendant again. There’s never going to be another welfare state. Socialism is dead. There’s no other foreign policy but freedom. All the big things we have won are going to stay.”

She admits she knows little about the nuts and bolts of the book world. As she tells it, David Rosenthal, the executive vice president and publisher of Simon & Schuster, asked her if she would consider running a conservative imprint soon after President George W. Bush was reelected. The company was looking for new areas of growth, and the booming conservative book market was an irresistible target.

The offer was attractive, Matalin said, because she wanted to spend more time with her daughters. She travels to Manhattan several times a month but does most of her work at home. Her goal is to publish six to 10 books a year.

“My main value to them [Simon & Schuster] is that I run in a world that they don’t have a fingertip touch for, and I find people, I’m like a talent scout,” Matalin said. “I can get authors on radio and TV. I can market books. I bring a special set of skills.”

Matalin’s GOP connections appear to have paid off in the acquisition of Mary Cheney’s book, which reportedly won an advance in the $1-million range. Simon & Schuster won a bidding war just before her new imprint was announced last March.

“Mary [Matalin] is like a member of our family,” said Mary Cheney. “I had an inkling that she was going to form this imprint, and it was certainly a selling point for me. She and I are very close. We worked well together on the book, especially after I had written the manuscript.”

Future Threshold books will include “What’s the Matter With California?” by conservative writer Jack Cashill, a conservative response to “What’s the Matter With Kansas?,” Thomas Frank’s liberal lament about how Republicans have won over previously Democratic voters in states such as Kansas; “Onward Christian Soldiers” by Deal Hudson, about the political power of Catholics and evangelical Christians; and “Hunting Zarqawi” by Richard Miniter, about the leader of the Iraqi insurgency.

“I’m publishing books that I, as a conservative, would want to read,” said Matalin, setting a platter of cookies on the counter. “And I’ve got strong support from the folks at Simon & Schuster in New York -- even though they’re a bunch of crazy liberals.”