I was recently invited to write an article for the 150th anniversary issue of Publisher’s Weekly. Below is an abridged version, for the full article, click here.
There’s been a tidal wave of change in the book business over the past 25 years, and nowhere has that upheaval been more evident than in conservative publishing. Changes to the way books are sold and marketed have transformed the entire industry; they have also helped turn conservative publishing into a major force in the book business.
Think back for a moment to 1996. Conservative books were, by and large, niche books, given little attention from “book media” and even less shelf space from retailers. Of course, there was the occasional conservative bestseller, like Rush Limbaugh’s The Way Things Ought to Be, which sold over two million copies in its first two years in print. But there was no conservative book program among the big New York houses, which dominated the publishing scene. And if felt like an Easter egg hunt to find conservative books in most bookstores.
Two remarkable events occurred in 1996, and both would have a huge impact on conservative book publishing: the first full year of operations at Amazon and the launch of Fox News. Those two forces provided exactly what conservative books needed to take off —a giant book retailer that carried, quite literally, every title and was designed to make finding the books you like easy; and a dedicated national platform for raising the visibility of conservative issues, authors, and books. Together, they greatly enhanced the public’s ability to learn about conservative books, find them and purchase them.
Another momentous change occurred five years later: the launch of Bookscan. Previously, bestseller status was bestowed by newspapers, the most famous list being the New York Times’. But conservatives had long complained about the bias of that list, suspecting that liberal editors had their fingers on the scale when ranking conservative books. There was no hard proof, of course, but when Nielsen began reporting data-driven real-time numbers of book sales each week, everyone could see that conservative books fared better than in the curated lists from the Grey Lady.
By 2003, New York publishers had gotten the memo: Conservatives actually do read, they in fact do buy books, and we are missing a giant chunk of the market by not serving that audience. So, Random House founded Crown Forum, Penguin (still its own company) founded Sentinel, Simon & Schuster followed suit in 2006 with Threshold, HarperCollins did so in 2010 with Broadside. Even the Book of the Month Club got on board in 2003, launching a conservative book club–American Compass.
But over the past 10 years, storm clouds have darkened the landscape of publishing, thanks almost entirely to social media and digital commerce. Social media platforms have swamped broadcast media, especially when it comes to daily (hourly) news. Reporting has been replaced by sharing, and analysis has been replaced by soundbites. As digital commerce is driven by eyeballs and clicks, headlines have morphed into click bait.
Today, our news, our shopping, our lives are so curated that we rarely bump up against anyone with a different opinion, never mind world view. One of the most sinister results of this balkanization is the emergence of a virulent cancel culture plague.
Cancel culture has infected the major publishing houses; a well-placed New York publishing executive told me, “if you put it to a vote, probably fewer than 1% of people who work in publishing want their company to publish books by Republicans.” For a society built on liberty and free speech, this is a toxic development.
These trends are a threat to all publishing. It is not that books aren’t selling: Americans bought more than 825 million print books last year, up nearly 9% from 2020. No, the threat to publishing is the very real danger that books will no longer be able to teach us something we don’t already know.
If we have already decided what the answers are, if we already “know” what the news is — and what it means — before it even happens, we are doomed. Doomed to fracture as a society. Doomed to lose friends and family. Doomed to stifle creativity, adventure, and discovery. Doomed to repeat some very tragic mistakes of history. And sooner or later, people will realize there is no longer any reason to read books at all.
But books themselves can be the antidote. By definition, books require from a reader a degree of patience and an investment of time that tends to calm the nerves and quiet the shouting. I’m not suggesting books are bloodless – the best books are filled with passion. But reading a book should be a journey, not a slap in the face. As such, books have the potential to make people stop and think, rather than just react. We need books, from all points of view, now more than ever.