John McCain: Debate among publishers
NEW YORK (AP) - February 7, 2008 Matalin is also head of the conservative Threshold Editions, an
imprint of Simon & Schuster. With McCain almost surely the
Republican nominee, Matalin and like-minded publishers face a
conflict shared by the conservative community as a whole: How to
handle a presidential candidate who has often dissented from the
right wing.
"He is a different kind of conservative and I think his
candidacy will set off a new round of issue-oriented,
principal-oriented books about conservatism," says Matalin, whose
current releases include Glenn Beck's "An Inconvenient Book" and
John Bolton's "Surrender Is Not an Option."
Marji Ross, president of the conservative Regnery Publishing,
has mixed feelings about McCain as a candidate, but does think
he'll be good for business, if only because he incites so much
debate. Like Matalin at Threshold, she expects that upcoming
Regnery releases will focus more on ideas than personality, such as
a current best seller, Newt Gingrich's "Real Change."
Both Threshold and Regnery have published books by McCain
critics. Beck has called him "more dangerous even than Hillary
Clinton." A Regnery book, Christopher C. Horner's "The
Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and
Environmentalism," places the Arizona senator among "the green
lobby's favorite politicians."
Jed Babbin, editor of Human Events magazine, a sister
publication of Regnery's, has written a handful of books for
Regnery and recently wrote a column entitled "John McCain: The
Anti-Conservative." Ross, asked by The Associated Press if she
would consider publishing an anti-McCain book by Babbin, said she
"would give it a serious look."
"I don't know the answer," says Adrian Zackheim, founder of
the conservative Sentinel imprint at Penguin Group (USA), when
asked by the AP if he would publish an anti-McCain book. "And I
think the fact that I don't know the answer is interesting."
Meanwhile, publishers of books written by McCain are looking to
take advantage of his remarkable rise since last summer, when his
campaign appeared over. Twelve, an imprint of the Hachette Book
Group USA is rushing a paperback of McCain's "Hard Call," which
received little attention when it came out as a hardcover in
August.
HarperCollins is anticipating increased sales for the paperback
of McCain's "Faith of My Fathers," a best-selling memoir
published in 1999. Jonathan Burnham, publisher of HarperCollins,
says "we're talking to writers and agents right now about possible
(new) McCain projects."
"I think McCain himself should consider doing another book,"
Matalin says. "He could use a framework to present his ideas, so
others can try to understand them and promote them."
The competitive primary campaign has complicated publishers'
schedules. By February 2004, Republicans knew that President Bush
would be their candidate that fall and Democrats had largely agreed
on Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts. Publishers were able to
respond with a wave of topical books, from Michael Moore's
anti-Bush "Will They Ever Trust Us Again?" to the anti-Kerry
"Unfit for Command," a disputed, but news-making attack on
Kerry's Vietnam War record.
But with the Democratic race so close this year that it may not
be resolved before the party's convention, in late August,
publishers don't expect any timely new works about the winner to
emerge before the election. Instead, readers likely will have to
seek out older books, whether memoirs by Sen. Hillary Clinton and
Sen. Barack Obama or biographies such as Carl Bernstein's "A Woman
in Charge."
"I know that when I get anti-Hillary proposals, I tell them,
`Just wait and see if she becomes president,"' Ross says. "Even
if she's the nominee, there are so many books out about her that
the marketplace feels like it knows everything about her past."
"It is a tough, tough situation to publish books into,"
Zackheim says. "The only books you can publish in that time span
are books that can be written very quickly."
The campaign is far enough along that at least publishers can
safely predict some flops. Among the doomed: "The Fred Factor: How
Fred Thompson May Change the Face of the '08 Campaign," Hugh
Hewitt's "A Mormon in the White House? 10 Things Everyone Should
Know About Mitt Romney" and ex-candidate Bill Richardson's
"Leading by Example," for which Amazon.com is offering a 64
percent discount just four months after it came out.