The Right-Wing Book Market is Dying a Free-Market Death

The free market is a cruel beast, which is something the book publishing industry has been made acutely aware of in the past decade or two. But now, even in one arena where that industry had traditionally been doing well, right-wing conservative political books—as in, books that prattle on about the glories of the free market—things are looking grim.

BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins looks today at the boom-and-bust cycle of this genre, which boomed and busted in pretty textbook fashion. A few hit titles early on showed a market for conservative-oriented publishing, so then every publisher-huckster in the country set up a conservative publishing imprint. Then, the market was flooded, the audience didn’t grow, and now no one can make any money, but they’ll try to anyway, by frantically debasing the quality of the literature to world-historic lows.

The story also perfectly demonstrates a well-known tendency of conservative thought to drift towards what some would call “epistemic closure,” others would call self-ghettoization, and what others still might call hucksterism run aground. As in, when faced with a choice between trying to reach a more mainstream audience or creating an isolated intellectual bubble to feed upon, conservatives always find themselves leaning towards the latter: unsustainable self-embrace. To wit, from Coppins:

The challenges afflicting the market are varied, but in interviews with BuzzFeed, several editors, agents, and executives faulted the same trend they were celebrating in 2003, when mainstream publishers began elevating conservative editors, like Adam Bellow and Adrian Zackheim, and luring high-profile Republican figures like consultant Mary Matalin into the book business. At the time, many on the right welcomed this development as the sort of victory that had eluded them in Hollywood, academia, and the mainstream press — a mass influx of conservatives that would wrest the industry from the hands of liberal elites, and work to reverse the tide of the culture wars.

Instead, what followed was the genrefication of conservative literature. Over the next 10 years, corporate publishers launched a half-dozen imprints devoted entirely to producing, promoting, and selling books by right-leaning authors — a model that consigned their work to a niche, same as science fiction or nutritional self-help guides. Many of the same conservatives who cheered this strategy at the start now complain that it has isolated their movement’s writers from the mainstream marketplace of ideas, wreaked havoc on the economics of the industry, and diminished the overall quality of the work.

It is fascinating to watch conservative free-market-loving entrepreneurs consistently fall into this pattern. Instead of trying to work through mainstream studios, publishing houses, universities, and so forth, a few conservative entrepreneurs set up their own beachheads to “reverse the tide of the culture wars.” But these outfits, be they the Citizens United film studio, Regnery publishing, Liberty University, or others, they can only go about selling to the same limited, old, white audiences for so long. And since audiences fail to grow, when you take an explicit strategy to only reach a narrow audience, either natural market competition or the audience’s literal death—whichever comes first—will eventually wipe out whatever money there is to be made.

Down the road, these same dynamics may even bring down conservatives’ most successful media enterprise ever: Fox News. The network is still highly watched and profitable. But it, too, tailors itself to a narrow slice of the population that is old and white. Author Gabriel Sherman, who just wrote a much-hyped biography of Fox News president Roger Ailes, argues that this strategy will eventually spell the network’s doom. As Sherman told Salon in an interview earlier this year:

And I see both [Ailes] and Fox — you know, he is presiding over an empire that has a crumbling foundation. And it still is very much an empire, but the underpinnings holding it up are weakening.

And Ailes is clinging to power. So you can never predict when that end will come. But what has made Fox News powerful is speaking to a part of America that has continued to get older and older. And the time will come when that audience is no longer there to program to.

The free market’s a bitch.