The Future of Conservative Books by Harry Stein, City Journal Summer 2008
True, it scored some major victories in the past, including Ronald Kessler’s pro-Bush A Matter of Character; Mona Charen’s Do-Gooders, on liberal good intentions gone horribly awry; and its biggest seller of all, Ed Klein’s 2005 The Truth About Hillary, which left its author such a pariah in liberal elite circles that he had to give up his home in the Hamptons.
What? What sort of pussyboy would do that?
Spit in their eye and keep on walking.
The mainstream houses demonstrate their liberal bias even when they condescend to publish a non-PC book. Take Until Proven Innocent, Stuart Taylor and K. C. Johnson’s look at Durham D.A. Michael Nifong’s legal near-lynching of three Duke University lacrosse players accused of rape and how the university and the liberal media mob abetted it. Published by the Thomas Dunne imprint of St. Martin’s Press, the book was much anticipated in conservative circles and appeared to great critical acclaim. Yet it died quickly, victim of a publisher that utterly failed to grasp its potential appeal. “They [initially] printed only 13,000 copies and, as far as I know, gave it no advertising,” says a still-frustrated Taylor, who considers himself a liberal. “Amazon sold out the third day, and we got hundreds of e-mails from all over the country from people that couldn’t find it in the stores, which just killed it commercially. The truth is, the house just never seemed very excited about the book.” According to BookScan, the book ended up selling 17,000 copies.
Bellow reports that even Jonah Goldberg’s recent mammoth bestseller, Liberal Fascism, which he edited at Doubleday, was at first given short shrift by the house. “We printed 14,000 copies, and shipped 12,000,” he says. “But Jonah was an Internet star, and in the first week, the demand from his troops was so intense that it jumped onto the Times’s list. With 12,000 copies in print! Even then, Doubleday just eked the book out into the marketplace, reprinting in quantities of 5,000 or 10,000. If this had been a book by a major liberal journalist, they would have gone out with 30,000 copies and reprinted in increments of 20,000, and we would have been up to 150,000 in no time, with huge stacks in Barnes and Noble. Even when Jonah’s book hit Number One, it still wasn’t easily obtainable. You’d walk into a Barnes and Noble and, if they had it at all, it would be tucked away on the second floor in the back in the sociology section. Eventually, they pushed the book up to 198,000 copies. I would like to have seen 300,000 in print.”
I can personally testify to the truth of this. Even my (former) agent thought my mild sendup of BJ in the opening pages of a novel I’d written was too strong for the NYC houses - and him, personally, as well. “A lot of us like Clinton,” he told me at the time.
The bottom line: Anybody who writes a recognizably conservative book of any sort is nuts to take it to a mainstream house. Sadly, however, there seem to be no conservative publishers interested in a line of conservative-oriented fiction.
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Books? Movies too. Try getting “Ender’s Game” made in to a movie in Hollywood. It’s impossible.
I’ve worked in Hollywood, Wes. It’s even worse than NYC. But as for Ender’s Game: the Movie….
i’ll be damned. i’ve heard the screen play was being shopped around and not acted on. i guess that info was old. i wonder if they are doing massive re-writes or sticking to the original.
Well, I’m not familiar with this particular project, but I am familiar with this sort of process.
Quite often, the reason a book doesn’t sell - or get made - is that either the author demands to be tied to it, or demands more control over the production than the producers want to give (what they want to give is zero).
I know that Bill Gibson turned down many offers for Johnny Mnemonic because he wanted to write the screenplay. Since Card is being credited with the screenplay, I’d assume that might have been one holdup. Also, as screenwriter, Card will have a bit more influence on the final product than he would have with a simple book sale. I’ll look forward to it, just as I look forward to this one.
What about Bill Whittle’s screenplay? He made it sound like a near-term relatively likely story instead of the fanciful nuttiness of Ender’s Game or Neuromancer.
Have you heard anything about it?
Nope. Why not ask Bill?
Bill, Baen Books has published Conservative-oriented Science Fiction. Known for it in fact. They have done the occasional conservative present-day fiction as well (State of Disobedience by Tom Kratman).
Just an aside about Enders Game. Card’s been fighting the Hollywoodisation of the book. He’s fighting to keep the ages right, he’s fighting to keep Ender from having a ‘love interest’ and he’s struggling to get them to see that the Battle Room sequences are REALLY important.
Last I heard he’s managed to shut up some of the Hollywood types by combining Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow and making it a quasi-buddy picture.
Pretty much what I expected, jack. He’s trying to exert author control, and they hate that in Hollywood. Writers are regarded as vermin, especially novel writers, who aren’t even part of the Hollywood hierarchy, like screenwriters (who are also regarded as vermin - but “our” vermin).
Hollywood regards the novelist role as simple: sell the book to us with the right to do whatever we want with it, then go away and never bother us again. Anything a novelist tries to do beyond that will tend to put brakes on a project.
This is, by the way, why you see so much “auteur” stuff coming down the pike. Writers become screenwriters, and then “writer/director/producers” in self defense. It’s the only way they can make the movies they want to make.
Of course, you also end up with idiot directors who make a couple of changes in somebody else’s script, and then want a full writer credit, so they can call themselves writer/directors. And get a chunk of the writing money, of course. It’s still all about the benjamins out there. Well, almost all.
Ender’s Game really isn’t that great a prospect for a movie, if you think about it.
Where are you going to find a child actor good enough? You can’t -age- Ender, or you lose a lot of the point of the story. But if your kid isn’t a brilliant genius at acting, he’s just not going to be able to make the audience buy it.
On top of that, talk about breaking the bank in special effects. The Battle Room sequences would be hellishly hard to shoot!
It’d almost work better animated, I’ve thought (not that I don’t have a bias in that direction…)
Do it like Tron.
Avatar, everyone says that–but it’s not the problem. The problem is Bean, Petra, Hot Soup, Peter, Valentine etcetera. You need A LOT of amazing child actors to pull it off.
Beyond that there’s the nudity and violence issues.
And you haven’t even gotten to the Battle Room yet.
And Bill, you’re absolutely right. But at least we can hope that the auteur trend will net us better movies–just look at what Marvel getting it’s licenses back has accomplished.
On a different tack: Imagine how much fun the Vicars of Perpetual Indignation will have with the character of Alai, no matter how he’s handled.
And sometimes they even act in them.
If Hollywood doesn’t screw up Ender’s Game the way it did Starship Troopers, I’ll be completely amazed.
I won’t. I’m sure they’ll manage to find an entirely different way to screw it up.