Right-wingers need book larnin'

When my agent was marching me around Manhattan to major publishers, trying to sell them on "Crunchy Cons," I remember going to the offices of one of the biggest publishers in the country to have an audience with an acquisitions editor. This was a man of real experience, but he clearly had no idea what I was talking about with this book. To him, "conservative book" meant Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh. You could tell that he thought that the the conservative book audience were a great unwashed mob that wanted red meat and nothing but. I may as well have been talking to a Hapsburg prince.

That fellow came to mind today when I read the following comments by former US representative Patricia Schroeder, who is -- get this -- a major figure in US publishing:

Liberals read more books than conservatives. The head of the book publishing industry's trade group says she knows why—and there's little flattering about conservative readers in her explanation.

"The Karl Roves of the world have built a generation that just wants a couple slogans: 'No, don't raise my taxes, no new taxes,'" Pat Schroeder, president of the American Association of Publishers, said in a recent interview. "It's pretty hard to write a book saying, 'No new taxes, no new taxes, no new taxes' on every page."

Schroeder, who as a Colorado Democrat was once one of Congress' most liberal House members, was responding to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll that found people who consider themselves liberals are more prodigious book readers than conservatives.

She said liberals tend to be policy wonks who "can't say anything in less than paragraphs. We really want the whole picture, want to peel the onion."

Oh brother, how incredibly self-serving. But you know, this response from the same story wasn't entirely helpful:

"As head of a book publishing association, she probably shouldn't malign any readers," said Mary Matalin, a GOP strategist who oversees a line of books by conservative authors, Threshold, at Simon & Schuster. Matalin said conservatives and others aren't necessarily reading less, but are getting more information online and from magazines.

Mary Matalin's imprint has not exactly been a success, to put it mildly (here's one notorious example, but a friend in publishing tells me that her books have been financial disasters). I mean, look, if you're going to publish books for conservatives, you ought to publish books that conservatives might actually want to read.