Making Books: The Politics of Publishing

Polemic, n. A passionate, strongly worded, often controversial argument against or in favor of something. Polemical book: A hot bestseller.

They're everywhere.

And their titles imitate playground taunts. Comic Al Franken's bestselling Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot is parried by Bernard Goldberg's also bestselling 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (And Al Franken is #37) .

Thomas Nelson Books, a venerable Christian publishing house -- the world's largest producer of Bibles -- has established an imprint featuring authors like Michael Savage, a caustic talk radio host with a book called Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder .

ReganBooks, a HarperCollins subsidiary, published two sparring titles on the same day last month: The Case for Hillary Clinton , by Susan Estrich, who's a fan of the senator from New York, and Condi vs. Hillary , co-authored by Dick Morris, who, it's safe to say, is not.

Coming soon in the same vein: Ten Excellent Reasons Not to Join the U.S. Army , a collection of essays with an opening chapter by anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan. And Kate O'Beirne's Women Who Make the World Worse: And How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports .

American polemics date back to pamphleteers like Tom Paine ( Common Sense was a bestseller, too), but it's hard to recall a recent time when the style was this ascendant.

If you can't say anything nice, the current thinking goes, maybe you should be an author.

The Galvanizing Moment

Political opinion has always been a staple, sometimes appearing on publishing houses' general lists, sometimes originating with imprints like Pantheon (once a liberal enclave) or the Free Press (once known for conservative authors). But the revved-up tone is a more contemporary contribution.

In cranking up the volume and the partisanship, "publishers are following a trend, rather than initiating one," says veteran editor Robert Asahina, who acquired books by William Bennett, Allan Bloom and Bill O'Reilly before leaving publishing in 1999. "I don't think you can separate this from the general trend in the media; if anything, publishers lagged behind television, and especially radio."

Indeed, book people often cite an early '90s milestone in polemicism: Judith Regan, then a senior editor at Pocket Books, acquired a book by a recently syndicated radio personality about whom New York publishing people knew very little. "Everyone was skeptical," recalls Will Weisser, a junior publicist at the time. "But she said, 'No, you wait and see. This guy' " -- Rush Limbaugh by name -- " 'is huge in the rest of the country. It's going to be a big book.' And it sold something like two million copies in hardcover -- in 1992, when nothing sold two million copies."

Regan has been amused, in the intervening years, to watch editors who rolled their eyes at Limbaugh scramble to try to duplicate his success. "What people respond to in this culture is loud and brash and pointed and sometimes vulgar -- that's what gets people's attention, on TV and radio and in books," says Regan, who has also published Sean Hannity and Michael Moore. "Shades-of-gray books are very difficult to sell."

Through the Clinton years, as the intensifying shrillness spread to cable television (both Fox News and MSNBC debuted in 1996), a once gentlemanly business discovered profits in polemics.