Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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The “Big Five” publishing houses — Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins, and Penguin Random House — wield enormous global power, controlling about 80 percent of the English-language trade publishing market.
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Around 2002, seeing a market that they hadn’t yet tapped and inspired by the success of conservative publisher Regnery, the top four of the Big Five began to aggressively court the Fox News market. Between 2002 and 2010, each set up a dedicated conservative imprint.
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In 2002, Random House established Crown Forum (now just Forum) “as a way to inform and contribute to the national dialogue and political discourse.” Forum now boasts that it is “one of the leading publishers of politically conservative authors and points of view.”
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Penguin set up Sentinel in 2003, which they describe as “a dedicated conservative imprint within Penguin Group [that] publishes a wide variety of right-of-center books on subjects like politics, history, public policy, culture, religion, and international relations.”
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Hachette set up Center Street, whose authors include Donald Trump Jr, Pete Hegseth, Jeanine Pirro, Newt Gingrich, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Kristi Noem, followed in 2005 by Simon & Schuster’s Threshold. The Threshold mission statement explains that it is “proud to have published some of the most influential and controversial political leaders of our time,” including Dick Cheney, Donald Trump, Karl Rove, and John Bolton, not to mention “some of the most exciting and controversial broadcasters in media today,” such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Alex Marlow, editor in chief of Breitbart News Network.
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In 2010, HarperCollins tried to claim its share of the market with Broadside Books, publishing the likes of Peggy Noonan, Ron DeSantis, Christopher Rufo, Tomi Lahren, Jared Kushner, and Vivek Ramaswamy.
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As the founding executive director of Broadside Books put it, they publish books by authors like Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity “whose aim is to whip the Republican base into a froth, and get rich in the process.” Each of the Big Five operates as part of what New York Times journalist Jim Rutenberg calls “the Incitement Industry.”
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It’s true that the major companies don’t want titles that promote misogyny and white supremacy to spoil the image of their regular literary output. And they will happily publish authors from the Left if they think the books will make them money.
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S&S cancelled the book because of his abhorrent views on sex with minors, which made even right-wingers think twice about hosting him at their events. For Simon & Schuster, Yiannopoulos’s history of xenophobia, misogyny, and hate speech was not the problem. They could no longer see a way to profit from his work.