NEW YORK -- The success of Ann Coulter, Michael Savage and other conservative authors has led the publishing industry to turn more to the right.\nThe operators of the Book-of-the-Month Club announced Tuesday that they are forming a new club, as yet unnamed, devoted to works with a conservative point of view. Within the past month, Penguin Putnam and the Crown Publishing Group have started conservative imprints.\n"We don't think we've done enough in this area. We have featured conservative authors like Bill Bennett, but we've never presented them in a coherent way," said Mel Parker, senior vice president and editorial director of Bookspan, which runs the Book-of-the-Month Club and several other clubs.\nBookspan is co-owned by Bertelsmann AG and AOL Time Warner Inc., and its new club is scheduled to begin by early next year. Brad Miner, a former literary editor with the conservative National Review, will serve as editor.\nMiner should have plenty of material. Penguin and Crown, a division of Random House, Inc., each plan to publish about 15 conservative books a year. Regnery Publishing, a conservative press based in Washington, D.C., puts out between 25-30.\nThe new imprints represent a shift in publishing tradition, but not a break. While New York publishing people are often politically liberal, they do welcome best sellers from both sides.\nCrown is publisher of both "Slander," Coulter's best-selling attack on liberals, and David Brock's "Blinded by the Right," a best-selling attack on conservatives, Coulter included. HarperCollins released both Sean Hannity's right-wing "Let Freedom Ring" and Michael Moore's left-wing "Stupid White Men." Around the same time Penguin announced its conservative imprint, it signed up a book co-authored by liberal commentator Eric Alterman and liberal activist Mark Green.\n"I've been in publishing since 1975, and publishers have put out a very broad spectrum of opinions throughout my career," said Adrian Zackheim, publisher of Penguin's conservative imprint. "But the range of conservative opinion was often forced into the margins. Only now is it finding its way back into the mainstream."\nThe rise of conservative books in New York publishing could prove both vindicating and troublesome for Regnery and its sister organization, the Conservative Book Club, which was formed in 1964 and says it has a membership of more than 80,000.\nRegnery has long prided itself on publishing best sellers the New York community ignored, including Bernard Goldberg's "Bias," which accused the television networks of favoring liberals, and Coulter's "High Crimes and Misdemeanors," which called for President Clinton's impeachment. Now, Regnery faces increasing competition from companies able to pay more.
"I expect there will be a feeding frenzy for certain books, and I expect New York will overpay for some of those books and write the kinds of big checks we won't be willing to write," said Marji Ross, president and publisher of Regnery.\nRoss said she is more concerned about the new book club. Although Bookspan says it hasn't decided on a marketing strategy, it will almost surely go after members of the Conservative Book Club.\nRoss said she worries that Bookspan will offer lower prices, but says Regnery is only beginning to talk about how to respond.\n"That will be a harder business challenge than competing for writers," she said. "It's hard to imagine why you should belong to two book clubs"
