Conservative indie publishing boom turns to bust

It’s hardly a surprise that Ben Shapiro is working on another book. Publishing remains one of the most lucrative elements of a successful media career on the right, and the Daily Wire co-founder is at the top of the list of in-demand voices. The new book will be a payday for the commentator, already a multiple-time New York Times bestselling author.

But Shapiro would apparently rather be the author of the book than its publisher.

Just three years after its splashy launch, the Daily Wire’s publishing arm has largely wound down its operations. Alyssa Cordova, who was brought on to lead the imprint when it launched in 2021, is now a communications person for the media company. Plans for books by Candace Owens never materialized after she flamed out and parted ways with the company. And when Shapiro publishes his next book, it will likely be with a major publisher, not his own imprint.

“Daily Wire was actually quite successful with the books we did publish by industry standards, but traditional book publishing is high effort and low margin and doesn’t make sense for the pace of our business right now,” Cordova told Semafor in an email. “We are still positioned to publish books in-house that make sense for us (for example, specialty books like Johnny the Walrus by Matt Walsh — which has sold over 150,000 copies — and kids’ books tied with our children’s entertainment content) but, for now, current events nonfiction books by our hosts make more sense to outsource.”

The Daily Wire’s pivot reflects a broader realization on the right, as publishers have struggled to recreate the book sales of the conservative imprints at major publishing houses.

People close to Donald Trump launched Winning Team Publishing in 2021 with the goal of circumventing major publishers and self-publishing books by the former president and members of his political coalition. But the company hasn’t had much luck selling books beyond those written by its signature author.

It’s difficult to tell how many books Winning Team has sold because the publisher sells many of the titles directly to customers, meaning its sales don’t show up in BookScan, which tallies sales from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other retailers. But Fox News host Judge Jeanine Pirro, whose last book with Hachette sold 75,000 copies, published a book via Winning Team in 2023 that sold 18,000, according to BookScan. Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s 2022 book with the Trump family publisher sold just more than 15,500 copies, while his latest book released in June has sold just 6,000. When Kirk released his 2020 book with HarperCollins, it sold nearly 60,000 copies. Still, others did worse: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Winning Team-published book sold just under 4,000 copies in major retailers, per BookScan.

The publisher has brought in some real revenue selling high-priced Trump books as, essentially, collectors’ items. BookScan said it sold nearly 47,000 copies at $99 each, and 42,000 copies of Trump’s Our Journey Together at $74.99 per book. That’s a lot of money for a self-publisher, though it is nowhere close to the sales numbers of other recent presidential memoirs; Barack Obama’s post-White House memoir sold several million copies, while Michelle Obama’s book did even better.

Steve Bannon’s War Room Books imprint hasn’t fared much better. Conservative internet personality and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec — though currently a New York Times bestseller — has sold 23,000 copies of his book Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them) since it was released last month. But other books, like a biography of Trump attorney Roy Cohn, have sold just a few hundred copies in major online and physical retailers, according to BookScan.

The numbers stand in stark contrast to sales by the major imprints, which have been much higher over the same period.

Mark Levin’s book, published by Simon & Schuster’s Threshold Editions late last year, has sold more than 310,000 copies. Philip C. McGraw, better known as Dr. Phil, has sold 100,000 copies of his anti-cancel culture book this year, while Kellyanne Conway’s book is nearing 80,000 copies sold. Fox News personalities Harris Faulkner and Shannon Bream published books over the last two years that cleared 369,000 and 325,000 copies, respectively, as did Pete Hegseth, who has sold more than 300,000 copies of his last two books (all three published with HarperCollins’ imprint Fox News Books).

Other conservative upstarts have found that the nonfiction book publishing business is thorny and can occasionally be complicated by real-life events.

All Seasons Press, started by former executives from Simon & Schuster and Hachette, has been embroiled in a series of lawsuits with some of its own authors, including former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows. The publisher has spent the last year trying to claw back its $350,000 book advance, saying that Meadows violated his contract with the publisher by telling U.S. special prosecutor Jack Smith that he never believed Trump’s election fraud claims, a contradiction of what he wrote in his 2021 book. The publisher was recently acquired by Skyhorse, another independent publisher that over the last several months has hoovered up conservative publishers, including Regnery.

In late 2021, Shapiro’s conservative digital media company, the Daily Wire, announced it was launching a book publishing arm with an ambitious goal: break the stranglehold the traditional book publishing houses had on conservative books.

The strategy, which mirrored the one laid out by the founders of All Seasons Press, was both practical and ideological. Shapiro understood that conservative books made money and represented legitimate revenue for the five major book publishing houses. A company like the Daily Wire, with its large online audience, could use its distribution to sell copies to its audiences without needing promotion in mainstream outlets or major airtime on Fox News, which remains one of the best ways to sell a conservative book.

There are some successful examples of this. The Daily Wire had a hit with a book by one of its personalities, Matt Walsh, who sold 115,000 copies, according to BookScan. I was personally surprised that All Seasons’ Peter Navarro book cracked 80,000 copies sold, given that he has been a more fringe player within the Trump universe.

While the publishing houses had their own conservative labels, conservatives increasingly felt that they were being isolated and censored at major publishers. Staff and other authors were organizing boycotts or raising concerns about conservative authors, particularly those who had stood with Trump or made excuses for his actions on Jan. 6.

Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith, then The New York Times’ media columnist, wrote that internal tensions at the major publishers following the riot on Jan. 6 represented a shift that could change conservative book publishing. New independent publishers could “have their pick of the MAGA litter,” and while conservative authors wouldn’t get the huge advances offered by major publishers, internal uproars from left-leaning staff might slow the publication of major titles to a trickle.

The opposite has happened. The Biden era hasn’t been the kind of boon to the conservative book publishing world that the Obama or Trump administrations were. But conservative imprints at major publishing houses have continued to publish a steady stream of titles that have put up impressive numbers.

And the continued outperformance of books released by the traditional publishers demonstrates the edge that the traditional big players have in author selection, strategy, press, and distribution. The big players’ scale also has allowed them to withstand flops, while the upstart indie publishers still need hits in order to justify the advances they need to woo authors away from the Big Five publishers.