Making Unnecessary Enemies

Editor's Note: This is David Corn's response to a piece Jennifer Nix wrote last week about progressive authors signing book contracts with corporate publishers.

You have a rather funny way of doing business.

That's the one-line email I sent to Jennifer Nix, editor-at-large of Chelsea Green Publishing, last week. And I never heard back from her.

What prompted my note to her was a piece she wrote for AlterNet that chided Michael Moore, Al Franken, Amy Goodman and me for having published our books with corporate publishers. The article, entitled "Sleeping with the Enemy," was billed as "the opening salvo at the company's soon-to-be-launched weblog." I was tempted to ignore her acting-out article. But it received some pickup on other sites. So allow me to reply.

Nix started her piece this way:

I've got an invitation for all progressive authors out there.

How about putting your money and ideas where your mouths are? Why not work with independent book publishers to share with the public your thoughts about progressive politics, social justice, sustainability and media reform ... instead of lining the pockets of the corporate publishers (and ultimately the five or ten rich white men who control nearly every media message we read and hear in the U.S. today).

Well, I have an invitation for Nix. How about approaching potential colleagues in a reasonable fashion – rather than attacking them – if you want to run a successful progressive-minded business?

She goes on:

I'd like to ask Amy Goodman why she published her last book, The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media that Love Them, with Disney-owned Hyperion.

Michael Moore: What possessed you to make money for Rupert Murdoch by publishing your book, Stupid White Men, with ReganBooks/HarperCollins, and to then go to AOL/Time Warner's Warner Books with Dude! Where's My Country?, before jumping to a third corporate ship, Viacom's Simon & Schuster, to publish your latest offering, Will They Ever Trust Us Again?

David Corn: When you were underscoring the media's role in spreading W.'s deceptions, in The Lies of George W. Bush, why did you choose not only to go with a corporate-owned publisher, but with Crown – for years now, a member of the German-owned Bertelsmann AG conglomerate, which helped to spread anti-Semitic literature and Nazi propaganda in the years leading up to and during WWII?

Al Franken: When publishing Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, why did you make money for Dutton, a cog in the wheel of British-owned media giant Pearson, rather than help to reform American media by making a commitment to and money for an independent American publisher? And, finally, I really hate to point out to populist Jim Hightower that he, too, made money for that same Brit media giant, by going with another of Pearson's holdings, Viking, when he published his latest book, Let's Stop Beating Around the Bush.

Come on, people. Is it all about the big advances? Hear this: a big advance does not a bestseller make. It should be about how many people buy your book.

Pardon the royalties out of me. But advances do matter – at least to me. Unlike Moore and Franken, I am not a millionaire. (I am assuming they are, and they better be, given the sales of their books and movies.) I have worked for 18 years (yikes!) at The Nation, making a salary well below my peers in mainstream journalism. (I have also written for AlterNet, which hardly pays Vanity Fair rates.) I have two small daughters. To complete The Lies of George W. Bush in nine months (while still working my day job), I had to take time away from my family. My hard-working wife picked up plenty of slack. The only way I could justify such a project was to guarantee it made economic sense for my family.