Closed books: conservatism benefited over the last decade from the inroads it made in the world of publishing. No more.

Between the end of World War II and the beginning of the Reagan Presidency, liberals had a virtual lock on America's cultural and intellectual outlets. It was only during the post-1980 conservative renaissance that the Right came to dominate some media (talk radio, direct mail) and make impressive inroads in others. In particular, book publishing went from a sleepy industry dominated by the academic Left to a dynamic, big-money business that was suddenly willing to give conservative books a chance, as long as they contributed to the bottom line. But recent, radical changes in the book business have altered the conditions that allowed these conservative gains. In the future, we can expect to see far fewer books by conservative academics, intellectuals, and journalists on the market -- and probably a corresponding reduction in conservative firepower.

American publishers are divided into two categories. The New York corporate publishing world consists of Bantam, Doubleday, Dell (which recently announced that it is buying Random House to create the largest publishing house in the U.S.), Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Warner Books, Penguin - Putnam, Norton, and a few others. This cohort publishes half the titles available at the typical Barnes & Noble or Borders superstore; their wares might make up 75 per cent of the stock at a smaller chain store like WaldenBooks or B. Dalton, and an even higher percentage at warehouse stores (like Price Club), which are capturing a rapidly growing share of the book market.

The second category is more diffuse. Under the catch-all title of "independent publishers" is included everything from academic and university presses to niche and specialty publishers concentrating on one or two topics (like science or sports) or genres (like romance novels). While some of their books may appear on the shelves of the large chain stores, these small players seldom reach a mass audience. They are content publishing what the industry refers to as "mid-list" books.

The trait that mid-list books, whether scholarly or popular, have in common is that they tend not to make a lot of money for either the publisher or the author. Traditionally, the publishing industry didn't care. Authors wrote books to make a meaningful contribution to public knowledge, or for ego gratification, or to get tenure. Publishers paid authors very little up front, and while the publishers made only a few dollars on each title, in the aggregate they realized adequate -- if not spectacular -- profits.

But large companies like Viacom (the current owners of Simon & Schuster), News Corp. (HarperCollins), and Time-Warner (Warner Books and Little, Brown) did not enter publishing to make adequate returns; and celebrity authors are in it for the money, not for the fame. The corporate chieftains looked at the publishing world and saw only the best-sellers. What would happen, they asked, if a company solely published books that had a chance to be best-sellers? With visions of publishing two hundred Stephen King novels each year, the media and entertainment companies set about to remake book publishing in the image of Hollywood: the only books that matter are those that become hits; all the rest are dogs.

Of course, no one wants to be known as the guy who publishes dogs. So the directive came down in publishing houses all over New York: Fewer mid-list books, more best-sellers. Stop wasting the company's money on all those treatises by unknown academics (like, say, Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind), think-tank geeks, journalists at small-circulation magazines, and other assorted oddballs. Publish only books with obvious wide commercial appeal. Leave the niche titles for the independent publishers.

This process began just in the last five years, and not without resistance from the editors at these houses, most of whom still hold to the quaint notion that books are, or should be, of lasting quality. Most editors are happy to publish Lite books, which are presumed to have wide audiences, as long as their bosses let them publish real books as well. So a precarious bargain has been struck, and editors may still acquire and develop a few mid-list books. However, with fewer opportunities they will usually choose ones that jibe with their personal aesthetic or political agenda.

The 1980s and early '90s could be called the heyday of conservatives in publishing. Supported by a handful of exceptional New York editors, most notably the late Erwin Glikes at The Free Press and his counterpart at Basic Books, the late Martin Kessler (who, despite his liberal politics, was first and foremost committed to open debate of serious ideas), conservative intellectuals published a number of books that were both commercially successful and ideologically important. Losing Ground by Charles Murray; The Tempting of America by Robert Bork; The End of History and The Last Man by Francis Fukuyama; numerous books by Thomas Sowell; The Moral Sense by James Q. Wilson; Out of the Barrio by Linda Chavez; Illiberal Education by Dinesh D'Souza -- all these did more than surprise their publishers by selling well. They also provided crucial ideological ammunition for the conservative movement, and helped persuade countless Americans that conservatism was a legitimate alternative to the postwar liberal consensus. It is fair to argue that the groundwork for the Republican takeover of Congress was laid by these publishing successes. They certainly shook up the liberal media and academia.

But with the changes in the publishing business, works like these will become exceedingly rare. Among other reasons, there are not all that many editors at the big New York publishers, and there is even less diversity among them. Virtually all of them are white; most of them are women; and practically every last one of them is a liberal (the few conservatives and principled liberals have either died or been purged). These are not people who are going to squander what little editorial freedom they have left on publishing unknown conservative writers; instead, they will seek out the familiar cast of academic feminists, left-wing cranks, and former government bureaucrats.

Not all conservative authors will find themselves out in the cold. Celebrities like Rush Limbaugh, William Bennett, George Will, and Newt Gingrich will find willing publishers as long as they remain celebrities. And several bright stars already under contract will see their books out soon, including Reason editor Virginia Postrel, the Manhattan Institute's Wendy Shalit, and NR's John Miller. But from here on out, most less-well-known conservatives can give up on having their books published in New York.

The Free Press -- a stalwart for conservative and contrarian liberal ideas for a decade, first under Erwin Glikes, then under Adam Bellow -- is being reinvented as a more conventional publisher, losing its edge and its instinct for big, controversial issues. Basic Books, which published so many influential works by conservatives, has been purchased by an independent outfit called The Perseus Group. Perseus, based in Washington, D.C., has attempted to corner the market on mid-list books on intellectual topics by buying or establishing several imprints, including Civitas (headed by Harvard celebrity prof Henry Louis Gates), New Republic Books, and Public Affairs. Under this corporate umbrella, Basic will concentrate on history, science, and the humanities; politics and related subjects will be the province of Public Affairs, whose publisher, Peter Osnos, was formerly head of Times Books. There he published classics like Bill Clinton's Putting People First; the book version of the ClintonCare plan; and Sen. Bob Packwood's Secret Diary (which was a commercial flop). It isn't hard to guess where that leaves conservative authors.

Some university presses are willing to take on conservative projects, but for the most part their distribution and marketing pale beside the resources available to commercial publishers. Not much good in publishing a book if no one knows about it.

Regnery Publishing has had dramatic success with conservative books over the years, and will probably continue to do so. But Regnery is an explicitly conservative house -- its books are for the most part intended not to persuade non-believers, but rather to sell in large quantities to the converted. Regnery's most recent best-sellers were FBI agent Gary Aldrich's problematic White House memoir, Unlimited Access, and an attack on O. J. Simpson, Murder in Brentwood, by the even more problematic Mark Fuhrman. Aldrich didn't convince a single American not to vote for Bill Clinton, and Fuhrman was more interested in self-vindication than in advancing the public good.

The special importance of the conservative books put out by houses like The Free Press and Basic Books is that they spoke to people across the political spectrum. Conservatives cheered D'Souza's Illiberal Education. Moderates respected it, and many found themselves in general agreement. Liberals hated the book, but were compelled to argue with its premises and conclusions, rather than ignoring them. D'Souza succeeded in reorienting the whole debate about multiculturalism on campus and in society generally.

Other conservative books were also simultaneously controversial and successful because they broke new ground. In The Real Anita Hill, David Brock was one of the first conservatives to use the favorite weapon of progressive muckrakers, investigative journalism, in this case against a left-wing icon. And Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve tackled a big question -- what role heredity might play in class differences -- which denizens of the Ivory Tower had failed to ask, largely because from their academic viewpoint it didn't even look like a question. The strength of conservative intellectuals has been their willingness to take up the hard issues that the establishment was -- and is -- afraid to touch.

And it is this that the conservative movement stands to lose if it is successfully frozen out of mainstream publishing. Books were the one way most conservatives had of reaching the public mind directly, without the censorship of liberal journalists. People could read Murray's Losing Ground and make up their own minds about the effect of Great Society programs on the urban poor, or Brock's book and make their own judgment about Anita Hill.

WITH the loss of access to mainstream trade publishing channels, what can conservatives do? A conservative takeover of the New York publishing establishment is fun to contemplate (Why doesn't Richard Scaife buy The New Yorker?) but not very practical. Besides, books and magazines are becoming old media. The rapid growth of the Internet, and the democratization made possible by the invention of desktop publishing, give conservatives the opportunity to get ahead of the curve for once. Let the liberals have Barnes & Noble. Just as conservatives took over and revitalized talk radio (both intellectually and commercially) after liberals established a monopoly on television news, it's time to look for fresh alternatives in both new technology and old. Conservatives should adopt the World Wide Web as the next intellectual battleground, taking on digital magazines like Slate and Salon with competing sites that offer more substance and intellectual excitement.

To be sure, conservatives can make their own forays into hardcover books (author Peter Collier, with some backing from the Bradley Foundation, is in the process of starting up a small intellectual press that will publish interesting books across the political and cultural spectrum), but at the same time they should explore alternatives -- for example, short, topical pamphlets. Publishing inexpensive broadsides would mark a return to the roots of intellectual publishing, feeding the perennial American appetite for contact with the great questions about American culture and Western civilization with an affordable, populist product. Collier and his colleague at the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, David Horowitz, have already experimented with a handful of pamphlets, with promising results. All it takes is some energy and imagination, born of the frustration of being locked out of yet one more channel of the mainstream culture.