A headline teasing a new Buzzfeed publishing story caught my eye this morning, something about a decline in sales of conservative books, so I later clicked the link and read the story. The title and tagline of the piece were way over-hyped:  Killing Conservative Books: The Shocking End Of A Publishing Gold Rush

Reporter McKay Coppins talked with some conservative agents, editors, and publishers who told him that their books aren’t doing well, or at least not as well as they were doing during some halcyon earlier time. They complain that publishing is tough right now, with declining sales, which they gravely lament. Here’s a nugget from Coppins’ piece: “I think the problems in the conservative publishing arena are more acute than in the rest of the industry,” said Keith Urbahn, former chief of staff to Donald Rumsfeld, who now runs a communications firm in Washington and works as a literary agent for conservative authors.” His grandiosity is fairly stunning, and it’s like that throughout the story: this is an example of people living in a bubble who think their problem are worse than everyone else’s. They’ve just noticed that times are tough, and are acting like they discovered a trend.

My response to these agents, editors, and publishers, especially the latter who’ve paid ridiculous advances to officeholders, cited in the story, like $800K for Marcio Rubio: As Republicans are fond of demanding from others, “Tighten your belts.”

My view is that all this right-wing publishing that was doing better until recently reaped the benefit of being on the up side of a boom cycle that has finally begun coming back to earth. These guys have feasted for years creating chimerical boogeymen (the Clintons, Barack Obama, progressives, liberated women, etc.) in their political messaging, then reaping the dividends of it all in many areas of media, including books. For a time this allowed them to inflate their sales among low-information right-wing viewers and readers who knew little and for a long time believed much of what they heard and read. Evidently many of those people are wearying of the ceaseless clown show put on for them, or at any rate, have tired of buying the books.

My response to McKay Coppins: the book business is struggling in a lot of areas these days. Your story took a really myopic view of this situation, by focusing almost entirely on hard times for your chosen subjects, and overlooking what’s going on for all political books, as well as current affairs and history titles, and in many other areas of consumer publishing.

My headline for Coppins and his sources: “Welcome to the book world of 2014!”