Melville House Books

Lynn Vincent and Sarah Palin

PublicAffairs founder Peter Osnos posted some notes on the publication of Sarah Palin‘s Going Rogue last week on The Atlantic ‘s website. “From all accounts, this is her book,” Osnos writes.  ”It is not insignificant that Lynn Vincent, the writer, doesn’t get an author credit.”

It is significant, but not in the way that Osnos means. He’s talking about Palin’s ghostwriter, Lynn Vincent — announced as a “collaborator” by Going Rogue publisher HarperCollins and by Vincent’s former employer, World Magazine — but referred to as the ghostwriter everywhere else: from Time magazine to Bill Buckley‘s conservative National Review (linking in turn to The Daily Beast).

I don’t know what accounts Osnos has been reading but his is the first I’ve seen to suggest that Sarah Palin is entitled to the honorific “author” (I acknowledge that it is a word so devalued as to be shared by O.J. Simpson, Jessica Simpson, and Homer Simpson). Maybe it was Palin super-agent Bob Barnett‘s account, in Variety, that “Every word of the book will be her words” — which does have a biblical ring to it.

Palin thanks Vincent in her acknowledgments for Vincent’s “indispensable help in getting the words on paper.” That’s almost as ambiguous as Osnos’s distinction between the “writer,” Lynn Vincent, and the “author,” Sarah Palin, but at least we know from Palin herself that Vincent was “indispensable.” Not insignificant. (Unless Vincent also wrote the acknowledgment — and given how precisely, unrevealingly written it is, I wouldn’t be surprised.)

But Osnos implies that whatever Vincent may have contributed, it wasn’t enough to justify an author credit. In a sidebar that accompanies his post (and is nearly as long), Osnos’s bio states that among his many other accomplishments he has worked with authors that include Barack Obama, former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, Rosalyn Carter, Nancy Reagan, former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, Boris Yeltsin, Paul Volcker, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Clark Clifford, Sam Donaldson, Morley Safer, Peggy Noonan, Molly Ivins, Stanley Karnow, Jim Lehrer, Muhammad Yunus, Scott McClellan, and Robert McNamara. So, presumably, he knows from ghostwriters. But could Sarah Palin and her handlers have had any other reason for keeping Vincent’s name off the book? (If you type “Lynn Vincent” into the search field on Amazon’s book page, and sort by publication date, Going Rogue is the first result, even though Vincent is not credited anywhere on the page, except in reviews. How do you think that happened?)

Mike Wendland, Communications Pastor at Woodside Bible Church, and professed “big fan” of Sarah Palin, hasn’t had the same trouble sorting this out. He won’t be buying the memoir. Why not? Because, as he explains in a post on his website, “Sarah Palin didn’t really write this book. A ghostwriter by the name of Lyunn [sic] Vincent did. And she won’t — make that can’t — talk. She had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. While Palin may be the subject, Vincent is the writer. Palin told Vincent a bunch of stories. She didn’t write them. Vincent researched the background and gathered the details and described the scenes. The order and structure and ebb and flow of the story is the work of Vincent, not Palin.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself, even if I were a Christian.

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Osnos begins his post by saying that “All concerned: Palin, her publisher HarperCollins, and her agent, Robert Barnett (who she shares with Kennedy, Barack Obama, the Clintons, and George W. Bush), all deserve kudos for pulling off a blockbuster.” [parentheses Osnos] It’s demoralizing that this comes from a man who says he founded PublicAffairs in tribute to the legacy of I.F. Stone. And I don’t mean spying for the Soviets.

Does it matter what the blockbuster says?

Does it matter that its nominal “author” didn’t write it?

Or is it only the pure, value-free exercise in merchandising that we should applaud?

Osnos says “the book itself is a matter of taste. If you like Palin and what she represents, the book will reinforce that feeling. If you think she’s shallow and defensive, the book will certainly support that conviction, but why then would you waste time reading it?” (Rush Limbaugh calls Going Rogue “truly one of the most substantive policy books I’ve read” — just as I thought.)

Osnos knows that it isn’t only her shallowness and defensiveness that rile people about Sarah Palin. Palin knowingly promotes the fictions of the “death panels” and Obama “palling around with terrorists.” As this post at Politico notes, only a few days ago she said of the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate, “I think the public rightfully is still making it an issue. I don’t have a problem with that.”

Palin is a capable huckster and she has the support of a distressingly large number of people. She has seized the chance to enrich herself in a way that would not have been possible had she not abandoned the responsibilities of Alaska’s governor’s office. And as Osnos reports, “whatever else Going Rogue has done, it has made Sarah Palin rich.” Kudos to that.

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The differences between conglomerate publishers — “the publishing industry” — and independent publishers are of little interest to outsiders and are often mischaracterized, even among the publishers themselves.  Size and resources are radically unequal, but the day to day of publishing is much the same whether in midtown Manhattan or in DUMBO. Writers’ complaints about their publishers, big or small, are identical. All publishers are confounded by the transformations being wrought by new technologies, faltering national chains like Borders, and the demise of independent bookselllers. Young people join conglomerates and independents alike for many of the same reasons, and are afforded similar opportunities. Most independent publishers are distributed by conglomerates (Melville House is distributed by Random House) so neither is distribution a defining characteristic. The publication of Going Rogue, however, is a good example of how we differ.

Osnos asks of Going Rogue, if you don’t like Sarah Palin, “why then would you waste time reading it?”  (That’s a trick question. If Sarah Palin were a serious person then reading her book might be valuable whether or not you cared for her or her ideas.) My question is, why would you publish this book? Is HarperCollins nobly performing a public service? Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset once said during a debate that given the opportunity he would have published Mein Kampf (in 1961 he did publish a second book attributed to Hitler) but I don’t think he would have been tempted by Palin.

HarperCollins provides the obvious, unsurprising, answer to my question: Money. Just before last year’s election Harper published the fawning Sarah Palin: A New Kind of Leader (under their “Christian” imprint Zondervan) at the very same time they were publishing Terminatrix: The Sarah Palin Chronicles, a “book” purportedly compiled by the editors of the Wasilla Iron Dog Gazette and consisting of Palin’s head pasted onto photos of various embarrassing human and animal bodies.

Nothing personal Sarah, it’s just business. See, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Harper, has no other allegiances. It’s a public company (NYSE: NWS), and its responsibility is to its shareholders. That duty to make money transcends personal misgivings and hand-wringing about whether it’s wrong to publish self-serving “sloppiness” — Osnos’s euphemism for those tiresomely documented lies and errors that fill Palin’s book. (Or maybe Going Rogue it’s just an example of non-partisan even-handedness, the publisher’s grave responsibility to represent competing points of view, the lifeblood of our hallowed democracy, etc., the kind of thing that makes palling around with terrorists like Robert McNamara necessary.)

Let’s imagine that the make-up of HarperCollins reflects the makeup of the city in which it is headquartered. According to a New York Times report, about 75% of New York City voters voted for Obama. Of course, some percentage of HarperCollins employees probably live in New Jersey or on Long Island — but we’re just imagining. They may have voted for Obama, too. In Manhattan alone, 85% voted for him. Publishing people are stereotypically liberal. What percentage of HarperCollins employees voted for Obama? 75% is a reasonable guess.

So in May, when HarperCollins announced its acquisition of the Palin memoir, a likely majority of its 1400 employees were made party to a deal to publish a woman whose views are, if not repugnant, then certainly contrary to their own. Even Harper editor Adam Bellow, who has been lying down with discredited right-wing dogs (Dinesh D’Souza, anyone?) his entire career, may not have been thrilled. He reportedly co-wrote Terminatrix — and was the in-house editor of Going Rogue. If you’ve followed this sordid story — as in here, and here, and here — you already know that Harper publisher Jonathan Burnham is an out gay man; and that Palin’s collaborator, Lynn Vincent, is an out-and-out homophobe (she has also co-written a book with a white supremacist). We don’t know what Burnham’s private thoughts are but, whatever they are, they wouldn’t matter. Not even the publisher of a conglomerate can act on his convictions.

I know that it’s tediously earnest to suggest that people might be motivated by other things, and might act accordingly, but in reading Osnos’s and other Olympian commentaries you might not realize that there are people right here in America who would not have published this book for any amount of money (if in some alternative universe it had been offered to them). Try to imagine Beacon Press or W.W. Norton or Grove/Atlantic, New Press, Seven Stories, Graywolf, or City Lights — publishing Going Rogue. It’s almost as hard as imagining Izzy Stone heaping kudos on Rupert Murdoch’s machine for selling a million dupes some ghostwritten piece of crap from a right-wing crackpot.

It’s a small thing, but it is the reason some of us will never work for a “big house.” All publishers are opportunistic and all need to make money, but with e.e. cummings we say, “there is some shit I will not eat.”

If you work for an independent publisher you will not agree with every editorial decision, every book will not be a work of genius, there’s no end to the problems — the same problems everybody has — but at least you can have a reasonable expectation that you won’t be busting your ass to enrich your enemies.

Dan O'Connor is the Managing Editor of Melville House.