It’s hardly surprising that Ben Shapiro is working on another book. Publishing remains one of the most lucrative aspects of a successful right-wing media career, and the Daily Wire co-founder is at the top of the list of most sought-after voices. The new book will be a huge success for the commentator, who is already a multiple New York Times bestselling author.
But Shapiro apparently prefers to be the author of the book rather than its publisher.
Just three years after its spectacular launch, the Daily Wire’s publishing arm has largely ceased operations. Alyssa Cordova, who was hired as its head when the publishing company was founded in 2021, is now the media company’s communications officer. Plans for books by Candace Owens never materialized after she was fired from the company. And when Shapiro publishes his next book, it will likely be with a major publisher rather than his own.
“Daily Wire has actually been quite successful with the books we have published compared to the industry, but traditional book publishing is high-effort, low-margin and doesn’t make sense for the pace of our business right now,” Cordova said in an email to Semafor. “We are still able to publish books that make sense for us (for example, specialty books like Johnny the Walrus by Matt Walsh – which has sold over 150,000 copies – and children’s books that tie into our children’s entertainment content), but for now it makes more sense to outsource current non-fiction from our hosts.”
The Daily Wire’s shift in course reflects a broader realization on the right that publishers are increasingly struggling to capture the book sales of the major publishing houses’ conservative labels.
People close to Donald Trump founded Winning Team Publishing in 2021 with the goal of bypassing major publishers and self-publishing books by the former president and his political coalition. However, the company has not had much success selling books not written by its own author.
It’s difficult to say 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 sold 75,000 copies at Hachette, published a book about Winning Team in 2023 that sold 18,000 copies, according to BookScan. Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s 2022 book, published by the Trump family imprint, sold just over 15,500 copies, while his last book, published in June, sold just 6,000 copies. When Kirk published his 2020 book with HarperCollins, it sold nearly 60,000 copies. Others, however, fared even worse: BookScan showed that Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s book, published by Winning Team, sold just under 4,000 copies through major retailers.
The publisher has made real money selling high-priced Trump books as collectors’ items. BookScan said it sold nearly 47,000 copies at $99 each, and 42,000 copies of Trump’s Our journey together for $74.99 per book. That’s a lot of money for a self-published book, but it doesn’t come close to the sales 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 publisher War Room Books hasn’t fared much better. Conservative internet star and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec – currently a New York Times bestseller – has sold 23,000 copies of his book. Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Stop Them) since it was published last month. But other books, such as a biography of Trump’s lawyer Roy Cohn, have sold only a few hundred copies at major online and brick-and-mortar retailers, according to BookScan.
The figures are in stark contrast to the sales of the major publishers, which were much higher during the same period.
Mark Levin’s book, published late last year by Simon & Schuster’s Threshold Editions, has sold more than 310,000 copies. Philip C. McGraw, better known as Dr. Phil, has sold 100,000 copies of his book against cancel culture this year, while Kellyanne Conway’s book has sold nearly 80,000 copies. Fox News personalities Harris Faulkner and Shannon Bream have published books in the past two years that have sold 369,000 and 325,000 copies, respectively, as has Pete Hegseth, who sold more than 300,000 copies of his last two books (all three published by HarperCollins’ imprint Broadside).
Other conservative upstarts have found that the business of nonfiction publishing is tricky and can occasionally be complicated by real-life events.
All Seasons Press, founded by former executives at Simon & Schuster and Hachette, is embroiled in a series of legal battles with some of its own authors, including former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows. The publisher has spent the last year trying to recoup his $350,000 advance for his book, which Meadows allegedly breached his contract with the publisher by telling U.S. special prosecutor Jack Smith that he never believed Trump’s claims of election fraud, which contradicts what he wrote in his 2021 book. The publisher was recently acquired by Skyhorse, another independent publisher that has been snapping up conservative publishing titles including Regnery in recent months.
