For a conservative, Adam Bellow has impeccable liberal credentials. He is a longtime resident of the Upper West Side in New York, a son of the novelist Saul Bellow and a book editor in the Manhattan-based (meaning left-wing) publishing industry.
Michael Falco for The New York Times Adam Bellow, a book editor at HarperCollins in New York.But he has also carved out a long career as one of the leading conservatives in the book business, known for his editing of authors like David Brock, Dinesh D’Souza and the former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin.
In January, Mr. Bellow, 53, will take charge of a new line at HarperCollins, called Broadside Books, dedicated to publishing titles of a conservative bent, that HarperCollins is set to announce on Monday.
“I am a conservative in a liberal industry,” Mr. Bellow said on Friday. “And I’ve always considered it to be my function as an editor to bring news from the outside world — which is to say, reality — to the New York political cocoon.”
It used to be that Regnery Publishing, based in Washington, practically had the conservative book market to itself. But even some of the biggest trade publishers decided years ago that it was foolish to overlook authors on the right, who have huge followings and regularly claim spots on the best-seller lists. (One of the latest, Bill O’Reilly’s “ Pinheads and Patriots,” will make its debut at No. 2 on The New York Times’s best-seller list on Sunday.)
So several publishers created conservative imprints of their own. Random House started Crown Forum (whose authors include Ann Coulter and the former senator Fred Thompson); Simon & Schuster has Threshold Editions (Glenn Beck, Jerome R. Corsi); and Penguin Group USA has Sentinel (the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, Matthew Continetti).
Mr. Bellow has been an editor at HarperCollins since 2008, publishing books by Peggy Noonan, Mark Helprin and Ms. Palin, whose next book, “America by Heart,” comes out in November. He previously worked for Doubleday and The Free Press.
As Mr. Bellow imagines it, Broadside Books (“it had a certain combative edge,” he said of the title) will publish books on the culture wars, books of ideas, books of revisionist history, biographies, anthologies, polemical paperbacks and pop-culture books from a conservative point of view.
“There’s no reason why almost any publishing genre that we have can’t be approached from a conservative angle,” he said. “I hesitate to define it too narrowly. We’re on the cusp of an explosion of intellectual activity on the right, and I don’t want to limit the kind of submissions I receive.”
Mr. Bellow has already begun building his list. Beginning in January, Broadside will publish “Death by Liberalism,” by J. R. Dunn; “The Coming Entitlement Bomb,” by Peter Ferrara; and “The Free Market Capitalist’s Survival Guide,” by Jerry Bowyer.
“What I intend to do is uphold a standard of intellectual seriousness on the right,” Mr. Bellow said. “They should be written in a way that they are serious, soberly argued, well researched, and make a respectable case — agree or disagree.”