that we want to be part of. we are pretty good at rushing those books out and still making them verysuccessful >> as you know there's a national conversation now about sexual harassment . if you decided today to put a book out on that topic , how quickly and what would be the process? >> it all depends of course on who's writing it and how quickly they can write it.

we love to collaborate with our authors to help them write things quickly if that's important, which obviously if you have a breaking issue like this, it can be important so we can get a book turned around. we've had books that havebeen signed , delivered within 30 days and in the bookstores two months later. >> two months, what happens in that two months? >> a lotof things happen very quickly. within those two months we need to edit, layout, design, print, ship, market , get those books on the shelves. but that's possible if you have a good track record for doing that well. if you have good relationships both with your printer but also with your retail partners, which we do. and if you have a brand that is known for current events, quick moving books.

>> where are your books printed? >> they are printed at lake books which is a printer located in chicago. they do almost all of our printing. there are wonderful partner, we've worked with them for several years and they believe in the kind of books we are doing but they are very good at getting books turned around quickly and getting really good quality books and they work for a lot of other publishers as well and of course, being centrally located helps to because you then you cannot only get books to our warehouse but in some cases if we have a really fast-moving book, we might ship those books directly from our printer to the bookstore. >> margie ross, is there a book big warehouse somewhere with thousands of thousands of regnery books?

>> there's a big warehouse right now in jackson tennessee that holds all of our books. we partner with ingram as our distributor and they handle all of the warehousing, shipping and fulfillment of all of our books throughout the country and we sell our books at all the places people think of buying books. barnes and noble of course, amazon and books a million but also costco and walmart and djs and sam's club and airport stores and kroger's and places that keep a stable of books because of the type of books you publish as anyone ever said no, we will not put that book in our bookstore? >> yes they have. i think that by and large, all the accounts, all the big national retailers are a very savvy about serving a wide market and they understand

that there are people from both sides of the eye. in their stores and shop online and they want to make sure they are serving those people. i think it is more true in the independent stores where those stores are curated to serve maybe a local market and a very specific customer base, that that store knows particularly well and there are definitely some of those stores that don't serve a conservative marketplace and don't want to have conservative books in their stores. >> looking at some of the titles and some of the designs on the covers, on the bookshelf behind you, what goes into that? somehow the authors name in big letters, some have

images, some have pictures. >> we have a lot of fun coming up with titles and designing jackets and it's a very important part, i think, of a publishers job is to help an author , with a title and, with the right jacket. i think there's a great art to that that can help enormously in a book's success. some of the things that we think about when we come up with and help brainstorm on titles is making sure there are titles that are not only unique and distinctive but also that are titles can be a phrase or a word that becomes a part of the conversation about the book. so when we for instance came up with ed klein, came up with the title all out war, we knew that was not only a sort of headline grabbing title, but it was also a phrase that really describes what our author believes is happening and also what our audience suspects is

happening. there are a lot of people that the belief, there's an all out war being waged against this president and against this administration with the desire to take him down both politically and personally. and it's not just sort of a typical partisan battle, but it is something on a totally maybe unprecedented but certainly larger scale that is probably best described as all out war and when we think about our media campaign with our author, we like to think about ways that the title of the book could become part of that media discussion. and that, i think can make a very powerful title because i think it's more effective than just saying in my book

all out war, as you read in my book all out war, but to actually talk about the all out war that's going on and have become a phrase that resonates with our market, that's one of the ways that we think about coming up with powerful titles. now as for jackets, sometimes we do what we call a facebook which is we know we have a celebrity author, we want their face on the cover of the book and that works when you have an author who is very beloved or very well-known with the audience. and the job of a jacket is to get in our view, it's the job of a jacket to get the prospective buyer to reach out and grab the book. to want to be drawn to that book. in some cases is because they are drawn to the picture of someone they know. in other cases, it's because

they are drawn to what we try to convey as the emotional message of the book. so we want our book jackets to convey in every way in the title, in the design, in the image, in the colors, in the font, and the layout, the emotional message of the book . whether that is fear, whether that is anger, whether that is hope, whether that is reassurance or whether that is outrage. >> primarily my responsibilities are to oversee, create and design the high profile covers of all of our books. we have i think five imprints starting with the political and current events and faith imprints, the history imprints and we recently got into the fiction imprint in the lastyear now . and i'm quite sure we've got

another one, we do the children's imprints, that's another one.basically all the high profile colors i do. i have a great team of designers who help me out and i think they have a couple pieces up here. and then i also direct and watch over the interiors to make sure the typography is consistent with the covers. >> why would a sebastian orca get a cover like that while george gilder will get like that? >> i think what is different, that's a good question. i don't think george gilder is currently as visual as sebastian gord is. he was chief strategist and he's basically in this photograph is giving one of his famous speeches to the cia. so we think that putting him on the cover in one of his

domains is, he basically is explaining why we fight. so everybody is familiar with google. this was just one of the many solutions for google. we had google upside down, we had another visual of that. but now we are kind of thinking that this is really about the economy so here's another which is all about going and now we're thinking they be the google upside down will be played by google and the block chain economy so your were just two versions of that one. >> as that one been decided yet? >> know. that's the tough thing for this wall. this is all still to be fleshed out. among these things are going to be published like this one for karen pentz and marlon brando, that's pretty much done. >> there is that book about the bunny rabbit.

>> that's the vice presidents bunny rabbit, correct. >> who has input into a high profile book like that? >> this was all margie. this was all margie ross, the publisher. this was her baby and it was quite a surprise and quite a big surprise when she informed us all that she landed karen pentz. and it was great. we all, alyssa, myself and margie to the vice president's house and met with him and did a signing of the bunny on the contract and it was quite exciting. >> is that one of karen pence's illustrations on the front? >> yes, and this is one of those situations where it helps to be the art director on this because this is to illustrations. the original illustration is very much saturated and this

was a totally separate illustration but we wanted to give a sense of place. where is this? this is the vice president house. i took the scan of her original house which is going to be inside and screened it back and put the subject, marlon the bunny in front. i really like that. it's a very good illustrator. verysurprising, good illustrator . >> and you put a newt gingrich or and and coulter or a sebastian orca photo on the front of a book, what are you saying? >> that they are well known. that they are celebrity. we have a lot of people. there's a book by michael, very famous pr your guru, sebastian obviously. you could even consider this to be a faith book because everybody knows these young men. >> so here is another, it's not really facebook because he's not be author but this

is about hope and the lost shepherd, misleading the catholic church. so we often do face books when they are high profile authors. >> whatever history titles, the 10 biggest civil war blunders. what's the dutiful. >> and in the typeset is also relatively good. >> is not unique to the. and that's what makes it appealing. one of the things, i think this is all about my process, i'm literally turn the internet upside down looking for images and source material and i will go back to the civil war and literally google civil war plots and look up and say what did they use during the civil war to use as typography? this was a beautiful painting and it goes around the entire back cover and with all the

millions and millions of photographs and images and paintings out there. this one just really satisfies what all the destruction and the mistakes and everything, with all the men falling down and just beautiful. beautiful cover. >> and author like stephen, his name is bigger than the title. an author like nancy houston or where her name is smaller than the font. >> stephen as a very strong filing of fiction with readers and you will see that almost across all fiction books. they reach a book because of the author is. and for houston it's not so well-known to the subject matter for the audience, the christian audience is probably more important. pretty self-explanatory there and that goes along almost if i have any others. even limbaugh, everybody knows david limbaugh. but his goes, even though

they are equally incised, we top to bottom, left to right so we want to see him first. especially if he's on the shelf. >> does david limbaugh have a say in how that cover looks? >> david limbaugh says he loves everything we do and i'm not kidding. he absolutely loved it. >> does and coulter have a say in everything we do? >> the very first book i did for her, i've only been here three years and i will admit i didn't even know who ann coulter was three years ago. my very first book, one of them was ann coulter book and i had to ask myself doing my research, why do all of her books look like sex in the city? yes, she's attractive.

very thin, nice body, you know. i don't want sex. i want it to be about ann coulter's brain. the first book i did was, and it broke away from her mold was trust your faith. and the look on her face basically follows you everywhere. the eyes. she said it was her best book ever, best cover ever so i was happy with that. >> john caruso, if we went into a bookstore, could we pick out your covers? >> no. because every single cover of mine is unique to the tone of the author and the contextual elements inside. everything. everybody says wow, they're so different. you could look at the whole bookshelf and see every one of them is different. the only thing you could say is wow, they are all beautifully clean, beautiful

images, beautiful typography and i think that's the hallmark if you will of a good cover. it is appropriate for the subject matter. >> does it help to have an author go on tour to sell the book or is, how have you incorporated social media in marketing? >> for many years, authors regularly went on whistle stop tours to promote their books. and we probably were the first big publisher that pulled the plug on that and said that is not a worthwhile thing to do. there is no leverage in that. we said, an author can reach 100 times, of thousand times, 10,000 times as many people sitting in their living room in their pajamas doing talk radio as they can going out on tour and speaking to people in person. so what we decided was we would focus on earned media, television, radio, and print

and now that's digital print. and in person events that we wanted our authors to do or only those that we could leverage by having media like c-span cover us. if we knew that media coverage would be added to the equation for a live event, then it would be worth it but in most cases, just an in person book signing and a multi-city tour was not worth the time and expense and effort. now, we have definitely redeployed those resources, not only into earned media but also into social media as you mentioned and that's become a very important part of our marketing campaign for our books . again, for many years publishers talked about

personal media and whenever they were asked well, does it sell books? they would say we have no idea or how do you know, how you track the results or how do you know this is working? we don't know, we just think we need to do it. only in the past i think 18 months that certainly we have been able to justify leaning in to social media in a big way. and now, social media has become a very important part of our marketing campaign because it is now the way, we feel, to build word-of-mouth. it is the new word-of-mouth mechanism for a book. and that's not to say that hasn't been true for a long time but i think we did reach a tipping point in the past couple of years where because so many people are now in the habit of buying books online

and buying everything online, people are comfortable getting their recommendations and discovering new books and new authors through social media. so we used that in a number of different ways, whether that's facebook, whether it's google ads, whether it's amazon source adds, either it's twitter. we use all those things whether it's in the gram, all of those things are powerful vehicles for driving word-of-mouth, driving social media. >> nicole and alyssa cordova, every book according to markey ross as its own marketing and publicity strategy. how do you develop that? >> we start by, each book has a publicist assigned to it and we talked to editorial.

we look at what it is about this book that's going to sell. that the news is going to want to talk about. it's going to make people click links. we put together a plan and a strategy and a lot of that is what's tied to happening in the news that's relevant to the topic of the book. we get on a call with the author, we talked it out. ãout some ideas and then usually half of it works out if we are lucky so we are really collaborative here as a team and we bringan author and a lot of their involvement . >> it's important to click on a link, i heard. >> yes, i think a lot of, we do in the digital marketing side is on facebook and we do it a lot on facebook. people are sort of immune to

advertising that looks like advertising so a lot of our job is figuring out how to put out content about the book and get people driving traffic to amazon and our website, driving traffic to do media articles but without looking like spam. so to do that, we have to make sure we are talking about what our target market cares about and just rather than telling them this is a new book that you don't care about now but you should. we talk about what they already are concerned about, already thinking about so that this book fits into that framework. >> give us a framework of a recent marketing campaign? >> okay. well, we had world war ii books, the last fighter pilot came out. that was july which is very exciting for us because the subject of the book, jerry yellin, flew the last comment mission in world war ii and is just a fantastic person.

he goes for before audiences, we sent him to la. the american library association contest and he charmed the librarians there so we had a cameraman out the florida and got footage of him telling his stories. we got together a four-minute, very quick video , three subtitles on it and put that on facebook and pushed it out to a couple different audiences. our core audience, we've got a great custom audience , marketing on facebook and world war ii audiences and now has over 2 million views on facebook, shared over 30,000 times. it's something that we are really proud of and i think drives a lot of traffic to amazon. >> so how much of that was byron? >> i don't know. we only put like under $1000 behind this because we tried to spend money carefully. we don't have moody movie studio marketing budget. so we are smart about how we

spend it and that $700 because of the shares, and up reaching a huge audience. >> alyssa cordova, what was your role in promoting that book? >> my team and i, we were primarily on the media, the news driven side . for us with that book what we captured was what a special treat it was to have a first hand account from a living world war ii veteran who flew such an incredible mission and had such an incredible life story during the war. really targeting specific outlets that he believed would really grab onto the story which they did and we got some great profile pieces. we got a huge profile piece on jerry yellin in the new york post the fourth of july so it was a great prelaunch lead into that and that on top of the video, it all married together so well because it was one of those,

those ideal situations where it felt like everywhere someone turned, they were hearing about this incredible story which is really made the book successful. >> how closely do you work together. >> really closely because our goal as we said is to try to have the surround sound during launch where people are hearing about the book on the radio, maybe seeing it on tv and then seeing it on facebook, seeing the post about it so we coordinate well and then there's a great mediapart of my job . take it and package it and push it out to our audiences. >> so a book like that, an unknown story for the most part until the book came out, versus pr for a newt gingrich, which is tougher?

>> that's an interesting question. it depends on what aspect you are talking about.for someone like newt gingrich, it's easy to get news on the media because he's already on tv, people already want to hear what he's talking about. the challenge is to get on the book and not commentary on what's happening in the news so working on how you pick it that conversation naturally so that it doesn't just sound like you are talking a book. but actually sounds relevant to what's happening in the news. >> when you start thinking about a campaign for a book? >> it depends across our imprints, something like our history books, our facebook, we've got a longer lead time with fiction. when the author, i mean, as soon as we sign a book we're thinking about how we positioning and who our target market is because another part of the marketing job is to help our sales team get excited about the book. that's our first step and then when the author turns in the manuscript, then we start thinking, and bring them in

so it's about six months out but then with our big political books which are written on a deadline to include the latest news, we're on a short timeline and that's part of what we do well and what makes us unique is we know our audience so well that we are able to put together a marketing plan and really i would say execute a great loss within a couple of months . >> i think nicole mentioned something for us, we are looking at promotion from the moment we receive a proposal. it's such a big part of our strategy. it's not only is this a good book, is this a book we can sell, is this a book that our market will like. is this a book the media will like or play well on social media though that conversation and that process starts from the very beginning. >> you brought this up but the news cycle affects what

you do. >> definitely. >> and it's the most challenging because it takes time to create a book so when you sign something, it's something as relevant in the news at that time, who knows in six months or a year if that's going to be important? on the flip side, you could have a book and we've had this multiple times where it's incredibly relevant and then something changes the week before that nobody expected or anticipated that changes the whole positioning and you have to be able to ride that wave or navigate around that. >> you find that the mainstream media is willing to hear your pitch, your message? >> it depends on the subject and the authors. our experience is even if the mainstream media is

interested or wants to talk about it, that's not really what a lot of our market watches so we get a lot of exposure but exposure doesn't always equal sales so our motto here is to fish where the fish are so we work primarily with the media outlets where our buyers are getting their news and information. >> is regnery profitable? and pretty profitable for a front driven company to be. most publishing business rely on their backlist, books that have been published previously to provide most of their revenue, and certainly most of their profit. so it's a little bit of a high wire act for a front left driven company like regnery to grow and be successful and to be profitable but i think we've been able to be successful and profitable all these years because we are very focused on focused on serving

our market, understanding who our audience is, who our readers are and being careful not to try to do every different kind of book under the sun. when i started in the publishing business, we go to publishing conferences and i would meet people and they would say i run xyz publishing and i'd say that's fascinating, what kind of books do you do? it was astonishing to me how many people would say we do a little and everything. and i wanted to say, that doesn't seem like a good business model to me. >> i believe in doing what you are good at. and figuring out what you are good at and doing more ofthat . and then growing by asking what would readers that we know how to reach and that like our books, what are the kinds of books they like. what are the categories of books they read. what else can we sell them. when we sold them all the current events and

conservative political books we can sell them. in a given year, what other might they have money in to say gosh, i like history, i like biography, i have children and grandchildren who like their books with. i'm, i believe in founding principles and i have a strong faith. i'd like to buy books on that as well. and that's been our recipe for growth. >> give us an idea of your revenues. >> phil of course is a large company and so we report our results every quarter and that's been an interesting change for us at regnery, not only to be part of a publicly traded company but also to be , to think of our business as a business which puts the book publishing business, it's certainly not built to

be a quarterly business. but we publish our business, it's been growing steadily and our net sales for the book publishing business are around $15 million a year and growing. >> as president and publisher, how much of your day is spent on the business end as opposed to the editorial? >> most of my day is spent on the business side. by that, i mean that broadly. it's spent not only on running the business of the company but also taking about the sales and marketing and promotion of our books. it's spent on thinking about acquiring new authors and signing up authors which of course is essential to the business success and livelihood and so i spend a lot of time thinking about

the growth and the future of regnery and whether that means selling more copies of the books we have or signing up new problem projects for us to do. that's my priority. >> jerry yellin you mentioned, his video "the last fighter pilot", 3 million views. that translate into sales? >> yes it did. it's been one of the most successful books in our regnery history line. >> we started regnery history about three years ago, we launched our first book and basically we did it as a reaction to our need ora backlist . regnery political has always been current events and the political books, a certain point of view but the books don't last more than two or three years so we wanted something that would stay on

the shelf though we've done a couple history books, one off history books and they were successful and they seemed to mesh with what we do, there was overlap with the audience so now we do history books and not just history for conservatives, not political history, it's pretty much great history. we have authors from different points of view but definitely from a pro-america perspective. we wouldn't do anything that and i american but we do a lot of military history, biography and general history and we do fun stuff. one of our best selling books is called breaking with the saints and that's a book written by a theology professor at waco and he is straight out of central casting for madmen but he also knows his catholic literature so we pair the two and he worked wrote this book called the center's guide to a holy happy hour and he takes about 300 or so holy days based on saints, gives a

little history of them, a beer pairing, a wine pairing and a cocktail recipe. >> a lot of the history books are focused on world war ii, correct? >> that's our bread and butter, civil war and world war ii are our most popular topic. this year, we are doing a shift next year, mort civil war books. one of our most popular more successful books is "the last fighter pilot" and that is written by jerry yellin was still with us. he's 93 years old. he was the last fighter pilot in the last mission out of japan when the emperor surrendered. he goes everywhere, he gives talks. >> who is sergeant reckless? >> sergeant reckless is a horse and she was in the korean war and she was one of the most well-known animal heroes of the last century

and vice magazine wrote a top hundred heroes but like the korean war, she was kind of forgotten and we had an author come to us and she had read about sergeant reckless in a book somewhere about horses and she did research and couldn't find any memorial or anything about sergeant reckless or honoring sergeant reckless. so she raised over $100,000, build a memorial in monaco virginia and then wrote the book sergeant reckless which was a bestseller for the new york times and she's got another, she's put up another statue in camp pendleton in southern california. sergeant reckless is an incredible story. she was raised as a racehorse

but they bought her to be their mascot and ended up using her in warfare. she delivered ammunition up the hill to these large rifles and took some wounded down the hill and got a medal of honor and it's an incredible story alex novak, you say you are not a point of view necessarily when it comes to history but was there a frustration with how some history was being written? >> we are always looking for the rest of the story or the untold story. that was part of our reckless but in terms of political perspective, we just wanted an open, pro-american story to be told and that something thatwe look for . >> who's an author, i hidden gem that you found and who is one you missed that you really wanted to get? >> one of the authors that we published that i think is one

of the best thinkers and writers on the conservative scene that when we published his first book, i don't think he was well known is mark stein.he's one of my favorite authors to work with because he's both incredibly insightful and hilariously funny. and i often say it's a good thing he's funny because a lot of the things he writes about are pretty scary when he talked aboutthe future direction of the country and the world . but when we published our first book with him which is probably seven or eight years ago now, he was not a household name. he was a gem for the people who read and knew him but he wasn't a regular on fox and on guest hosting for rush limbaugh and online as he is today. that was a fun discovery for us and a fun opportunity to bring somebody even more

broadly available to readers. somebody that got away. .. there's several big conservative stars that have published books and we haven't been able to publish all of them. probably one that i would have loved to publish, we talked to him about his book. i would have loved to publish in and work with him and in the end he wentwith someone else . >> there's been a slew of big houses with conservative titles or with conservative -- >> no doubt. it was really fascinating and interesting timing. within a month of my becoming

the president and publisher of regnery, it seems everybody's discovered conservative books. it was a weird coincidence. they started crowd forum, soon after simon and schuster started reinhold. those three imprints didn't exist in 2000 and five years later they were all actively competing for conservative authors and conservative books. i think it's been a healthy thing. i think it's been good for us to have to compete with other houses and know that we have to be really on our game and through that there's a really great, competitive reason for an author to come with regnery. we certainly hadauthors who published with us , left to go to a big new york house and came back. we've heard from a number of authors that it was fun to be

published in a new york house , but they confirmed what we knew which was that regnery is really the home or conservative authors and that if you want a publisher understands the conservative marketplace better than anyone else and who has an affinity for conservative authors, who can partner with conservative authors because we really do understand how that marketplace thinks, because we are part of that marketplace, there's nobody better than regnery publishing to do that. >> here's a look at other festivals happening around the country. february 17 we had to georgia for the savannah book festival which will be live on book tv and on march 10 and 11th we are alive from

the university of arizona for the tucson festival of books featuring katie rick and charles sykes. investigative journalist david k johnson and more. and later in march it's the virginia festival of the book in charlottesville and the national black writers conference in brooklyn new york. for more information about upcoming book fairs and festivals and to watch previous festival coverage, click the book fairs tab on our website, booktv.org. here's a look at some of the best books of the year according to publishers weekly. in answer among elephants, sujata giblin describes her family history and upbringing in india. peter manzo, curator of religion at the smithsonian's national museum of american history recalls the life of william mugler, a photographer imposed toward america known for his spirit photography in the apparition us. city university of new york

professor ashley dawson explores how cities can be affected by climate change in extreme cities area in fear city, new york university can fill it fine recalls the fiscal collapse of new york city in 1975 and how the cities brush with banks are up to the reshaped ideas about government. and wrapping up our look at publishers weekly's best books of 2017 is the color of law, richard rothstein's report on how local, state and federal legislation is responsible for american segregated cities . >> today, those homes sell for 300, $400,000. the african-american families were prohibited from moving into those homes and rented apartments in the city. did not gain 200, $300,000 in equity over the next three generations. white families gained that equity from and today those

homes are unaffordable for working-class people. $100,000 in 1940 in our terms to 1947 was twice the national median income. working-class families could afford to buy the median income with that mortgage. today those homes sell for seven times the national median income. working-class families can't even afford to move to these suburbs created in segregated enclaves in the 40s and 50s so today, nationwide, we have a ratio of income, african-american income on average that's 60 percent of white income.

african-american wealth is 5 to 7 percent of white wealth. most families in this country gain their wealth through housing equity. there's an enormous difference between 60 percent income ratio and five percent wealth ratio. it's almost entirely attributable to unconstitutional federal housing policies practiced in the 1930s, 40s and into the 50s so the wealth gap i think is attributable to this segregation. >> some of these authors will be appearing on book tv. watch them on our website, booktv.org. >>. [applause]