[inaudible conversations] >> you're watching book to have on c-span2 with top nonfiction books and author every weekend. book tv, television for serious readers. >> with congress in recess this week we bring you book tv all this week in prime time here on c-span2. coming up a look at the book publishing industry, we will talk with regnery publishing and peter talks about duties of book editor, after that representatives of colombia

university press talk about the value of university presses and how to publish with them. later editor in chief and publishing director robert receive it is editorial excellence award from the biographers international organization. now author ann coulter speaking at an event a conservative book publisher based in washington, d.c. >> distinguishing characters. have always been famous, the authors take fantastic books and no new york publisher would publish one of which my favorite of that trend is demore senatorial privilege about senator kennedy and having drowned that girl and it is true. and leo got one of the cousins to talk to him.

swimming out in the river, could you say you were driving? [laughter] >> so years later leo -- it's on the record, in new york publisher would publish it, gregory publishes, 27 weeks on the new york times best seller list. 27 new york publishers turned it down, published it 44 weeks on new york times best seller's list. the way things are going now in the trump era, the hysteria, i don't know if any of you are reading the treason times but it's every day about somehow facebook page that they think russia went behind who they have thrown the whole election. [laughter] >> if you visited america in 2016 you would notice outside of

major cities you couldn't drive a mile without seeing a trump sign, but i'm sure that that was facebook page. at any event, they have become more hysterical than i've ever seen and lived through mccarthy era and nixon but i have written about them but it's even worse than that. if they do get control of the internet, we can get back to gregory being the only source, the only way for conservatives to communicate with one another. [laughter] >> so today on their mailing list and remember there's a reason, the most dangerous man in america. here is to regnery. [cheers and applause] >> and regnery publishing celebrated 70th anniversary. book tv visited offices in washington, d.c. to talk with many of the people responsible for bringing their books to

publication. >> marjl ross, what kind of books do you publish? >> book for conservative readers, we publish books on current events an politics and culture but we also do a lot more than just political books now, we publish history books, we publish a little bit of fiction, we publish kids books and we have a new line called regnery faith to publish books for faith readers. >> let's break that down a little. you say you publish books for conservative audience. has always been the case? >> it's always been the case from the very beginning henry regnery who started the company 70 years ago this year was dedicate today publishing books for conservative readers and at the time and for a long time he was one of the only, if not the only book publisher who was

friendly to conservative authors and conservative ideas. and he started off publishing some of the seminole books of the modern conservative movement in the very early years we published william buckley and russell kirk's, conservative mind. we published witness by whittaker chambers and all of those books are still in print today. we still sell them today. >> now, does that say something about the publishing industry that those books weren't being published necessarily? >> it definitely does and he, henry regnery saw an opportunity in the marketplace and he back then did what we still do today which is we publish books because -- we publish conservative books because it's great business and because it's part of our mission.

>> marji, who are some of the contemporary authors? >> they include daneh desusa, ann coulter, a whole host of others. >> so if you put an ann coulter book out, does it sell automatically because her name is on it? >> well, it certainly help that is her name is on it but i can't tell you that any book is a guarantied success anymore. i think that as the book business has changed over the past 15 or 20 years, a lot more of the business has gone online, of course, and people are buying online and so you lose the opportunity to visualize those books and publicize those books physically and you lose the sense of discovery that people have had for generations going

into a bookstore and finding a book that they didn't know existed, finding an author that they didn't know about before and that's been a big change in our industry and it's put frankly a lot more pressure on publishers to come up with interesting and creative ways to help people know that a book exists when there isn't a celebrity author attached to it. >> so how do you market a book over the last 10, 15 years? >> regnery has become, i think, the leader in using earned media to sell books and by that i mean, we think organically from the very beginning of a book's life, about how that book is going to become part of the news cycle and how the theme of the book and the topics and issues in that book will be connected with what's happening in the news so we have a crystal ball

and we look at what's going to be happening, but seriously, we try to anticipate what the big concerns will be within our marketplace, what will be driving the news for our market and how our books and our authors can be relevant to that and we use earned media whether that's tv or conservative talk radio or certainly online media outlets to really drive the conversation and try to make our books and our authors part of that conversation. >> does it matter which party is in power for sales? >> that's a great question. for a very long time we said what's bad for america is good for regnery, by that we meant when liberals were in power that might not be good for the future of the country but great for selling conservative books. and certainly when the opposition party is in power,

conservatives become very engaged, very concerned about the future of america and not so terrific landscape for selling conservative books but we also found over the past, certainly the past couple of years that there's so much debate and disagreement and concern across the political landscape with what's happening in washington that conservative books are selling very, very well even with a republican in the white house and i think that's because people are genuinely concerned about the direction of the country, there's concerns about divisiveness within the country and they are looking for an explanation for what's going on, what direction we are going and

how the country, i think, for conservatives can have a country can return to some of the bedrock foundation principles that conservatives think are important to keep this country on the right track. >> and while visiting regnery we spoke with harry crocker who is responsible for acquiring books. >> so how do you acquire a book? how do you acquire an author? >> the traditional way is waiting for agents to come up with proposals but a lot of what we do here is trying to project what will be in the news and the best books, some of the book that is we do are books where, i think, or we think collectively, this author on this topic, that'll be dynamite, so we try to make those marriages happen, we come up with an idea, think the guy would be great for it and put two together. that's been our go-to strategy,

not waiting on the agent so much but going out and pursuing authors. >> so ann coulter on immigration, is that one that you all put together? >> i think she came to us with that. [laughter] >> and even those ones that we take them to the author, the author, of course, makes it their own, i will call up and say, what do you think about subject x, what about subject x minus two, we talk it through and what not and i will -- it eventually works out. he can be up promoting it, i'm not going to be up promoting. i can only help him make the case the best way he can. >> somebody you published several times is edward klein, if you have a conversation with mr. klein, how does that -- how does it go? >> well, ed is an interesting case. that's a reporter. what we can say is can you find this out and try to see if he

can get the sources to go -- information that we think would be news worthy. but also a lot of reverse, i'm on the trail of this, do you think i should keep pursuing this. so it's a give and take back and forth. >> and when you acquire a book, how long between that initial conversation until that book is on a book shelf? >> that varies a lot but i will say one thing that's regnery apart from other publishers that many books that we do because they are current event driven are short occupational, it depends what reporting is being done, but especially when it's a reporter's book you can't be sitting too long and we could be signing up a book in a matter -- let's go back a bit. to get books on the shelfs, you are shipping the books on trucks, it takes four weeks to get coast to coast on the book shelves. you have to print the book.

you shot two months already. we have had -- any time from turning the book around in a week, either days to, more traditionally books, from conception on the shelves but in some cases weeks. >> have you start add quiring book ifs for fall of 2018? >> oh, sure, yeah. they don't like what we call drop-ins, the things that we do a lot of because the current events, things you don't know about, who knows what's going to be in the news in september 2018. we can guess. we will have a better guess in april. you have to have a really hot topic or really hot author because they've sold all the shelf space far ahead of time, so they much prefer books on six

months, you know, handle of what's going to be coming to the store. we pressure the issue a lot. we are a thorn on the side of bookstores' schedules. >> one of the national conversations that's going on right now is about sexual assault, is that something that you keep an eye on, we have an author, et cetera? >> that's interesting because topics that are really important that get a lot of news aren't necessarily the topic that is sell books, if you did a book on harvey weinstein, you can probably sell a lot of books, that's not necessarily our sort of book, though. our books are newsy but they are also, they tend to be more political and they tend to be more based on -- on what's

happening in washington, sexual assault happening in washington, but sexual assault is not our big topics. >> capitol hill, tax reform, another -- >> tax reform is a good topic where it's usually important, no one cares about reading book about tax reform. if you're going to do about flat tax, but our bread and butter are hard cover, 24.95 plus price points, and there's not a big market for that. what's going to drive book sales for us is if we are at a restaurant and you're telling me about a book that pe published because there's so many stories that you're burst to go tell me to tell everybody else. that's what works. we need book that is you want to read about and you want to know

more about and the book is presented well enough, the topic enough that you want to talk to friends about it. not many people have conversation about tax policies over dinner. >> george gilder has written about virtual and you can learn a lot. >> interesting case because gilderd is not that newsy model, that's what we call paradigm set of books and these are books that you actually do enjoy but enjoy on different level and a different way because they help you understand the world. george gilder is a great example. another one is mark stein, much more entertaining and snap you like a stand-up comic but his books are really big think books too, they are very serious at the same time and those are actually really rewarding books to do because it's one thing to

have a book where you can have lots of nice stories to tell scandalist stories, whatever they are, those are great, but it's really great to publish a book that alters your perception of what's actually happening. it helps you to see it more precisely i should say. you start putting pieces together and say, oh, now i get it. now i understand, that's why the country is going this way, politics is going this way and people are behaving this way. those are important books that can really last. >> marji ross, have you published biographies of donald trump? >> we have many that relate to donald trump including a book by donald trump itself. we published a book back in 2011 called time to get tough. it was fun and a book that

allowed him to talk about his vision for america and what was sort of going wrong in the country when he flirted with the idea of running in the last presidential cycle and decided ultimately not to run. so we published books by donald trump and we certainly published books about donald trump, during the 2016 election, we published a really important book by philip, her last book called the conservative case for trump and that, i think, played a role in helping him get elected by explaining to me people who might -- might have been wondering, well, is he a real conservative, explained from someone who had conservative credentials to say, yes, he is and here is the reason why it's important for us to vote for him. and -- and, you know, throughout the 2017, we've been publishing

books that talk about different aspects of the trump administration and what -- not only what he stands for but also all of the forces against him including one of our most recent best-selling books, a book by ed klein, a plot to destroy donald trump. >> what do you consider to be a best seller? >> i consider a best-seller to be a book that hits the publisher's weekly best-seller list and that is a national best-seller list based on book scan data and it really captures the books that are selling the most copies in any given week across the country. >> how many units? >> you know, authors ask me that all of the time, how many books to go b in best-seller list,

it's a moving target and it's all relative. at any given week, you can get onto that list with a few as maybe 3 or 4,000 books, in a busy season, such as the lead-up to holiday season, it can take 15,000 copies to get on the list. so it really just depends on the competition in a given week and publishers certainly take that into account when we plan out when we are going to release books and sometimes you think, you know, maybe we are better off releasing a book in april when there are fewer books for that -- for those top spots in the best-seller list. some say national best sellers, some say new york time's best seller, why the difference? >> well, you may know that we made a pretty big decision here at regnery earlier this year to

stop using "the new york times" best seller as promotion vehicle and as a way to track best-seller success and we did that because we were seeing that the new york times best-seller list did not reflect what was really selling the best in the country and, you know, whether that's a liberal bias or simply an outdated means of tracking sales, we felt repeatedly, we saw that the books that were selling the most copies in a given week across the country weren't ending up on the top of the new york times list and frankly that was especially true when those books were conservative books, whether that was a regnery book or published by someone else but time and

again would sell liberal books or books from author from the left, outsell those books, when we looked at the nielson data they were lower on the new york time's best-seller list and we felt that wasn't reflective and we made big announcement, that we were going to use the publisher's weekly best-seller week's forward. >> have you brought to the attention of the new york times prior? >> we had, on a number of occasions, not just this year but in previous years and they -- their response has been and has always been, we have a proprietary formula and system for calculating this list, so basically it's a secret how we -- how they do it and that's a hard thing to argue with.

it's certainly not a transparent way of calculating data or reporting on data and we just felt that it wasn't -- it wasn't reflective anymore. >> was it a good promotional tool to be able to put on book new york time's best seller? >> yes, frankly it was because i think most people, the average reader who is not sort of following this controversy day-to-day didn't know that the new york times best seller list was no longer quite in sync with the actual best-selling books in the country. people inside the industry have frankly complained about it for a long time and have known that this is an issue, certainly conservatives have talked about this for years feeling that they have been treated unfairly, but the average, you know, reader would see new york times best

seller and to them that meant national time's best seller and so that's really the reason why we used that for so many years and certainly plenty of our books have gotten onto the new york time's best sellers, plenty of books have been number one on the new york time's best-seller list. so it was certain degree that we made that decision to say, no, despite the fact that that is frankly a powerful marketing tool and we didn't feel that we could in good conscious use that anymore if we didn't believe it was reflective of what was going on. >> marji, back to time to get tough, 2011, whose idea was it? >> you know, it was a combination of watching donald trump start to speak at conservative events and to speak more politically and so we had the idea and he had the idea at

the same time and we heard that he was thinking about a book, we had been talking about him doing a book, so we approached him and said, you know, we should talk about this. i went up to his office in new york city and we made our case for why we thought we would be a good partner, he agreed, he's pretty entrepreneurial and so we struck a deal and -- and started right away. it was a terrific project. i really enjoyed working with him and he was one of the hardest-working authors i've ever worked with. he would not turn down one thing that we asked him to do in order to promote the book. and -- and then the funny thing was, back forward four years, he announces he's going to run, we said, you know, we have paper back and before i did that, i

took the book out of the shelves and looked at it to make sure that there wasn't anything in there that didn't quite align with what he was campaigning on and what he was saying and there was nothing in the book that was inconsistent which i was impressed with. so we contacted his office and said, we'd like to do this in paperback, within three days, we had a response back, yes, we would like to do it, here the things that we would like to update, let's go, and we did. >> tough deal making with him? >> it was fun deal-making with him, actually. i thought we struck actually a really good deal. [laughter] >> we are not going to hear anymore about that, are we? >> that's about it. >> what's the difference between a hardback and paperback? >> well, you know, that's such an interesting change in dynamic as well because as people have

gone to e-books and e-books have become more popular, the sort of role of the paperback has changed a little bit and people who used to say, i will wait till this book comes out in paperback, they don't have to wait anymore, they can download it in ipad or kindle and read an e-book. when we decide to release a book, we almost always do it in hard cover as a statement of frankly the gravitas of the book and the seriousness of the subject matter but there's also a part of the decision that resides with our analysis of who the readership is because there's some topic, self-help and self-improvement and even

business books and certainly some later topics, entertaining topics that probably the readership is more -- more used to reading those books in paperback and so we do at least some of our books as original trade paperbacks but by in large, our current events and political books, we release first as hard-cover books and i think our experience is that the media treats those books more seriously as well as we want to make sure that we get the attention of the media with our new releases. >> what percentage of revenues come from e-books? >> about 25%. it started -- >> steady growing, lowering? >> it's plateaued and that's been the case throughout the industry. you know, i talked to other publishers all of the time about e-book business and we of all seen a very steep growth curve,

you know, over the past eight years which has pretty much leveled out in the past couple of years. some categories see much higher percentage of e-books sale fiction, probably close to 50%, e-book versus print, but overall for the industry and for our program as well, it's about 25%. >> how many books a year do you publish? >> we are growing and we have planned 50 books, 50 new titles for 2018, that's an increase of about 10% over 2017 and an increase about 20% over 2011. -- 2016. so most of the growth, all of the growth is outside of current

events, political category. we are growing our history line and we are growing our faith line and we are growing our fiction line. but our, sort of core political conservative current events books is about the same and that would be somewhere around 25 titles next year. >> so you've got 50 books in the plans for 2018. when do you start working on the books that will actually be in bookstores in 2018? >> well, we started working on some of those, you know, earlier this year but we also are well known for crashing in titles and rushing books to press because of our focus on current events and breaking news and we have -- we are negotiating right now

books that we may not sign until the end of the year or even early 2018 that we will release in 2018. we are able to get books very quickly to market if they need to be rushed to the marketplace and sometimes there's a breaking news story or a new trend or a new issue that becomes really important that we want to be a part of. we are pretty good at rushing those books out and still making them very successful. >> marji ross, as you know there's a national conversation about sexual harassment. >> there is. >> if you decided to do to put a book out on that topic, how quickly and what would be the process? >> we -- it all depends, of course, who is writing it and how quickly they can write it and 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 -- we can get a book turned around -- we've had books that have been signed, delivered within 30 days and in the bookstores two months later. >> two months. what happens in the two months? >> a lot of things happen very quickly. within those two months, we need to edit, lay out, design, print, ship, market, sell and get those books on the shelf. but that's possible if -- if you have a good track record for doing that well, if you have a good relationship 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? >> our books are printed at lake books which is a printer located in chicago. they do almost all of our printing. we have a wonderful partner and worked with them for many years and they also believe in the kinds of books that we are doing and so that's fun but they are very, 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 kind of centrally located helps too because 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. >> so marji ross, is there a big warehouse somewhere with thousands and thousands of regnery books? >> hundreds of thousands, yes,

there is a big warehouse right now in jackson, tennessee that holds all of our books, we partner with ingraham as distributor and they handle all of the warehousing, shipping and few -- fufillment. people think of buying books, but also costco, wal-mart, target, bj's, sam's club, airport stores and krogers and places that -- that people like to buy books. >> because of the types of book that is -- books that you publish has anyone ever said, no, we will not put the book in our bookstore? >> yes, they have. i think that buy in large the -- all of the accounts that i just named, all the big national retailers are very savvy about

serving a live market and they understand that there are people from both sides of the aisle who shop in their stores and shop online and they want to make sure that they are serving those people. i think it is more true 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, you know, there are definitely some of those stores that don't serve conservative marketplace and don't want to have conservative books in their store. >> looking at some of the titles and some of the designs on the covers, on the book shelf behind you, what goes into that, some have author's name in big letters, some have images, some have pictures. >> we have a lot of fun designing, coming up with titles and designing jackets and it's a

very important part, i think, of a publisher's job is to help an author come up with a title and come up with the right jacket and i think there's a great art to that that 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 that our titles are not only unique and distinctive but also that our titles can be a phrase or a word that becomes part of the conversation about the book. so when we, for instance, came up with ed klein, ed klein came up with the title all out war, we knew that that was not only a sort of headline grabbing title but also a phrase that really describes what our author believes is happening and also

what our audience suspect is happening. there are a lot of people that believe that there's an all-out war against the president and against this administration with the desire to take him down both politically and personally and it's not just sort of 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 l

out war, but as you read and to actually talk about the all out war and how that has become a phrase that resinates with our market. so 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 face book, we know we have celebrity author and we want 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, you know, the job of a jacket is to get in our view, the job of a jacket is to get a perspective, a buyer to reach out and buy the book, to want to be drawn to that book. in some cases it's because they are drawn to the picture of someone they know and in other cases it's because they're drawn

to what we try to convey as 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 color, in the font, in 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. >> my responsibilities are to oversee, create, conceive and design the high-profile covers for all of our books. we have, i think, five imprints, starting off with the political and current events and faith imprint, the history imprint and we recently got into fiction enprint in the last year and a half, i think, now. and i'm not quite sure, we have

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

cover in one of his, in his domain is -- and he basically is explaining why we fight and so everybody is familiar with google. this one -- this one was of the many solutions, we had google upside down, another cross bones visual on that. we were thinking that this is really about the block chain economy which is all about the bitcoin. maybe the google upside down being replaced by bitcoin and the block chain economy, these are two versions of that one. this is all very still to be flushed out. some of these things are completely going to be published, like this one for karen pence and marilyn bundoe, that's pretty much done.

>> children's book about the bunny rabbit. >> the vice president's bunny rabbit, correct. >> who had input into a high-profile book like that? >> that was all marji. >> marji ross. >> marji ross the publisher, this was her baby and it was quite a surprise and quite a bit surprise that she landed karen pence. it was great, we all -- alyssa myself and marji went to the vice president's house, did a signing of the bunny and the contract, and quite exciting. >> now, is that one of karen pence's illustrations of the front? >> yeah, this is one of those situations where it kind of helps to be the art director on this because these are actually two illustrations. the original illustration is very much saturated and it

didn't -- and this was a totally separate illustration but we we wanted to give it a sense of place, where is this, this is the vice president's house, so i basically took her -- took a scan of her original house which is going to be inside and just screened it back and put the subject, marilyn bundo, the bunny, in front, so i really like that. very good illustrator actually, very surprising good illustrator. >> so john caruso, when you put a ann coulter or sebastian gorka in front of a book, what are you saying? >> that they are well known. that they are celebrity. basically we have a lot of facebook. sebastian, obviously. you can even consider this to be a face book. lincoln and jefferson. here is another because it's not

really facebook, this is about the pope and lost shepherd, how pope francis is misleading the catholic church. so we often do face books when they are high-profile authors. >> here for one of the history titles, the 10 civil war blunders. >> beautiful illustration. in -- and the typeset is relatively unique, isn't it? >> it's not unique to the period, that's what makes it appealing. one of the things -- i think this is all about my process, i literally turned the internet upside down looking for images and source material, i will go back to the civil war and literally google civil war fonts and look those up and see what did they use during civil war to use this kind of typography, this was a beautiful painting and goes in the back entire cover from the civil war and with all the millions and

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

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

coulter's brain, ann coulter and so the very first book i did was just -- it broke away from her mold, it was just her face and the look on her face basically follows you everywhere, the eyes and it was -- she said it was her best book cover, best cover ever. i was really happy with that. >> john, if we went to 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. and everybody looks like, wow, they are so different, yes, you could look at the whole book shelf and see that every one of them is different. the only thing that you could say, wow, they are all beautifully clean, beautiful images and beautiful typography and i think that's the hallmark, really, 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 a book? >> well, for many, many years authors regularly went to whist stop tour to promote their books and we probably were the first big publisher that pulled the plug on that and said, that is just not a worthwhile thing to do, we said an author can reach 100 times, a thousand times, 10,000 times as many people sitting in the living room in 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 digital print, and the in-person event that is we wanted our authors to do were only those that we could leverage by having media like c-span cover. 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, you know, an in-person book signing and a multicity 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 marketing campaign for our books. again, for many years, publishers talked about social media and when -- whenever they

were asked, well, does it sell books, they would say, we have no idea or how do you know, how do you track the results, how do you know this is working, we have no idea, we just think we need to do it. really only in the past, i think, 18 months that certainly we have been able to justify leaning into social media in a big way and -- 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 books and that's not to say that, you know, that hasn't been true for a long time but i think we did reach a tipping point, honestly, 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. and so we use that in a number of different ways, whether that's facebook, whether it's google ads, whether it's amazon search ads, whether it's twitter, we use all of those things, whether it's instagram, all of those things are powerful vehicles for driving word of mouth, driving buzz through social media. >> so nicole yeatman and alyssa córdova, every has publicity strategy, how do you develop that? >> well, we start by read the book, each book has a publicist assigned to it and we pull it

apart, we talk to editorial, we look at what the positioning is, what it is about this book that's going to sell and market is going to want to hear about and news is going to want to talk about and make people click links. we put together a plan and a strategy and a lot of that is tie today what's happening in the news currently that's relevant to the topic of the book, get on a call with the author, we talk it out, hash out some ideas and then usually half of it works out if we are lucky. but, yeah, we are collaborative as a team and we bring in the author and a lot of their involvement and opinions as well. >> it's important to click on a link, i heard. >> yes. >> yeah, i think a lot of what we do on a digital marketing side is on facebook and people are sort of immune to

advertising that looks like advertising so a lot of our job is figuring out how to put content about the book and drive traffic the amazon, drive traffic to media articles but without looking like advertising. without looking like spam. to do that we have to make sure we talk about what the target market cares about and telling them, this is a book that you don't care about but you should and show them that this book fits in framework. >> give us an example of a recent marketing campaign? >> okay, well, we had world war ii book, the last fighter pilot came out at the end of july which was very exciting for us because the subject of the book jerry young, 93 year's old flu combat mission of world war ii and a fantastic person.

we sent him to ala, the american library association conference and he charmed librarians there. so we had cameraman fly to florida, talk to him and got some footage of him telling his stories because -- we put together a four-minute video and subtitles and pushed to audience, core audience. we have great custom audience for remarketing on facebook and world war ii interested audiences and now has over 2 million views on facebook which shared 30,000 times and something that we are proud of and ended up driving a lot of traffic to amazon. >> nicole yeatman, how much of that was viral? >> i don't know -- we only put a

hundred dollars, $700 because of the shares ended up reaching a huge audience. >> my team and i, we work primarily on the media, the news-driven side, oh really for us with that book, what we captured was, you know, how -- what a special treat it was to have a first-hand account from a living world war ii visit rein who flew such an incredible mission and had incredible life story since the war which is a huge part of the story. so really just targeting specific outlets that we believed would grab onto that story, which they did. we got some great profile pieces, we got a profile piece from jared yellen from the new york post, it all married together so well because it was

one of those ideal situations where it felt like everywhere someone turned they were hearing about the incredible story which made the book quite successful. >> how close do you work together? >> very closely. to try to have the surround sound during launch, maybe seeing it on tv and seeing it on facebook, so we really coordinate really well and then when there's a great media hit, part of my job is to then take it and package it and push it out to audiences and social and e-mail list. >> an unknown book versus pr for newt gringrich, which is

tougher? >> for someone like a newt gringrich it's easy to get newt on the media, he's already on tv, the challenge with someone like that is to get it to be about the book and not just commentary on what's happening in the news and working on how you pivot that conversation naturally so that it doesn't just like you are hawking a book, but actually sounds relevant to what's happening in the news. >> when do you start thinking about a campaign for a book? >> well, i mean, it depends across imprint, something like history books, face books, as soon as we sign a book we are thinking about how we are positioning it and who our target market is because we -- another part of the marketing job is to help our sales team get retailers excited about the book. that's our first step and then when the author turns manuscript

we start thinking more seriously and bring them in. maybe about six months out but those are big political book which is are written up until the deadline to include the latest news. we are on a really short timeline and that's part of what regnery does well and makes us unique, we know audience so well that we are able to put together a marketing plan and really i would say execute a great launch within a couple months. >> yeah, and just to ebbing e something nicole mentioned, for us, we are looking at the 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 but is this a book that we can sell or is this a book our market will like s this a book that the media will like or play well in social media, that conversation and that process really starts from the very, very beginning. >> you brought this up, nicole

yeatman but the news cycle affect what is you guys do? >> definitely. >> very much. >> as you can imagine, that's challenging because it takes time to create a book. when you sign something if something is relevant in the news at the time who knows in six months or even a year if that's going to be important and then on the flip side, i mean, you can 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. >> do you find that the mainstream media is willing to hear your pitch, your message? >> it depends on the subject and the author. i mean, 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 could get a lot of exposure but exposure doesn't always equal sales. our motto is to fish where the fish are. we work primarily with the media outlets where our buyers are getting their news and information. >> is regnery profitable? >> yes, regnery is profitable and that's a tough thing for a company to be, you know, most publishing businesses rely on their books that have been published previously to provide most of their revenue and certainly most of their profits. .. ..

i iranian xyz publishing company and it was astonishing to me so many people would say we do a little bit of everything and i simply wanted to say why do you do that that doesn't seem like a good business model. what would the readers that we know how to reach out to other categories of books do they read when we've sol we sold them alle

current event is that we can solve them in a given year what other pockets might they have the money to say i like history, i like biography, i have children and grandchildren i like to share books with. i believe in accounting principles. give us an idea of your revenu revenues. >> we report the results of recorder and that's been an interesting change for us not only to be a part of a publicly traded company.

the. as a publisher how much is spent on the publishing end as opposed to the editorial? >> much is on the business side.

the growth and future of regnery and whether that means selling more copies of the book or signing up new projects for us to do a. did that translate into sales? >> it's been one of the most successful since we launched the line several years ago. >> we started about six years ago and basically we did it as a reaction for the need for the backlist. regnery political has been from the conservative point of view but they don't last more than two or three years if we are

lucky. we've done a couple of history books and they were successful. so then we do history books and it's not for conservatives, political history, pretty much straight history we have offers from different points of view we wouldn't do anything but anti-american weight of a love t of the general history and some fun books one of the best selling his drinking with the saints and that is if it is a k written by a theology professor and straight out of central casting for madmen but also notes his catholic so he wrote this book club drinking with the

saints, sinners guided to a holy happy hour and he takes about 300 or so days with a beer pairing, wine pairing at cocktail. that is our bread and butter, civil war in the two of the most popular topics we did with world war ii books. this year we are doing a shift. that is written by gary, 93-years-old when the emperor sounded. he goes everywhere and gives a talk. he is wonderful. >> who is sergeant reckless? >> she was in the korean war and

was one of the most well-known animal heroes of the last century and life magazine made her one of the top he rose but she was kind of forgotten. we had an author come to us that had read about sergeant reckless in a book somewhere and did some research and couldn't find a memorial or anything. so she raised over $100,000 built a memorial and then wrote the book which wa was a category best seller for the times and she's put up another statute in southern california. >> an incredible story.

a racehorse they bought as a mascot ended up using her in warfare and delivered ammunition for these large rifles and took them down the hill. >> so you say it's not a plaintiff view but is there a frustration and how some history is being written? >> we are always looking for a different story. in terms of the political perspective, we just wanted a pro- american story to be told and that is what we look for. >> who is the author of a hidden gem that you found?

>> one of the authors that we published that i think is one of the best speakers and writers on the conservative scene when we published the first book i don't think he was that well-known is markus stein, one of my favorite authors to work with because he is incredibly insightful and hilariously funny. it's a good thing he's funny because a lot of things he writes about are pretty scary when he talks of the future direction of the country and the world. but when we published our first book with him seven or eight years ago now, he wasn't a household name, he was a gem for the people that knew him but he wasn't a regular on fox and 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 the readers. somebody that got away. there are several big conservative start that have published books and we have it -- haven't been able to publish all of them. one of them was clarence thomas we talked about his book and i would have loved to publish in ananetwork within and in the ene published with someone else. >> there's been a smooth of big houses with conservative titles. >> it was fascinating and interesting timing. within a month, becoming the

president and publisher of regnery it seemed that he had discovered books. soon thereafter, those imprints deadened exces -- didn't exist a five or six years later they were all actively competing with conservative authors and books. i think it's been good for us to have to compete with other houses and do we have to be on our game. there was a competitive reason. they were left to go to a big new york house and came back.

we worked from a number of authors. it is the home of fort conservative authors and if you want a publisher who understands the conservative marketplace better than anyone else and who has an affinity for conservative authors because we really do understand how that marketplace thinks because we are part of that marketplace, then there is nobody better to do that. >> former florida senator bob graham will be part of a conversation on improving civics education and to become engaged citizens. hosted by the center for american progress starting at 10 a.m. on c-span.

in the evening the former secretary speaks to the john democrats of new hampshire. he was the mayor of san antonio texas and served in the obama administration said he's considering a white house run. the