podcast which looks at the business of publishing. joining us later is the publisher of gregory books. that's thomas spence, but first here's a look at some publishing news. well, the 2022 pulitzer prizes were recently announced and some of the book winners include nicole eustace. or covered with night. it details a 1722 killing of a native american and how that affected the american judicial system. also waiting in the history category was ada ferrer's cuba and american history which looks back at the last 500 years of that nation. now in the memoir category the winner of the 2022 pulitzer prize was the late winfred rembert's chasing me to my grave his remembrances of growing up in the jim crow south. well, generally new books are published every tuesday and here are some that came out this week. former attorney general eric holders. look at voting rights is entitled our unfinished march. you'll see him soon on book tv as well as trump administration defense secretary mark esper who has a memoir out a sacred oath. also longtime presidential adviser david gergen looks at what he thinks makes a great leader in hearts on fire. and tarika lee takes an alternative look at a long time british icon in winston churchill. his times his crimes. now another news two book festivals have returned as in person events this month. the gaithersburg maryland book festival takes place in the town square on may 21st and the san antonio fair happens at the central library that same day. also want to note that the senate chaplain admiral barry black has a new book coming out. it's for children, and it's called a prayer for our country. we also want to share with you some of the current best-selling nonfiction books. this is according to amazon former defense secretary mark espers memoir of his time in the trump administration made the list in its first week of publication. bill o'reilly and martin dugards killing the killers is a look at how the us hunts terrorists. in this will not pass new york times reporters jonathan martin and alexander burns were count the 2020 election and the first year of the biden presidency. and finally former vanity fair new yorker and daily beast editor tina brown looks at the british royal family in the palace papers. well as promised now joining us is thomas spence who is the president and publisher at regnery publishing? mr. spence, is it fair to call regnery a niche publisher? ah, yeah, i i that's fair we publish books on a pretty broad range of subjects, but we specialize in nonfiction and we specialize in books. that are in some sense conservative on conservative topics or from a conservative point of view. and is that is there a large market for that? there seems to be yes, we we've been in this market for 75 years as of this. this is our 75th anniversary in 2022, and we've always been in that market. about oh 20 years ago around two thousand regularly was selling lots of books by conservative authors to very large audiences and the large new york publishing houses noticed that and saw that there's there's gold and then our hills and so they all established a conservative imprint. of their own which have you know, we've been competing with ever since but it's it's a large market. and the market becomes a larger i suppose or more robust when the white house is occupied by non-conservatives. and and so right now the you know, our audience is pretty large. so when the white house as your predecessor, margie rossi used to say what's good for the country is bad for regniery and vice versa. that's that's our motto here. so some of those other new conservative publishers include sentinel broadside crown forum. are you all competing for the same pool of authors at this point? sometimes the my all i know about the the conservative imprints at the new york conglomerates is you know, just what i can observe as an outsider. i don't have any insider information, but it it you're watching them over the years different imprints seem to wax and wane be more active at different times, but generally the new york. conservative imprints are you know you might say they're opportunistic. they they look they have deep pockets so they can pay very large advances and they are are looking for books that are going to be blockbuster sellers. at regnery? we love to publish. blockbusters as well, but that's not all we do. so we we have lots of books that are that are more what you call mid list books that are, you know not going to be best sellers, but but serve our market for those we're competing, you know less frequently with the new york houses. we we try. i guess i would say that at regret we believe we know our market. you know better than anybody else. and so we try to acquire books. intelligently and not not just not throw money at projects. i mean, sometimes we'll throw money in projects that if we think it's worth it, but but in general the the new york publishers are going for celebrities. big name politicians whatever, but they i think it's fair to say they don't publish nearly as broad range of conservative books. as as we do sometimes sometimes we will we do find ourselves competing against them, but it's not most of the time. mr. spence you've talked about the new york publishers. you're not based in new york. are you yeah where we are in washington dc right here in the swamp. i think a couple of blocks from you. what's the advantage and disadvantage of that? yeah, gregory was actually founded in chicago. and was there for a number of years it was? al regnary who's the the son of henry regnery our founder moved the company to washington dc not sure i think in the maybe the late 1980s around 1990 maybe. we find that it is an advantage to be here just because our books are on political subjects. so as far as just being you acquire acquiring books is all about meeting people right? it's just lots of networking. just getting to know people and people who are writing books on political subjects. tend to be in washington dc or at least come here. so it's it's a convenient place we could do it from somewhere else. i know i think yeah the other conservative publishers. are for the most part in new york? i don't know that there are any others. of any size here in washington, but it's it's good for us. we're we're conveniently located for meeting the people we need to and plus since washington is, you know, the imperial city no matter what you're publishing on everybody comes here at some point. thomas spence over the last 75 years who are some of the authors published by regular oh, it's been a lot of them for 75 years the early authors. were some of the most important figures in the early conservative movement so the establishment of regular publishing in 1947 coincides almost exactly with the the emergence of what you might call the modern. american conservative movement so some of the important early writers were russell kirk henry regnier published. kirk's most famous and important book the conservative mind that really in many ways was the foundation for the modern conservative movement book that's still in print still sells like crazy. um, he discovered henry regnery discovered a a young recent graduate. of yale named william f buckley who had written a book about his experiences there called god and man at yale. in published that about 70 years ago launched buckley's career. most of the important conservative thinkers of the 50s and 60s published at regnary in in the years since then. oh. you know, it's hard. it's hard to even know where where to begin recently. i would say nowadays to give you an example of the kind of people that we publish. we have a number of politicians senator josh hawley is about to publish his second book with us senator ted cruz we have important conservative thinkers like yoramazoni, who's the the leader of the what's come to be called the national conservatism. movement both in the united states and europe and in his home country of israel. so it's hard to find a major conservative thinker or writer who has not published with with regnery the young i could add to the list whitaker chambers wilmore kendall. anyway goes on and on. and a us president has published with regnary as well donald trump. yes, donald trump published a book with us before he was president and that book came out just as i arrived at gregory myself and i think about 2012 time to get tough. yeah. what was your first roll at gregory? i came to regnery in 2012 as an editor. so i was acquiring books and and editing them doing what we call the lead editing which is note that the person who has the the first go at the manuscript and later on it goes to copy editing where it gets tidied up and and prepared for the printer all of that. so i was one of the leaders or senior editors here. i did that for eight years. that was a job. that was so much fun. yes, it was the perfect job. i i knew it couldn't last and and a couple of years ago our publisher margie ross and you mentioned a minute ago retired and i was i was left holding the bag. so now now i'm managing the place. i don't i don't get to do any editing but there are other advantages to this to this job, but i i came as an editor. well, you mentioned senator holly a minute ago, mr. spence and early in your tenure as president and publisher. there was quite a kerfuffle about his book and who was going to publish it etc. how did that how did that all pan out? that's right. yeah, i i became publisher at a very interesting time in 2020. of course just as the pandemic hit. and then i guess about a year later. there was the look the election trump versus biden the disputes about that leading up to january 6th. and different people will give you different interpretations of what happens specifically with senator holly on january 6, but from from my own observations, i think the story is that he he was there. aware of certain irregularities in the election a lot of it the result of the sudden and dramatic changes in the voting rules because of the pandemic and he he was planning to question. i think i forget which maybe pennsylvania's electoral votes. when that when the congress met to certify the vote on january the 6th. when he was arriving at the capitol he saw a group of trump supporters and he gave him kind of a a fist pump. i think the equivalent of a thumbs up. that was taken by some as a sign of incitement. immediately after the riots, or the incursion into the capital on the sixth senator holly delivered a an impassioned and emphatic denunciation of what had just happened however he had a book under contract at that time at simon and schuster. it was eventually published as the tyranny of big tech and a number of employees at simon and schuster decided that he in the invasion of the capital on january 6th, and it was unconscionable for simon schuster of publishes books, so they they canceled it promptly. that got a lot of attention we went after the book immediately and we're able to to sign it up and we we published it short time later that that spring and it was the best seller and did very well. and in fact, you mentioned he's got a second book coming out that your publishing as well. part of your role besides being an editor and the editorial director is the business side. of publishing and i have three issues. i want to bring up with you number one. you do work with the new york houses. don't you want to comes to district distribution and getting your books out there etc we do. yes. what's the what's the relationship explain that yeah, so a publisher any publishing house? has a couple of you know sort of basic functions to acquire books. edit them. and print them so to produce books. and then in some ways that's the easy part then you've got to sell them after you after you printed them. you've got to sell them. you've got to distribute them. through the various trade channels, you know get them to book stores and so forth. so uh most independent publishers or smaller publishing houses, like regnery use a distributor. to help us with that. second part of the job. so we we don't have our own warehouse. we have a distributor that warehouses the books. takes the orders fulfills the orders. collects the payments and so forth and sort of handles. the the nuts and bolts of distributing the books and a few years we have used different distributors over the years a few years ago. we moved over to simon and schuster. so most of the large, new york. publishing conglomerates offer a distribution service so they they've got gigantic warehouses, you know, very sophisticated systems and that they use for themselves and then they also take on clients other publishers and handle those things for them. so we work with simon and schuster and have for the last i don't know five years or so and i have to say it's it has been a very satisfactory relationship we have. we have not had with no, no complaints we've been happy with simon is schuster it was you know a little there were some questions when when simon and schuster publishing canceled senator holly's book. we jumped in and took it. there was a lot of attention in the press about that and we we noticed you know, like oh, let's see. we're distributed by the same company that just canceled this book. you know, how's that could work out? but they there was no problem the distribution side of simon's business it's very professional and they they did their job. so that's we hope we hope things continue that way. issue number two as we all know inflation is happening in the economy. how is it affecting the publishing world? inflation. well, we've been raising the prices of our as we as we print them. yeah, it's i i'd say that we're affected probably in the same way that that everybody else is what's affecting us? particularly and in a special way is the some of the supply chain problems that you read about for many businesses are affected by those but the printing industry is kind of a mess right now. they are they are struggling valiantly and they're getting the job done. but but it is there's getting paper and and getting books out is much more difficult than it's ever been before. again, we don't we don't print our own books and very few publishers. do we use book printers and we used to be able to get a book printed in a couple of weeks. we needed to sometimes even a week those those days are gone. it can take several weeks and sometimes months to get a book printed. that's a problem if you got a book that has succeeded beyond your expectations and you need to reprint. can't do that very fast anymore. and that was my third issue, which was the supply chain the supply chain issue. so thank you for addressing that on an average. author hands you a manuscript. you accept it etc. from that first handoff to being in a bookstore. what's the time frame? ah, well not to be evasive, but it's kind of like asking how long is a string right because books everybody but the the intro one of the most interesting things about being in the book. business one of the most maybe difficult but interesting things is that every product is unique right? we're not just rolling off. thousands of copies of the same widget, right? so everything about each title that we publish. is unique but so some books particularly. for a public for me with our where we do. so many books that are on political subjects and current events. sometimes those the time in which we need to get a book out is very compressed. so i would say if it's if the book though is not what we call a crash. and if takes maybe about a year, you know, it can be a little less a little more. it depends on all the other projects. we've we've got working on we've got that we're working on so but i would say author should expect. a year to maybe a year and a half. before you know from when he finishes his book to the time that it's it's published available for sale. it can be it can be substantially faster than that if need be so senator holly's book, for example, the tyranny of big tech now a lot of the work was already done when we got it it had been. you know, it was written somewhat edited. we had less work to do on that than usual, but we got that out and in a few weeks. um, i think the our world's record and i still don't know quite how how we did it. i was a book that we brought out a few weeks ago biography of president zelensky of that ukraine that was a book that came to us from an australian publisher. so they they had a couple of authors who were working on this project. they asked us if we'd be interested in doing a us edition, but we said yeah sure. you know, when when will you have it? something ready? and they said well, you know, we've got a lot we're working on it. we said okay stop now and send us basically did and and we had that thing out. from the the day that we first talked to these australians about the project until the day that the book was available for sale was i think under 40 days. that's pretty fast and and we had our printer. i'm not sure if somebody sold his soul to the devil or how they how they both we got very lucky is as because that was the main question was how fast can this thing be printed and they did it for us. so so anywhere from 40 days to two years and finally, what are two or three books that are coming out this summer that you're excited about from regular? ah, the the book that i think i am. personally, the most excited about is is called conservatism a rediscovery. i just happen to have a copy of it here by yoram husseini. he's an an political philosopher. who? born and raised in this country went to princeton but his his made his career in israel. he runs a think tank in jerusalem. and he as i mentioned earlier he has. spearheaded you know, you might call it a movement. i don't know if it's that organized, but it goes under the name of national conservatism, which is a with a rethinking of what conservatism should be all about particularly in the united states and and western europe. and how conservatism relates to liberalism it liberalism in the in the classical sense. it's it is a brilliant book provocative, but i think compelling. it's the book i'd say since i've been working here one of the ones that i'm i'm definitely the most excited about. will have a book coming out from senator cruz a pretty soon on the called to see justice corrupted on the weaponization of the justice system. so that's a much more, you know, kind of. political political book huzoni's book is political, but it's political theory. senator cruz's book is is on you know a really important. political issue which is the what we call the weaponization of justice system the the left. a commandeering of criminal laws investigations and so forth to go after their political enemies, i think it's it's an important book and one that will that we'll do very well senator holly's book, which is is on manhood. not really not a terribly political topic at all. it's on why? why republics need good men. to survive and so the masculine virtues pretty politically incorrect but again a very compelling sober argument that that will be out. that's not this summer that that's a little little farther down the road, but those those are the some of the titles that come to my well that i guess our next actually our next biggest big title is coming out in a couple of months. by dinesh d'souza who has published many books with ragnarie. this one is called 2000 mules. it's about ballot harvesting and potential fraud in the 2020 presidential election. he just released a documentary film about it that has made quite splash. this is the book version. it will be a much fuller presentation of the argument that all the signs for that book. 2,000 mules are quite promising at this point. thomas spence is the president and publisher at regnary publishing. we appreciate your joining us on book tv. thank you so much for having me and honored to be here and i enjoy talking with you and thank you for joining us for about books about books has also available as a podcast on the c-span now app or wherever you get your podcast. hereour topic today is we're gog to start with our discussion of native americans. this is one of two different discussions. we're having i want to make clear that we're not talking about the indian wars in this kind of lecture that's going to be in a couple weeks and we're gonna use that as as a way to link. kind of wars throughout the 19th century all the way up to it including the spanish-american war so our focus is we're kind of around that. we're thinking more kind of legal policy and issues and and such so the goal is to think in that broad 19th century way so our start point is a couple key things we need tod