Regnery Publishing President and Publisher Marji Ross on how to put all of the pieces together to create a hit title.

Marji Ross can find a winner. As president and publisher of Regnery Publishing, a publisher of politically conservative titles, she has developed a formula for what will sell. According to Ross, the company regularly sees a higher-than-average majority of its titles become best-sellers, and last year, Regnery landed four of its books on The New York Times Best-Seller List.

Ross will join other publishing executives for the session “Today’s Book Launch: Surefire Strategies for Success” at the Publishing Business Conference and Expo, March 10-12, in New York City (www.PublishingBusiness.com). At the session, she will share the multimedia marketing strategies that have helped make Regnery titles not only successful for their niche, but also when compared to major publishers. Book Business Extra spoke with Ross to get a preview of some of the insights she will share with conference attendees.

Book Business Extra: What advice would you give to other book publishing professionals on creating a successful launch?
Marji Ross: The key to success starts with choosing the right books rather than choosing the right launch strategy. If you haven’t done a good, strategic job in your acquisition and your positioning with your books, you’re already behind the eight ball when it comes to creating a launch strategy.

Extra: Over the past year, what trend(s) or technologies did you incorporate into your launch strategy?
Ross: Over the past two years, we have gone to outbound, dedicated e-mail messages. We are able to do that internally because we have corporately decided to collect e-mail names, and we have grown our lists to the point [where] we have 750,000 e-mail [addresses] that we send a message to every time we launch a book. E-mail communications have become a very important part of our marketing and of our launch.