Regnery Publishing President and Publisher Marji Ross on how to put all of the pieces together to create a hit title.
We look for authors who are celebrities or are passionate and have some controversy. If we have [all] three, we’re probably on the road to a successful author. But we do also decide not to publish a book because we’re concerned that the author cannot conduct a serious campaign for us. It’s not enough for the author to be a good writer or [a] specialist. They have to be a good messenger. We have a rule at our office: We almost never will sign a book before we have met in-person with the author. Agents know that about us. It’s come to be an unspoken agreement with a lot of the agents we work with. It’s important to us, so we can have the face-to-face meeting where we can assess the passion and the communications skills of our author. We publish a relatively small number of titles.