Marji Ross, president of Regnery Publishing, spoke with Breitbart News Daily SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Wednesday regarding Regnery’s decision to sever ties with the New York Times Best Sellers list.
Ross cited multiple cases where conservative books did not appear to do as well on the New York Times Best Seller’s List as their actual sales numbers indicate they should have.
When approached about the seeming discrepancy, Ross said the Times gave two different explanations. “One is, it’s a secret. Our formula is a secret. We don’t tell anyone how we do it,” said Ross.
The other answer she cited was that the Times samples stores across the country, which means it is quite possible the Times could be polling stores more likely to sell fewer conservative titles than others, leading to a skewed result.
Regnery is opting to switch to Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller List instead “because it is book scans,” she said. “It’s based on book scans. It’s beautifully transparent. They print not only the ranking, but they print the book scan numbers, so you can see that book number one really did outsell book number two.”
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“We refuse to continue to highlight a list which has an increasingly diminished value to our audience. Therefore, we will no longer promote, publicize or frankly even bother to mention this list,” Ross added.
“Instead, we will continue to track sales, as a large number of media groups do, through Nielsen’s BookScan report, and we will use the Publisher’s Weekly bestseller list as our benchmark.”
In a letter to Regnery’s authors, she noted: “We are often told it’s foolish to bite the hand that feeds you. I say it’s just as foolish to feed the hand that bites you.”
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