on about books we delve into the latest news about the publishing industry with interesting gvin interviews with publishing industry experts. we'll also give you updates on current nonfiction authors and books. the latest book reviews, and we'll talk about the current non-free open books featured on c-span's book tv. and welcome to about books, a program and podcast produced f'k with the head of skyhorse publishing, which recently acquired regnery and has■i■■5 be a force in publishing controversy books. but first, here'me of the latest news from the publishing world today show anchor savannah guthrie is the latest author to battle scammers who use a.i. technology within days of releasing her faith based memoir, mostly what god does. ms.

s warning her social media followers about book scams thatame. quote, so many fakes out there she wrote on her instagram account. i didn't write anything other than the book. mostly what? god does. no workbooks, no studies, no nothing. the today show followed up ms. guthrie's post with an article /.■sa1about the online fakes ans on how to spot general rated books. now, earlier this month, sir, can a bookscan reported that 767 llion units of books were sold last year in the us. 3% from 2020 to adult fiction. sales grew by 1%. that's about 1.5 million books. it's the fifth year of growth in the adult fiction sector. the adultdystopian romance and thri. also posted

now children's books xperia it's the steepest decline last year, selling 13.5 million fewer books did in 2022. now, in the rert analyst christn mclain offered predictions for 2024 and book sales. she included an expected growth in history and political science books. those genres, quote, typically spike in an election year. she said. if modeled off market expectations based on 2016 or 2020, circrna expects a banner ar in 2024. and joining us ns publishing. so, toni lyons, tucker carlson described you as the last radical publisher in the united states. what do you think he meant by you know, i think that publishers to a g e become sortr

biases. so, you know, the big publishing to, you know, published books th ups pe. they view publishing in a tay than i do. so i think that books should be disturbing. they should be dangerous. they should challenge people. that people■ should seek out books that are controversial sh point of view than the one that they're comfortable with. and i don't see the people reading books that just sort of confirm all their biases. you know, what's the what's the benefit to the readerhere? you know, it's sort of maybe it while they're doing something else or you know, not you know, there's noere is no need to do y research. there's no need to think about óf■ i think that that were at this tele stage in

american history, maybe in world history, where people are not interested in really thinking things through and inng at opposing points of view. and i you know, i find t reallyh bigger danger than the danger know, any ideas. so i think that that there should be thisous marketplace of ideas where people disagree, where they, you know, people turn on the television and they hear both sides of all kinds of things. you know, we published a book in 2020 called the case against wearing masks. and at the same time, we d the case for wearing masks. and both of them were sort of in-depth looks at, you know, what the arguments were. and so i amazon, some of the other big tech platforms took he case against wearing masks because the government had

good and anything on the marketpl tat idea was dangerous. so they were able ri that period to get all of the big tech ptf amazon, google, youtube to facebook, instagram, to take down anything that they di their many cases now that are that are ■xnding where it was clear that people from government agencies or people from the exactly of br called up amazon or youtube or other places and told them to take material sens. i mean, they have so much power and of, you know, antitrust regulation. so they pretty much felt that they had to do it.

and there's some letters back and forth saying, you know, how do you want this censorship to to go down? do you want us to just take the off? off or take or should we amplify it? so those are the i think most ae ■believed for for decades in in russia or china, but, you know, not in the united states that hered we can decide things for ourselves. so, you know, skyhorse, you know, my goal with skyhorse is to sort of be the preeminent pue people can find things th publishers find are too dangerous to challeng are afraid to publish. d' so i think that there's a real role there and that there are places like regnery that weren't doingbecause in a

sense they were just getting they were getting canceled in theketplace. and tony lyons, you took that same pro and anti approach with elizabeth holtzman and alan dershowitz, the case for and the case againsttrump. right. know, so so i think that's a that's a really interesting way oflithat, you ki would like people to buy both of those boond and or to buy the one that they think that they really disagree with. and ifheir ide■kas can really stand up, then then they shoul' so if somebody really believes something, why not read the opposite point of view? you know, why not say, where are my strongly held beliefs coming from? is it that i'm being indoctrinated? is it that i just, you know, grew up in a in a certain part of the country? so all the people here have that same point of view. i mean, i grew up in new york

city. i'm sure that there are a lot of people in new york who have very similar points of view when it comes to politics or some specific issues. and then you go to alabama and you have people with very different ts so the narrative in new york is that the people in alabama are, you know, not as intelligent as the peop york. and i'm sure that if you ask the people in alabama,think that thw york are just these crazy woke people who have these misguided views that that can't reallyand. so the idea is that, you know, any idea ought to be able to stand up to argument and, you know, that's what i would like to see much more of in this country. d then there's a there's a much more sinister side of it in know, the bigplatforms, the ind

out as this incredible opportunity for just maxum, um, diversity that every kind of idea, you know, was there somewhere and if you were willing to do a little bit of research, you could find it. but then at some point, it kind of all went south. and what happened there is that people discovered that you control the internet. so that the internet becomes the best possible source of censorship that the tools are so incredibly powerful. so while well, ittarted out as this opportunity or just this open world where everybody could have a voice, what it winds up being is that you can use bots, you can use censorship to make sure that it'sopposing points of view. and when it comes to really stie

dissent if you just make sure that nothing that contradicts is, you know, can be easily accessed. t becomes true even with things like, let's say, the iraq war, where we all saw the beginnings oatso people who saie weren't weapons of mass destruction, you were censored, were vilified in some lost their their government jobs. there was a cia agent outed as as punishment for it. so that was the beginning of it. and thou things like, you know, the the snowden story where there was a war on whistleblowers. but what it's come down to and it really happened during covid, is that who disagreed then just kind of disappeared from the there were people who o had, you know, decadesrw of

building up their online esence, maybe not decades, maybe ten, 15 years, who if the government or if a big tech something they were saying constituted hey could have their whole life's work just disappear, just taken down with no real recourse, no real way to kind of sue the government or sue youtube or sue google. and that, i thought was just such an america, in history see. being and what it what it really can get to is that any kind of dissent can be labeledsmisinfor. so when you looked at at the definition of health, misinformation during covid, it actually became and was

described in many places as anythingt contradicts the official government point of view. so■? you would have won official say something and anybody who that official then was scrubbed from the internet. so the problem is that once you give the government that kind of power, it's not easy to take it back. and, you know, so you can say, well, we're in a crisis. so we have to do take certain steps to to protect people, even ifen say, well, you didn't actually protect people you protected people making certain products, corporate nations making certain products. but but but that's a long story that doesn't really fit here. but the idea is that you can then take any narrative about any subject and say that it's the truth. anything that contradicts it shouldn't be allowed to be

in or in any other form. andfundamentally combat that. and i'm working very hard t that. and and i think, you know, that a company like regnery that has this really story history of publishing conservative views for, you know, 75 years, then sort of foundd in any independet bookstores for example, many books that that they publish. i mean, i didn't really know the details, but i could see from the books that i was publishing. so whebert f kennedy's book, the real anthony fauci, you know, it waebestsell. in its first week, it93,000 cop. the new york times bestseller list made it number seven. they wouldn't accept an ad for it. big tech platforms wouldn't take ads for it.

so it was censored in every possible way. it got no reviews at all. total media blackout because it was labeled as misinformation, which by the definition that was prevalent then, which anything that contradict did statements by dr. fauci were pese misinformation. heep science. and that was that was where where, you know, the government position had had gotten to. so a book that contradicted him even just by the title. so you didn't have to read any of it to decide that. and the title itself was misinformation because it a govt be saying things that wer or needed further research. tony lyons, published conservae books? i know you just conservative publisher as well. ah. so, you know, we we publish

books across the political trum. we have many books coming out this this year that are, you know, really solidly can conservative books. we h pro-trump books, but we also have anti-trump books comi out. we have books that are for bobby y. so, you know, it's really across the political spectrum with all the different nuances. and that's the kind of publish comes to conservative books, i've been really fascinated by the censorship of those books. so that kind of■1 drew me more towards that kind of publishing and on the, you know, on the a really well-respected democrat writing a mainstream book right now, you have five, you know, gigantic publishing cfive compa, are more than $1,000,000,000

companies that are going to get a bid on those books. but if you have a really great, you know, excitg, ierchallengin, er not many publishers who would be brave enough to publish■ them now. so that's a it's a very strange historical momenthere. and so i wanted to take part in as a as a wrong. you've publishedoody■+fx allen, rfk jr, as you said. alex jones.ff limits? you know? thixat's ways a tough question. and, you know, if if a book explores that point of view and, that's a and it's a strong argumfo point of view is, i thin'have it out there. and i think that that what you

find is, youno w look at this country now, there really two americadifferent narf what the truth is. ■3é■pand, you know, i think that that's really, really harmful, really dangerous, but also bad for the american mind that that we really want the broadest possible■%íknzdeas. and and and the idea that that both all this missing formation and that that ought to be taken knoe truth is decidedke i said before, in the marketplace of ideas and that it's much better to have it done in the town square with people m very best arguments rather than a government or a big tech companyt the trut. some of the other authors published bycruz, paul manaforts

hedges and lennon. from? the name skyhorse ca f employee who worked at the company many, many years ago. i really liked the name. it doesn't really have much to do with the person that it that it came from, but i had started thinkinghat i was going to going to call it pegasus books idea of something sort of soaring in t clouds, you know, something big some some big idea, some new way of publishing. and but at the time that that trademark was taken, you know, there's there's another publisher lled pegasus books. so skyhorse seemed like a like a alternative to that. and it's a name that i that i really like now, you know, totay the from the history of where the idea of it cam started with lions press. does that still exist?

yes. lions press in 1985. he was a professor of literature in new york. he he wrote, i believe, 26 books and literally thousands o articles and newspapers and magazines. he still alive. incredible man. and so hired me. i had gone to law school, practiced law for about 18 months, and then joined his publishing companyped him run tp until 2001. then we sold the company and i went with them and and then ran it for the company that for three years. and they are they are+ñ■ttill still publishing books. yes. well, you keep the regnery imprint two or fold that into skyhorse. definitely keep the regnery imprint. i think it's a great brand and i and i'd like to, you know, be a

good steward of the brands that that we take on. what about i would you publish a bookri a. i mean my my feelings there are that you know, area. and i think that a free speech publisher that i should be open to all the different historical changes. so, you know i'm a little bit skeptical of, you know, sort of play out and with certain kinds of books, it it seems like it's it's it's not going to play out. but in theory, you know, if it was, for example, somebody was going to write a practical that area and they hadany, many articles and i then becamer them

to sort of shortcut the whole process and say, write a book on ar some specific thing, you know. so to the extent that it would just save them. 500 hours work and then create an author tick book, that was their idea based on, you know, their form of, of, of writing, their style, their ideas, you know, that that, i think isn't a bad, you know, any time we can to do things more that's, you know, jt as high quality, there are a los to it, too. and that word, you know, we're starting to to see what some of those are, that there's all kinds of bias that can go into the process of of a i.

6qlbut but i'm but i'm open to anything. tony lyons founded in 2000 657 new york times best seller. so far more than 10,000 books on the backlist the wall s■tree ab, mr. lyons doesn' and that alone qualifies him as a maverick in today's environment. but he's really an old fashioned civil libertarian and wary of power in all its forms. he especially deplores the extent to which social media platforms or traditional media and government seem to have joined hands to combat misinformation. he se unity as antithetical to the healt necesy for discovering truth. tony lyonss the publisher of skyhorse. we appreciate your spending a few minutes with us. thanks so much. and you're watching about books. a progin produce by c-span's booktv. well, each week, dozens;n of new

books are published. here's a few. author peter schweitzer is out with his latest book, blood mowh turn a blind eye while china k schwei'k also focused on china. r+ handed how american elites get win. another new book, nick troiano, has released the primary solution rescuing our democracy from the fringes. mr. troiano is executive e america, which advocates for primaries and independent redistricting. and one other new book to note, former federal prosecutor andrew weissmann and new york university law professor melissa murray compiled the four criminal indictments against former president donald trump into one book. it's called the trump indictments the historical

charging documents with commentary. this book includes a timeline of the four cases. alongside the former president. and historical comparisons to cases against other former political leaders. mr. weissman served as a lead prosecutor in former special counsel robert mueller's office, and he previously authored the book where law ends inside the mueller investigation. and we want to note one book review this week, the guardian's martin pengilly took a look at the washington book, how to read politicians. it's by carlos lozada of the new york times. pengilly calls the , quote, an authority of overview of us political publishing in the last decade. and carlos lozada, by the way, will be a guest in the coming weeks. on c-span's q&a program. and this week on book tv' progrt

kara swisher talked about her career tech industry and its key players. here's a preview. burn book expression actually mean girls is out now, which is kind of too it is for you write things you really think about people and you're not. people are supposed toe of that. and you have fun with and mean a little bit, but funny. and so i decided that's what i was doing in my memoir of what my 30 years covering silicon valley, the same time that subhead is a tech love story. because i love tech. yeah. so i don't want this idea that there's a lot of tropes out there. i know tech is terrible. it's not terrible. it's how how it' essentially. and so i want to say i love tech, but let me tell you what happened. rney. do these people becoming the world's richest and most powerful people? and a reminder that afterwards airs at 10 p.m. eastern time on book tv. well, thanks for joining us for

about books, a program and podcast produced by c-span's booktv. we'll continue to bring you publishing news and new author programs. and a reminder that you can get thisapp and you n so watch ■online any time all of our author programs at booktv dot org.

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