Conservative Publicists Go Independent

by Christopher Dreher, PW NewsLine -- Publishers Weekly, 2/16/2005

Over its successful recent history, Regnery has sometimes functioned like a minor-league team for corporate publishers, supplying authors and editors to those houses after having its own good run with them.

Now the D.C. publisher is serving as a feeder for another area: publicity. A trio of former Regnery publicists have started MNS Publicity, a boutique shop in D.C. that will handle overflow on other houses' conservatives titles.

The growth of a freelance publicity industry is usually a sign that other houses are becoming too strained to handle their own promotion, and the birth of MNS (which stands for the founders and partners, Stephanie Marshall, Gwen Nappi and Sandy Schulz), highlights how publicists at some larger publishers may not have the resources--or the experience--to handle conservative titles.

MNS has already signed on to work on SMUT: A Sex Industry Insider (And Concerned Father) Says Enough is Enough, from Sentinel (also the new employer for a former Regnery editor). MNS is also doing Nelson Current's March tribute to CBS anchorman Dan Rather, Rather Dumb: A Top Tabloid Reporter Tells CBS How to Do News, by Mike Walker. Unlike most PR firms that delegate assignment, the three principles will be the only employees and will do all the pitching themselves.

The group's pedigree is heady- together they have worked on more than a dozen bestselling titles by conservative stars like Bernard Goldberg, Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D'Souza. And their contacts both as Regnery employees and freelancers--in a world that's still relatively insular--could help them more than it would the usual startup. "We all have the same ideology," said Marshall. "We all get it. We're not just publicists trying to cash in on a hot book market."