The most important thing to remember is that you're not actually in the book publishing business. You're in the business of building authors' careers and connecting those authors to readers. Be amazing! Books change lives. -Dominique Raccah; CEO/Publisher and Co-Founder, Sourcebooks, Inc.
Hello!
As another BookExpo America opens, I wanted to share some very exciting news with you. We've all heard that "flat is the new up," and last week I heard someone in the business joke that "down 20% is the new flat." But I'm happy to report that this is NOT how we're experiencing things at Sourcebooks!
Last week's strong sales pushed our year-to-date point-of-sales numbers up a full 1.5% to 15.5% against last year's numbers (last week's YTD POS jumped from 13% to 14%). We're also continuing to gain market share in core categories. This week Sourcebooks set a new record for single-week sales with Harlan Cohen's The Naked Roommate (ISBN 9781402219016), the #1 college guide in the country, selling 2,036 units this week-that's a 63% increase over the same week last year for the previous edition!
In other imprints/categories, Sourcebooks Landmark (historical fiction), boasts POS up 51% and Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, our children's imprint, has grown 76%. These gains, however, are not at the expense of our core categories like nonfiction reference (across multiple categories), which are up a solid 2.5% despite this dismal economy.
Sourcebooks' motto for 2009 is "NOT Business as Usual," and we're actually putting that theme into practice. One of the ways we're doing that is by asking ourselves (and each other), "What can we create together?" Part of that answer has been to reorganize and partner our marketing, publicity, and digital departments to better support our authors in reaching an increasingly fragmented-yet no less impassioned-readership in the core areas. As our CEO and publisher Dominique Raccah always says, "We publish authors, not books." So we're aggressively acquiring titles in core categories like historical fiction, commercial women's fiction, Jane Austen sequels, study aids/college guides, parenting, and gift books, just to name a few.
In addition to growing our relationships with our authors, we're redefining what a "customer" is: A customer is not just a buyer or retailer or librarian; an author, agent, or a vendor; Our customers are you, the media; our customers are the colleagues and patients and clients of our authors who are also medical doctors and child psychologists and nutrition experts. They're the readers of your magazines and newspapers and blogs who demand more, want it now, and need it done easier than ever before. Because our world is so BIG and forever evolving, Sourcebooks is choosing to be, as a company, proactive, optimistic, and possibility-driven.
This means we're delivering our products the way our customers want them and we're doing that through our new digital initiatives. Last fall we launched our first digitally enhanced book with Country Music: The Masters, followed shortly thereafter by Laura Duksta's I Love You More. Publishers Weekly announced the latter's release in an article entitled "Taking Steps into the Digital Future (2/16/09)," declaring that "Sourcebooks became the first major print publisher to release an enhanced digital picture book." Powered by DNAML's DNL eBook Reader, which integrates audio, video, and images into the text, our digital books allow readers to fully immerse themselves into the book, creating a "theater of the mind."
As if that wasn't exciting enough, in March we unveiled our first iPhone app, Most Baby Names, based on the #1 bestselling baby names book, The Complete Book of Baby Names (a new edition with a fresh look comes out next month!) And earlier this month Apple approved us for two more iPhone apps: Gruber's Shortest SAT (http://www.sourcebookscollege.com/apps/sat-app.html), from our Gruber's Complete SAT Guide, consisting of 18 questions in Verbal, Math, and Writing; and The Essential Law Dictionary iPhone app (http://www.sphinxlegal.com/articles/Essential-Dictionaries.html).
