by Dominique Raccah

About two years ago, I came to the conclusion that we needed to have a decidedly more direct relationship with our readers. I was especially intrigued by watching some of the smart ways publishers in other spaces (most notably O'Reilly and Baen) were engaging with their readers. It also came from watching how e-tailers like Amazon.com repeatedly used their customer information to build products, services and user engagement. Having a direct, ongoing relationship with our readers could not only make solid business sense, it could also help create enormous impact for our authors.

Discover a New Love is our first major project in this direction. Its focus is primarily on lovers of great romance novels, or novels with strong romantic elements. Among other things, we believe it will make us a stronger publisher—one better able to satisfy the desires of our readers. We believe we'll be better able to further the careers of our authors and to provide insights that may prove useful to our retail partners, as well as our authors, their agents and our international publishing partners. We think it will actually help us to create better books and market them in more interesting ways.

Specifically we’re hoping to accomplish 3 things:

1. FEEDBACK: We need to be constantly learning to make better books, particularly in a world as noisy and crowded as that of romance novels. To do so, we actually need to ask more questions and gather more data. We need to learn more about what really can make a difference. It’s one of the essential ways that publishers can add value for authors.
2. COMMUNITY: We think we can create new ways of connecting authors to readers. We’re going to start with regular parties online and several live events throughout the year. Your hostess is the incomparable Barbara Vey! We’re launching at the RT Booklovers Conference here in Chicago this week!
3. TRENDS: Having a place to listen and learn: What do readers want more of?  What do they want next? What new directions is romance fiction going? As Joe Wikert pointed out “One of the most important reasons publishers should invest in a direct channel is because of all the data it provides.”

Fundamentally, we’re interested in one problem: how can we help a reader discover the next book or author they will love?

We know people who read Susanna Kearsley love her books, so how do we help more readers to discover her books? (And so on for other authors obviously.)

Like many new developments, we expect how we tackle this problem to evolve—starting immediately. Here are some of the ideas we’re starting with:

• In response to reader demand, many of the eBooks will be available all over the world. It won’t be for all titles due to some contract restrictions, but we’re paying attention and looking for ways to connect the world-over.
• The eBooks offered will be Digital Rights Management (DRM) free and portable to ALL eReader devices. We want readers to own the ebooks and for those ebooks to be portable across eReading devices and platforms. DRM is controversial because on the one hand it offers some protection from piracy (people disagree with how much). On the other hand, it’s hard on consumers—they can’t share, they can’t take advantage of all the devices they own. And there are many who don’t like it. The question is how best to balance these competing interests?
• We invite other publishers to join us (though as the Wall Street Journal pointed out DRM may well be an issue for others). Possibly more to come on that topic.

Discover a New Love is not intended to replace our valued partnerships and promotions with other retailers. Many who know Sourcebooks know we’re aggressive in testing promotions that find both greater readership and value for our authors, so we do and will continue to do frontlist and themed ebook promotions with our retail partners. Discover a New Love is envisioned as another avenue to help readers. If you’re a romance reader, it’s one more platform for discovery (with loads of neat pluses). The data we’ve seen shows that romance readers are heavy users and that they buy from many different outlets. We see this is an expansion and addition to the current space.

Discover a New Love is a new model built directly in response to what we’ve heard from authors, agents and readers. Expect a lot of changes from us. This is just the beginning. And we look forward to learning together.

Thoughts, comments, suggestions are all welcome.

With warmest wishes,

Dominique

This Sunday I had the opportunity to present during the Tools of Change (TOC) conference at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, a daylong event filled with a ton of interesting conversation on the digital world of kids’ books.

A number of people I met there have asked me for my slides and as promised, I’ve posted the full presentation below. The presentation focused on the changing world of children’s books, and these were some of the key points that I found interesting. 

I would love to hear your thoughts and/or questions!

5+ things we learned and are doing differently now

After an engaging, inspiring, and utterly packed Digital Book World Conference & Expo (DBW) last week, I started to pull together some of the more practical implications of the DBW and Publishers Launch Conferences for Sourcebooks:

1. Marketing: Integration & Better Data

The discussions on these subjects were outstanding and really identified several areas that we're moving forward on.

• Marketing is getting a whole review with implications for multiple departments: publicity, marketing, editorial, and sales.
• Metadata is getting yet another pass. We’re going to be integrating with SEO and taking on a backlist review project.
• Data dashboarding is now a top priority. How quickly can we get information, make decisions, communicate, and change directions? This new thought process was probably the highlight of the show for me.

2. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) & Metrics

Lots of important discussion and thinking around data and metrics. Sourcebooks has a management quarterly next week to review performance and plans. This will be focused on key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics. Again, much to think about and push forward.

3. New Ventures

DBW was a great show for creating new opportunities. We met four new companies (with interesting business proposals or models) with whom we expect to be doing business in 2012. There’s some new thinking in unexpected areas.

4. Partners

It was wonderful to have meetings with many of our current partners and to discuss expanding our relationships. This is a rapidly changing space and everyone was abuzz with new work and new ideas in both the digital and physical book marketplace. Five of our partners have some big things brewing, and yes, we’re absolutely going to be participating.

5. Illustrated eBooks

Unbelievably, I saw two new opportunities at the illustrated book panel. Let’s see if I can convince anyone else in my organization to try these out.

This is obviously not all:

• Lots of data points that I'’m still thinking about. I suspect there are some new ideas, experiments brewing.
• There were other Sourcebooks folks at DBW – what they learned and how that may change, impact, redirect this preliminary list
• Lots of big industry-wide conversations: DRM, libraries, rights and royalties, worldwide English language, the rapidly developing global marketplace and more

We thank you for the warm reception to our new Agile Publishing Model and our partnership with futurist David Houle.

And a special thank you to David Nussbaum, Mike Shatzkin, Michael Cader, Jess Johns, Matt Mullin and all of the DigitalBookWorld and Publishers Launch Conferences team for their hard work and commitment!

The thing that warmed my heart the most was the level of conversation and engagement between lots of different industry members. Some conversations were difficult. Sure. But most were productive and engaging.

I hope others will share their learnings, thinking and/or questions.

Dominique

Check out this interview with Sourcebooks CEO and Publisher Dominique Raccah. After participating in the CEO Panel at Digital Book World, Dominique explained to GoodEReader why she’s so excited about the publishing transformation and coming innovations in the juvenile book space, including ebooks and enhanced digital books.

To watch the video and read the full article, click here.

Publishers Weekly recently asked nine publishing executives to comment on how their company is preparing for the transition of print to digital and the impact this transformation will have on their businesses. 

Below is Dominique’s statement on how digital has transformed Sourcebooks, and what we believe about the present and future of publishing.  You can read the full article here.

“Looking for the 50% Solution”

Publishers Weekly

December 30, 2011

Dominique Raccah, President and publisher, Sourcebooks

E-books already constitute over half of sales in two parts of Sourcebooks business. As a result, there has been tremendous impact on strategy and models, which will continue to evolve over the next  five years. And as the market changes, we have to continue building the infrastructure to accommodate digital, both from an architecture and an innovation point of view.

As devices and software change, integrate, and inevitably segregate again, we have to be ready to deliver great experiences for each device. At Sourcebooks, we’re always looking for increases in functionality—for example, look at what’s happening with children’s picture books, where last year’s e-ink obstacles are being replaced by joyous tablet opportunities. Imagining what might be next is an important part of the job.

Over the next five years, we believe that building vertical platforms will make an enormous difference to our company. For some of our authors, there’s a very real new set of opportunities that we are creating for them—new platforms, new models, new ways to reach readers. It is (I think) going to provide some significant revenue streams down the road.

We also expect to discover and formalize new ways to work with our bricks-and-mortar retail partners. You can already see the outline of that in the work we’ve been doing with Anderson’s Bookshops, the ABA, and our college authors. Expect publishers and retailers to create more of those kinds of opportunities together. It’s certainly one of the things we’re working on. And I think you can expect publishers to have much broader relationships—with retailers, digital partners, affinity communities, authors, agents, multimedia resources, and other content providers among them. You can expect us to be “publishing” far more than just printed books and e-books.

I’m incredibly excited about what the book and storytelling itself will look like in five years, and how broad readership might be by then. That’s probably the thing that excites me the most. We (the publishing industry) are at the center of a remarkable conversation. This is in some ways a glorious time for books—with more readers, more writers, and more outlets than ever before.

Sourcebooks Director of Sales & Marketing, Chris Bauerle, was at the Publishers launch Conference in Frankfurt last week, where he gave a presentation about book publishing workflow. The article below appeared in the Publishers Launch Conference program and highlights the innovations Sourcebooks has made in the digital workflow transformation over the past few years.  

BOOK PUBLISHING WORKFLOW IN TRANSFORMATION

Changes You Can Make Today to Prepare for an Age of Exploding Opportunity

By Chris Bauerle, Sourcebooks

The digital transformation offers opportunities for authors and books that we couldn’t have imagined five years ago: from instant digital access to an author’s work to interactive children’s books, from web-based platforms for content to highly engaging mobile apps. This new digital revolution in publishing has taken an industry that remained relatively unchanged for decades and provided it with a virtually limitless platform from which to create new products and ideas.

Seeing these opportunities on the horizon, Sourcebooks’s founder and CEO Dominique Raccah began to retool our organization several years ago to capitalize on the game-changing shift, and a digital workflow was at the heart of the changes made. I’m not sure that we could have articulated “digital workflow” when we set out, but our content delivery team was tasked with automating our workflow and preparing content to be repurposed in a host of new ways.

Yesterday's BISG Annual Meeting (#BISG11) was awesome! There was so much to learn and share, great data, and new systems and processes. Can't remember the last time I was so excited about metadata and rights management. We're making real progress in areas that will make a difference for the industry. Thanks to everyone who participated and shared!

A couple of people mentioned that in my Year in Review introduction, I'd said something that gave them goosebumps and asked me to put that in print. Not sure that you can replicate the experience but I can certainly tell you what I said. It's what I believe.

We are an industry in transformation. This is the most important thing that has happened in any of our professional careers. This is the transformation of the object and idea that we love and value, the book, with all the inherent risks and possibilities.

It's now. It's us. It's not going to be our kids or our grandchildren.

We're developing the systems, processes, models and relationships that will be the track of the future. And so the work we're doing today is the most important work any of us who love books have ever done. "It’s us” is all of us – every lover of literature, of the culture of books and authors and readers.  Every parent, teacher, editor, publishing professional, agent, librarian, bookseller, reviewer, blogger, in short, everyone who cares about the future of books.

Sometimes in the day-to-day rush it helps to remember...

It's now and it's us.

You can find the slides for the presentations here:

http://www.bisg.org/events-0-621-2011-annual-meeting-of-members.php

Dominique

Michael Bolton called it a "wonderful thing" and Sinatra crooned that it’s "many splendored," but I’ll align with the Beatles, correct as always when they told us "love is all you need." As a reader, how many times have you just fallen so in love with a story, with its characters, with a writer’s exquisite turn of phrase, that you wanted to shout it to the world? When you’re a publisher, sometimes you get to do just that.

Two years ago at the Bologna Book Fair I ran into a self-published children’s picture book called My Name Is Not Isabella by Jennifer Fosberry. Mixed in on a shelf with other small- and self-published books hoping for translation rights buyers to fall across it, it needed a little attention. I had a read and fell in love.

And I remember asking to take a copy for just a moment and running back to our booth to just show it to our team. I had to tell people about it!! Jennifer had done an amazing job publishing that lonely little book. She’d enlisted the terrific Mike Litwin to illustrate and she told a story that is at once a remarkable read-aloud, an educational powerhouse, and a touching connection between parent and child. The book was well-printed and she’d begun to sell copies wherever she could, plus snare a few awards. If I’m remembering right, she’d sold something like 1800 books.

And I remember thinking this book is brilliant and there are so many people who are going to love it. So right away, I tried getting in touch with Jennifer. I emailed. I asked my friend who’d represented her at Bologna to connect us. I was definitely possessed as only a person in love can be. And I was possessed because I believed we could bring Jennifer to a much bigger platform, that our team could be a megaphone for her (and for Isabella!).

Among the first things we did with Jennifer was to begin planning the future ­ we planned and began work on a second book almost immediately, the companion book for boys, My Name Is Not Alexander (we’ve since announced the second Isabella book for Spring 2012). One of the most important things we’ve done with Jennifer is worked with her to develop her characters and we started plotting how to build these characters as a "brand" of sorts. Most importantly, we wanted to allow Jennifer to never again worry about printers’ shipments and bills, packing boxes, collecting invoices, or cold-calling promotional appointments or reviewers. We wanted her to get back to flexing her creative muscle ­ in short, we wanted to let the writer write. When you love a writer that much, helping them be their absolute best is just one way of sharing that love with the world.

The earliest results for My Name Is Not Isabella included a big one ­ on January 9, 2011, author Jennifer Fosberry and illustrator Mike Litwin became New York Times bestselling authors, as the book snared 9th position on the Times Children's Picture Book list. How? Well, as both authors and publishers know, it’s not that easy. For starters we coordinated a big tour with bookstores and schools for Jennifer, putting her in front of kids, teachers, and libraries nationwide while we did the heavy lifting of tying in media and local booksellers along the way. And this spring we coordinated another tour as My Name Is Not Alexander came out.

We also very early personally showed it to booksellers that we knew would have an affinity for this book. And they got behind the book in some very important ways because what’s important is not just for the publisher or the publishing house to love the book, but for the love to spread. For booksellers, librarians, readers, bloggers, reviewers, teachers, and lots of other people to love the book.

As a result, we got heavy placement with our partners at national chain bookstores, who identified the book as a major one at early-season marketing meetings held with select major publishers. And we got a big break when bookseller Rona Brinlee raved about it on her holiday round-up on NPR’s Morning Edition. Was it a lucky break? You bet, we were blessed that Rona loved the book ­ but it was connections that started the train rolling when our matchmaking sales rep Tom Murphy plucked it out for Rona and suggested, "I think you might love this."

And our bookselling army has kept finding others who share the love. We just announced that Jennifer’s books have been optioned by Facinelli Films, led by Peter Facinelli, of Twilight and Nurse Jackie fame. Also, in exclusive partnership with the merchandising team at a major retailer, later this year you’ll see Isabella’s paper dolls, available as a companion to the books on prominent display in stores. Paper dolls!

Ebook users will also find My Name Is Not Isabella available as an innovative recordable book on the Nook Color ­ readers can experience the entire picture book, listen-along as the author (and her daughter!) perform the book for you, or record the book themselves for a loved one. And you’ll see other innovative and playful forms of the books soon, including apps and animated readalongs for devices we wouldn’t have imagined having "books" on years ago!

Like most great loves, the affair renews continually. It takes a lot of people and tremendous number of details to successfully unfold this kind of love story. Every day someone on our team pulls an arrow from the quiver and aims for a welcoming new heart. More importantly, every night, homes across the world share in our joy as parents and children together lovingly shout along with the story’s refrain, "my name is NOT Isabella!" And that’s the most important part of this love story.

That's the magic of book publishing the falling in love and making something extraordinary happen. Whether it’s picture books or romance novels or historical fiction or college guides or parenting titles it’s about finding these books that you love and then working incredibly hard (and I mean seriously hard) on behalf of the books and their authors.

This year, 2011, we’ve spread more love then ever before. This week, we brought The Heir, a first novel by Grace Burrowes, a remarkable talent discovered by Deb Werksman whose star is definitely rising, to the New York Times bestsellers list. It has been an extraordinary year for Sourcebooks so far beyond the predictable and ordinary. And it’s really all about finding these books you love and then working incredibly hard to spread that love to others.

As we head into Book Expo America 2011, those of you at the show will see the theme "Authors Are Our Rock Stars" at our booth, and we know we share that feeling with pretty much everyone at the show. We’ll have plenty of love to share about a lot of different authors and books. That’s a big task, but when you love something that much, you just have to spread the word.

Dominique Raccah
Chief Excitement Officer— Sourcebooks

An interesting article on digital transformation asking the question "As tablet computers surge, will video be publishing's next big hit?" was posted today on publishersweekly.com. As a pioneer in successful commercial multimedia publishing, Sourcebooks publisher Dominique Raccah is quoted:

Sourcebooks publisher Dominique Raccah, no stranger to the potential of multimedia, speaks of "a new era of creative partnership," and says 2011 may be the year in which some publishers begin to look and act "a lot more like film directors" for some types of books than the stereotypical fustian, tweedy book person. In college prep titles, a leading vertical for Sourcebooks, Raccah points to new videos produced for the electronic editions of Harlan Cohen's The Naked Roommate and Gary Gruber's SAT 2400—works that are available for sale as videos, in addition to using the videos to sell the books. The term "reader," as a result, Raccah suggests, is almost insufficient at Sourcebooks, which has sold more than five million "media-embedded" units (remember the book-and-CD combos from the 1990s, We Interrupt This Broadcast and And The Crowd Goes Wild?). Rather, Raccah speaks of her "constituents" and "stakeholders" in the marketplace, and stresses that for many titles, publishers should consider electronic editions more a "type of production" than just a publication.

Read the full article at:

The Producers: Books and Video in 2011

Last Friday lots of folks from Sourcebooks spent the day at the Spring 2012 Launch. 

So what does a “launch” meeting entail?

Publishers work in different ways and run different calendars, so this explanation is pretty much from the Sourcebooks perspective, but most will have some form of large group introduction to future titles. For traditional book publishing companies, “launch” is often the first time that the whole company is introduced to the new books. It’s a fairly early look.

Among other things, it’s when:

• The publicity and marketing groups start crafting and planning marketing and publicity plans
• Each person on the sales teams identifies opportunities and question areas
• The design department and art directors start developing ideas for covers

Many of these people have looked at some of these books already, but this is usually the first full-group look at them.

The focus for launch is to make sure that you’ve got the right pieces in place. Successful books are made up of hundreds of individual decisions. It’s what makes book publishing such a complicated process. So some of the decisions you’re reviewing are related specifically to what I’d call the merchandising package, including:

• Title
• Subtitle
• Publication date
• Format (hardcover, paperback, mass market, board book, etc.)
• Content
• Trim size

This part of the process is oriented around print books, though increasingly we’re talking about alternate-format concepts at this stage and earlier. Yes, print books are still the vast majority of the book business and there are categories for which ebooks are still not an important part of the business.

And for each book you review a fairly comprehensive data sheet that includes basic data, initial drafts at key selling points, descriptive information, and competitive/comparative books.

The goal at launch is simple: you want the book to create an awesome experience for the reader and a real success for the author. [And it’s heartbreaking every time you don’t…that, by the way, is true for every publisher, but that’s a different post.]

So the thing you spend the most time on is the positioning of the book. What is this book? How does it speak to readers? How do we express that? Positioning is more than a title or a jacket. It’s all of the communication around the work.

You review other books that you’re going to be competing with in the space. What else is there? What’s not worked? What do we know today that we didn’t know when we bought the book? What’s really exciting about this book? What moves people?

You can probably see that there’s a fair amount of fact and data we’re looking at, but also an awful lot of craft. As the publisher, what we’re delivering is a lot of experience and hands-on knowledge of the marketplace. We’re trying to deliver both dollars and “wow” for our partners on the retail end. And ultimately that becomes all about how and where we strike the readers.

Having all of the elements aligned at the beginning is how you can really create a successful book - that having the right vision of the book has enormous impact. Over the years, we’ve had a lot of examples of what good versus bad positioning can do for a book.

I love launch. It’s new. It’s fresh. It’s filled with joy, laughter and the possibilities that exist for authors. Even something seemingly as minor as a publication date can make an enormous difference in the life of a book. And titling is something we obsess over. Each book matters.

Friday’s Spring 2012 Sourcebooks Launch was no different. The room was packed. You could feel the energy. There were moments when the room vibrated. And there were books that lit up the room.

And then there were books that needed more work. Books that had real potential but we didn’t seem to have it all wrapped up yet. That’s what launch is for – identifying those needs and opportunities and making sure that what we believe about a book and an author truly come across when we communicate it to the outside world.

Ultimately, we want to create books that create awesome experiences for readers. [If you’re an author and haven’t yet viewed Kathy Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users video, here’s the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSlRd6MnDv8&feature=player_embedded]

Books touch you, inspire you, call you to action. This year (2011), we’ve done more of that for authors than ever before in the history of our company. More bestsellers. More awards. More sales. It’s been incredible.

And it all starts with these seemingly mundane but incredibly potent data sheets for every book that help ensure that the idea is right. That the title communicates. The format makes sense. The cover direction is distinct. The publicity and marketing group has an angle. The list of these decisions goes on and on. It’s what makes great books soar, it’s why publishers matter – and if you're very lucky, all these little decisions can turn into something that can look like this:

It’s been an incredible couple of days...

For the first time in the company’s history, Sourcebooks has four titles on the New York Times Bestseller List AND a USA Today Bestseller! It’s really extraordinary for any publisher, but for an independent publisher to have a set of books on the list by a number of different authors is rare (I actually couldn’t think of another example that weren't part of the same series...at least not four).

The New York Times Bestseller List for Children’s Picture Books for the week ending March 26, 2011 will feature not one, not two, but THREE Sourcebooks Jabberwocky titles! Olympic gold medal figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi’s debut children’s book, Dream Big, Little Pig!, remains on the list for the second consecutive week at the #3 spot after debuting at #2 for the week ending March 19. 2011.

Author Jennifer Fosberry’s My Name Is Not Isabella returns to the New York Times Bestseller List at the #9 spot, after previously landing at the #10 spot for the week ending January 9, 2011. Fosberry’s new book, My Name Is Not Alexander, debuts at #10 on the Children’s Picture Book list this week.

OK, I have to say it’s kind of amazing for a Chicago independent publisher to have 30% of the top picture books. One of my bookseller friends told me (at an event this week) “Sourcebooks really seems to have a feel for children’s books.” That’s an amazing compliment! And yes, we seem to really be developing a feel for our readers in this area. And we're working hard to do that (but that's a different post).

And then...Bestselling UK author Jill Mansell has matched her success overseas with a double bestseller in the U.S.: Miranda’s Big Mistake has reached #12 on the New York Times eBook Bestseller List and is #86 on the USA Today Bestseller List for the week ending March 26, 2011. Miranda’s Big Mistake is Mansell’s first bestseller in the United States, and the first New York Times eBook bestseller and USA Today fiction bestseller for Sourcebooks.

What’s really amazing is that our team envisioned the possibility of having 3 books on the list and then worked hard to make it happen. Look at what happened!

These are remarkable times in so many ways. I think there’s a lot to learn from Dreaming BIG!

Dominique

PS. I walked back into my office (after a trip to New York) and here’s what I saw:

Thanks, guys! Congratulations to all of our authors! And many thanks to all of our bookselling partners!!! What a great week!

I thought you might be interested in this interview I gave at DBW '11 (a few weeks back), where I discuss in more detail the latest insights we've gained on the transformation of the book industry and the strategies we're employing to move forward.

Some of what I talk about:

• A few lessons learned in connecting voice/authors to readers
• The strength of independent book publishers...could that be an advantage right now?
• Conceptualizing new digital ideas in partnership with authors, for example, the Fiske Interactive College Guide (which is today New and Noteworthy at the App Store!!)
• The problems of discovering new books on the internet and upcoming discovery experiments
• The search for new business models

As always, I love having this conversation!

How are you experiencing the changes taking place in book publishing today? What do you think makes it not publishing as usual?

Let me know what you think,
Dominique

What was the most important thing you learned about digital and books in 2010?

As is natural going into a new year, I did a little reflection on 2010, the year that was. And it was really such an extraordinary year.

For me, 2010 was the year my role as CEO and Publisher became mostly about planning the digital future.

In fact, 2010 was the year in which we all started to pay a lot more attention to digital. And there was news – often the lead stories - every day about digital developments. Who would have predicted that the book (and particularly ebooks) would be so central to the development of the web?

So I started to think about what was the biggest thing that I learned this year, what really changed in my thinking, and I think it was this:

We are entering a new age of what a publisher can be and what a publisher can do. It is (I believe) a new era of creative partnership in which a publisher may look a lot more like a film director for any individual project; an era in which the boundaries on what we can create with our authors and our digital partners is limited only by our imagination, vision and understanding of the needs of our customers.

It is both exhilarating and frankly terrifying.

And I believe this: There has never been more opportunity for books than there is today. We may be surprised to experience an explosion in readership. While some will read less (yes, distraction really is a problem), the very fact of making books so much more readily accessible will, I believe, significantly increase the number of books bought or read because so many more people will be easily able to buy books. Providing easy and relatively inexpensive access might actually create more book readers. Wouldn’t that be amazing!

I think we will look back on 2010 as the year when everything changed for our industry. It will be historic, it will be a year that we talk about and remember: we lived through it, we did this, we were part of this...we were part of the transformation of the book.

We are each grappling with a rapidly changing world -- facing challenges for which there was no training and that none of us could be fully prepared for. The entire book infrastructure is being re-conceptualized and rebuilt. The possibilities for us all -- everyone in the supply chain that runs from author to reader -- are enormous and at times overwhelming. And the thing that made me happiest this year was watching my friends, peers, customers and company step up and take it on. 2010 saw real progress on behalf of authors and readers made by so many (and yes, there’s always more to do). And as we go into another transformative year, we should celebrate the progress, the successes and even the failures of 2010.

So that's what really struck me about 2010 (and I guess it’s more than one thing).

What stood out for you? I thought we could compile into a list: #whatilearned2010. Feel free to post and tweet. Just send me links or post in comments below. I'll try to pull all the responses together into a single area so everybody can see them.

2011 promises to be extraordinary as well, the kind of experience and opportunity that will only happen once in our lifetime.

Happy New Year!

Dominique

@draccah on Twitter