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—Heather Moore
The last few days have been tremendously exciting as Discover a New Love got off the ground, and Sourcebooks took the spotlight in what was big news throughout the publishing industry, the tech world, and romance reader community. The response has been more than we imagined! In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Jeffrey Trachtenberg noted several ways in which he views the announcement of Discover a New Love as being a new direction within the publishing industry, including: “In a move that further thins the line between book publishing and book retailing, Sourcebooks Inc., a leading independent publisher, is launching an online bookstore this week focused on its romance titles… In a decision sure to grab attention, Ms. Raccah said that titles from Sourcebooks will be sold without digital rights management, a striking departure from the protections used in traditional digital book publishing. Sourcebooks digital titles can be lent and moved from one device to another, including Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook.” News of the new initiative reached Bloomberg Television and they invited Sourcebooks CEO & Publisher, Dominique Raccah, to speak about the new project and the transforming publishing industry on Bloomberg West. We also saw great coverage in the following outlets: The Chicago Tribune PublishersLunch paidContent eBookNewser The Digital Reader Marketplace Tech Report Dear Author Smart Bitches Trashy Books USA Today Happy Ever After blog Indie BookSpot And the comments on social media ranging from readers to industry folk were very encouraging (just a few examples): “This is brilliant on a couple of levels…” “the categorization… is pretty freaking awesome” “… found some great deals. Thanks!” “Exciting!” “What a great idea...” A BIG congrats to the Discover a New Love Team, we're off to a great start! 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:
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:
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 |
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