Sourcebooks Celebrates Twenty-Nine Years of Innovation

This week Sourcebooks turned twenty-nine, and took some time to celebrate twenty-nine years of success, growth, and innovation, and most importantly, all the people who helped us get there.

The Sourcebooks Naperville team in front of the office, full of ice cream and good cheer.

After taking some time to let loose, and engage in some friendly competition, Publisher and CEO Dominique Raccah spoke on what it takes to create a company like this, and while she was addressing the employees, she was really talking to the entire Sourcebooks family. All of the authors who write such wonderful books, our bookselling partners who help to connect readers with the right books for them, our media partners who share their love of these books, and of course the readers. We wouldn’t be here without the readers. Here’s what she said:

“Wow. Twenty-nine years.

Sourcebooks as a book publishing company simply should not exist. Whoever has a copy of “The Rules of Publishing” would tell you that. You think that’s not an actual thing, but sometimes our industry believes that there are “rules.” We ran into them again and again, and we still do.

My book review of “The Rules of Publishing” is short but sweet, “Let’s create something amazing.” 

Innovation is how we got here. It’s the cornerstone of who we are and who we’ll become next. As you all probably saw, we won the BISG Industry Innovation Award last week, and when I got up on stage I talked about how innovation is iterative, is about the customer experience, and is about having the right mindset.

What I didn’t talk about is what innovation looks like.  For that I would have needed pictures because it looks like all of you. It looks like the great big ideas and the small improvements to processes that let us pursue those ideas. Each and every one of you has a daily impact on the work we do, how we innovate and the success we create.

There are so many places in the company’s history where we did something that other people thought was crazy. We put CD’s in books, we published not one but TWO New York Times bestselling children’s poetry collections, we built a whole personalized website from the ground up. But we did it to create something amazing—connecting authors to readers in new ways.

Sourcebooks would not be the company that it is today without you and your dedication to the idea that books change lives. YOU have changed my life, and all I can say is thank you! Thank you for your ideas, for your hard work, for your dedication. It has been a great year and I cannot wait to create an even bigger future.”

​Thank YOU!