We are excited to share that Kerry Cohen, author of Lush (published July 17, 2018) appeared on Megyn Kelly TODAY on Friday, July 20th!

Click here for the full interview.

From the TODAY segment:

After turning to alcohol, this woman explains how she reclaimed her life

For decades, Kerry Cohen struggled with the trauma of her parents’ divorce. She carried that emotional baggage through her first marriage, eventually developing an alcohol addiction. Now author of her memoir, “Lush,” Cohen joins Megyn Kelly TODAY to discuss how she overcame lingering feelings of loneliness, and embarked on a journey toward self-healing.


Read about the book and Kerry below.

The following article on Sourcebooks CEO Dominique Raccah ran in Bookselling This Weeky by the American Booksellers Association.
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Dominique Raccah, the CEO and publisher of Sourcebooks, has created a distinctly female-driven company publishing a diverse, wide-ranging collection of books that elevate marginalized voices.

Founded in 1987 as a publisher of books for bankers, Sourcebooks went from publishing just one title that year to 385 titles in 2017. The company, which celebrated its 30th anniversary last year, has since had hundreds of books on New York Times bestseller lists, and in 2018 was identified by NPD BookScan as the 14th largest trade book publisher in North America.

“Like a lot of booksellers, I started with nothing except a dream and a passion for books. It’s hard today as an entrepreneur to run and grow a vibrant business, but it was really hard when I started, and it was particularly hard as a woman entrepreneur,” Raccah told Bookselling This Week. “That’s what made us who we are. Today, I would say we are America’s most female-forward publisher and certainly North America’s largest woman-owned publisher.” Dominique Raccah, CEO and publisher of Sourcebooks

Sourcebooks Senior Marketing Manager Valerie Pierce told Bookselling This Week that the publisher aims to connect with indie booksellers in every possible way. Said Pierce, “Our catalog in Edelweiss is marked up so booksellers can sort and discover new titles. We have a special newsletter for indie booksellers that goes out once a month called Booktipsy, where we address some of our bigger books coming out; we also have our Booktipsy Twitter account. We’re at the Winter and Children’s Institutes, we do ARC mailings, we attend almost all of the regional indie events, and we’ll be at BookExpo next week.”

Booksellers are invited to visit Booth 2039 at next week’s BookExpo in New York City to meet staff from Sourcebooks, which employs just under 150 staff members and occupies three offices, in New York; Naperville, Illinois; and Milford, Connecticut. More than 70 percent of Sourcebooks’ staff is female, as is more than 70 percent of the company’s leadership team, said Raccah.

 “That female DNA is clear in what we publish, which is diverse and eclectic and, I think, really representative of what America actually is today,” said Raccah, who was named Publishers Weekly’s Person of the Year in 2016. “The Sourcebooks motto is ‘books change lives’ because, for us, it’s about books giving voice to marginalized people, including women and girls, and taking on a lot of challenging topics, particularly in places like YA.”

Sourcebooks is known for challenging the conventional, creating conversations, relentless innovation, and creating new kinds of business for its retail partners, including independent bookstores, Raccah said. Many of Sourcebooks’ titles, produced by a team led by editorial director Todd Stocke, showcase the company’s “female-forward” identity as a publisher — a progressive force; the starter of important conversations, whether about gun violence, gender fluidity, sexuality, immigration, or the value of science; and a champion of the voices fighting to be heard.

“One of the things that we are particularly proud of are the fiercely female voices that we publish,” said Raccah, citing books about forgotten women in history like The Other Einstein by Marie Benedict, which tells the story of Albert Einstein’s first wife. Sourcebooks is also the publisher of the May 2017 Indie Next List pick The Radium Girlsby Kate Moore; in August, Sourcebooks will publish the first and only biography of Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, Antonia Felix’s Elizabeth Warren: Her Fight, Her Work, Her Life.
 
Sourcebooks’ adult fiction business is comprised of Sourcebooks Casablanca, their romance line, and Sourcebooks Landmark, their literary imprint, while the company’s juvenile division is divided into different segments: Jabberwocky, their children’s imprint; Sourcebooks Fire, their YA imprint; entertaining and licensing; and the Jabberwocky nonfiction imprint.

Raccah cites This Is Where It Ends by Netherlands-based author Marieke Nijkamp, which spent 72 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, as one of the publisher’s YA books that has sparked important conversations. Back in 2015, Sourcebooks’ marketing team reached out to teachers, school librarians, and booksellers to make ARCs directly available to teens.

“Gun violence is epidemic, and it is a place where we have to take a stand as a nation. This Is Where It Ends was the number-one YA debut of 2016 and it keeps on touching lives,” Raccah said. “It is a vital stance for teens on gun control. Today kids are doing lockdown drills but they are also demonstrating; this is a conversation we have to have.”
 
Another YA book Raccah said has been a major conversation-starter is This Book Is Gay by Juno Dawson, anecdotally one of the most stolen books in high school libraries. Raccah, who said the book’s advertising campaign on Instagram and Facebook received thousands of positive comments, said the hardcover version was published under the name James Dawson, and after Dawson transitioned to female, the name being printed on the paperback’s cover was changed to “Juno Dawson.”

One of the publisher’s upcoming books Raccah says exemplifies the character of Sourcebooks is the company’s first graphic novel, Illegal, by Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer. Out this August for middle-grade readers, Illegal is a moving portrait of the immigration experience that puts a human face on a familiar story from the news headlines. In March 2019, Sourcebooks will publish a groundbreaking book about gender, She/He/They/Me: For the Sisters, Misters, and Binary Resisters by Robyn Ryle, which Raccah calls “wildly remarkable.”
“It has a nonlinear structure, so the reader can choose his/her/their own path through the book to discover what gender means,” she said.

Some of Raccah’s other favorite recent releases include Quantum Physics for Babies and General Relativity for Babies, part of a series by Australian physicist and father of four Chris Ferrie. Raccah said Ferrie, who is also the author Goodnight Lab, a scientific parody of Goodnight Moon, will soon be adding Blockchain for Babies and Evolution for Babies to the series.

Finally, Raccah cited the publisher’s partnership with America’s Test Kitchen as some of Sourcebooks’ important work: so far, products of that relationship have included 1, 2, 3 the Farm and Me; A Is for Artichoke; and The Complete Cookbook for Young Chefs, with more to come.

Raccah told Bookselling This Week that beginning as a female entrepreneur in the 1980s, she has been “mansplained” to more than her fair share. In fact, when she was applying for a loan to start Sourcebooks, the banker insisted on speaking to her husband instead of her.

Raccah’s business advice for female entrepreneurs, including indie booksellers, who deal with this kind of treatment or who have faced business challenges is to recognize that “the place where you are weak is actually the point you will have to strengthen. The part that is the most challenging for you is the thing you will have to face in order to take on the next growth opportunity for yourself. I saw that for myself over and over and over again.”

The veracity of this advice was no clearer to Raccah than in 2001, when she mortgaged her house to publish We Interrupt This Broadcast, also packaged with CDs, which features the most famous moments of the 20th century as announced by actual news broadcasts. Though one of the Big Five publishers initially discouraged her from going forward with it, the $50 coffee table book ended up selling 800,000 copies and became the first Sourcebooks title to make the New York Timesbestseller list, said Raccah.

Raccah said she is looking forward to meeting with indie booksellers at Booth 2039 during next week’s BookExpo to discuss these and other Sourcebooks titles.

“Growing Sourcebooks has been, in many ways, growing myself, as well as learning more about how to serve authors and booksellers,” said Raccah. “To booksellers, we welcome you and we hope we can help you to be really successful. That’s our goal.”

by Liz Button, originally written for Bookselling This Week

Sourcebooks is thrilled to announce the publication of Grammy Award–winning musician Ketch Secor’s debut picture book, Lorraine, scheduled to be released October 2, 2018.
 
Secor is a founding member of Old Crow Medicine Show, a Grammy Award—winning group that has been inducted as members of the Grand Ole Opry. In 2017, Old Crow Medicine Show released two critically acclaimed albums: Best of Old Crow Medicine Show (Nettwerk) and 50 Years of Blonde On Blonde (Columbia Nashville), a reimagined version of Bob Dylan's classic Blonde on Blonde album.
 
In writing Lorraine, Secor found inspiration from the Appalachian folktales he heard when living in eastern Tennessee during the infancy of Old Crow Medicine Show. “I’m interested in telling children’s stories using the traditional form found in folktales and incorporating all of these elements of music that both make it fun for kids and also harken to the richness of Tennessee culture,” said Secor.
 
Steve Geck, editorial director of children’s books at Sourcebooks, found himself drawn to the story’s deep roots in music and exploration of Americana. “Lorraine celebrates the bond a young girl shares with her grandfather through their mutual love of music. It’s sweeping, epic, and energetic,” said Geck.
 
The illustrator, Higgins Bond, is a nationally recognized illustrator and recipient of the 2009 Ashley Bryan Award for outstanding contribution to children’s literature. Best known for her work illustrating children’s biographies, including Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall, and adult books such as Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of An American Family, Higgins Bond was thrilled to partner with Secor. “I was excited for the opportunity to illustrate a story about a girl and her grandfather, and the love and healing power of music,” said Higgins Bond, who used her granddaughter as inspiration for the young girl, Lorraine.
 
“One of the things I’m most excited about this project is Higgins’s involvement and her illustrations,” said Secor. “I’m able to not only tell this Appalachian story, but also an African American story. There’s an important value to that, and writing a story from all of these voices has been inspiring to me. I’m really honored to be the one to tell it.”
 
“The combination of Higgins Bond’s bold, lavish illustrations and Ketch’s rollicking, rhyming story create an Americana fable reminiscent of Thunder Rose and Swamp Angel,” added Geck.
 
In Lorraine, Pa Paw and Lorraine spend their days celebrating life with the music of the Tennessee Hills. But when a fearsome storm rolls through, the two must rely on the power of music to get them through.

Promoting literacy, especially in his home state of Tennessee, is another important element of this project for Secor. “I live in a state that is oftentimes toward the bottom of the list in literacy and national education statistics. I hope this story can serve as a source of pride not only for the people who live in this region, but the many places that are underserved in children’s literature,” added Secor.
 
Secor will be on the road this spring and summer promoting Lorraine in advance of publication while on tour for Old Crow Medicine Show’s new album, Volunteer, which drops April 20. In October, Secor will go on a national event and media tour—visiting schools, bookstores, and libraries around the country.

Lorraine is available for pre-order now!

Today, America’s Test Kitchen and Sourcebooks, two of the country’s leading book and media publishers, announced the creation of America’s Test Kitchen Kids, a partnership to create a series of co-branded books designed to educate, inspire creativity, and shape a child’s relationship with food and cooking.

Under the agreement, America’s Test Kitchen and Sourcebooks will develop and publish a variety of uniquely targeted books from baby to board, kids to teen. Combining the expertise of Sourcebooks in the children’s book market with the exceptional content development from America’s Test Kitchen, the books are designed to create new ways for children to connect with food, from baby’s first foods and STEM-based picture books, to cookbooks that bring the test kitchen experience to kids of all ages.

Over the last 25 years, through its magazines, cookbooks and instructional cooking shows, America’s Test Kitchen has solidified its place as one of the most respected brands in food publishing and media, with millions of home cooks who trust its experts for tried-and-true advice on recipes, ingredients and cookware.

“America’s Test Kitchen is dedicated to helping home cooks succeed in the kitchen,” said David Nussbaum, CEO of America’s Test Kitchen. “We are teachers. That's what we do. By partnering with Sourcebooks to focus on children through America’s Test Kitchen Kids, we hope to instruct and inspire the next generation of cooks,” he added.  

“We are thrilled to be adding America’s Test Kitchen Kids to our growing children’s nonfiction business,” said Dominique Raccah, CEO and publisher of Sourcebooks. “Their focus on combining the science, math, and creativity of food, paired with our aptitude for producing books that transcend categories, will create the perfect doorway to developing a child’s positive relationship with food at every stage, baby to teen.”

America’s Test Kitchen is passionate about food and cooking—discovering why recipes work and why they don’t. Now they will working with the youngest among us to create confident, passionate, and knowledgeable food-lovers. To do this, they will be working in-person with America's Test Kitchen test cooks at their new Boston test kitchen/headquarters as well as online.
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Jack Bishop, chief creative officer at America’s Test Kitchen, and Kelly Barrales-Saylor, editorial director for children’s nonfiction at Sourcebooks, will lead the creative teams working on book development and new product generation. America’s Test Kitchen and Sourcebooks expect to publish six to 10 titles per year across a range of age groups, beginning fall 2018.

About America’s Test Kitchen

America’s Test Kitchen, based in a brand new state-of-the-art 15,000 sq.ft. test kitchen in Boston’s Seaport District, is dedicated to finding the very best recipes for home cooks. Fifty full-time (admittedly obsessive) test cooks spend their days testing recipes 30, 40, up to 100 times, tweaking every variable until they understand how and why recipes work. They also test cookware and supermarket ingredients so viewers can bypass marketing hype and buy the best quality products. As the home of Cook’s Illustrated and Cook’s Country magazines, and publisher of more than one dozen cookbooks each year, America’s Test Kitchen has earned the respect of the publishing industry, the culinary world, and millions of home cooks. America's Test Kitchen the television show launched in 2001, and the company added a second television program, Cook’s Country, in 2008.
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Learn more at https://www.americastestkitchen.com/

About Sourcebooks

Sourcebooks is a thriving entrepreneurial company that brings extraordinary authors and brands to readers in the most dynamic, data-driven ways. We create books that transcend categories and defy odds and have been honored with hundreds of national bestsellers and awards. We are home to enthusiastic, book-loving employees who are dedicated to connecting books to readers in new and innovative ways. Today, Sourcebooks is proud to be the 10th largest book publisher in America and the only one of the top ten headquartered outside of New York City. Story by story, book by book, we have touched over 100 million lives. Join us as we change 100 million more.

​Visit www.sourcebooks.com for more information.

Sourcebooks, Inc., one of the country’s leading book publishers, announced today that it has signed The Gotham Group as its exclusive representative for all film and television projects for the company. The agreement covers all books in which Sourcebooks controls the film and television rights from its current catalogs and backlist, including the New York Times and USA Today bestselling children’s book series by Adam Wallace, How to Catch a Leprechaun, How to Catch an Elf, and How to Catch a Monster.
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Sourcebooks will also work directly with Gotham to develop, publish, and produce original content across multimedia platforms.

“We are incredibly excited to be partnering with Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Eddie Gamarra, and all of Gotham Group. They’re brilliant,” said Dominique Raccah, CEO and publisher of Sourcebooks. “Their expertise across the animation, film, and television markets, combined with our bestselling books and content, will significantly expand opportunities for Sourcebooks authors.”
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“We are excited to work with the team at Sourcebooks,” said Goldsmith-Vein, founder and CEO of The Gotham Group. “Not only are we fans of their current authors and titles, but we’re looking forward to the original IP ideas we can brainstorm for their roster. We’re committed to making even more opportunities for their multi-platform storytellers who defy the traditional ‘silo’ mentality and whose creative output can’t be limited to one entertainment sector.”

About The Gotham Group:
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The Gotham Group is a multifaceted management and production company representing some of the most creative minds in Hollywood. Goldsmith-Vein and The Gotham Group, cited in Variety’s 10 Producers to Watch series, have been producers on such hits as The Spiderwick Chronicles and the Maze Runner franchise. Gotham also produced Kodachromewith Jason Sudeikis, Elizabeth Olsen, and Ed Harris, which just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival; Stephanie, directed by Akiva Goldsman; The Big Game, which chronicles the phenomenon of daily fantasy sports; and Train Man, starring Julia Roberts as the lawyer defending Darius McCollum, the New Yorker who became notorious for driving subway trains illegally. On the television side, Gotham has Star Trek’s Zachary Quinto set to star in and executive produce Biopunk and is developing Randi Zuckerberg’s New York Times bestselling book Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives as a series. Gotham also just optioned film rights to three of this summer’s hottest book titles over the past four weeks: Ruth Ware’s The Lying Game, which debuted at number three on the New York Times bestseller list and is the August pick for Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club; Janelle Brown’s critically acclaimed suspense thriller Watch Me Disappear, and Robyn Harding’s bestseller The Party. Gotham is also producing Ruth Ware’s The Woman in Cabin 10horror novels.

We are so pleased to share that The Moon in the Palace by Weina Dai Randel was selected as the RITA award winner for Best Mainstream Fiction with a Central Romance!

​Roughly, 2,000 romance writers entered in the RITA competition, and the winners were announced on July 27 at the Romance Writers of America (RWA) Annual Conference in Orlando, FL. The RITA is the most prominent award given throughout the genre of romance fiction.

​Dai Randel is a Chinese American writer who came to the U.S. for the first time at twenty-three. After becoming fluent in English and writing, Dai Randel earned an M.A. in English from Texas Woman’s University in Denton, and has worked as a journalist, magazine editor, and adjunct professor, before becoming a writer.  It took Dai Randel ten years to write the RITA awarded novel, The Moon in the Palace, and its follow up, The Empress of Bright Moon. Dai Randel received eighty-two rejection letters before Sourcebooks Landmark picked up the duology.

“Weina stands out as one of the hardest-working authors I've ever had the privilege of editing," said Anna Michels, editor at Sourcebooks. "The time and attention she took in making sure each detail was correct shows on every page. Editing her was truly a joy, as she is always willing to dive back into the book to tweak and refine details as necessary—but it's her evocative narrative voice, which is impossible to edit, as it comes straight from her heart, is what makes The Moon in the Palace sing.”

Dai Randel was inspired to write the story of Empress Wu of China while studying at Texas Woman's University.  It was there, during an Asian American literature class that she recalls “reading Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. Because that story was so depressing, I wanted to show my classmates that not all women had that kind of fate in China. I decided to write about Chinese women who succeeded in controlling their destinies. And who else controlled her destiny better than Empress Wu?”

A couple of years ago, determined to seek out new opportunities in fiction, Sourcebooks conducted a deep dive into the mystery and suspense categories. That data analysis made a strong case for development of a mystery program at Sourcebooks. A year and a half later, we launched our first mystery titles, and, in true Sourcebooks fashion, we continue to turn to the data to tell us what's working (or not) in this ever-growing space.

The Strand Magazine, a leading mystery magazine, recently profiled Sourcebooks and our expansion into mystery & suspense. In "Sourcebooks: Driving Change in the Publishing World," editor Garrett Kim cited Sourcebooks' "reputation for the intimacy it cultivates when working with authors" and went on to say, "While Sourcebooks has become a haven for authors looking to make their debuts, the firm has also become a source for more accomplished authors to find a personal relationship with a publisher that they won’t get with other firms."

We are incredibly excited about some of the successes we are experiencing in mystery, including Randall Silvis' Ryan DeMarco Mystery series--Two Days Gone (January 2017), and the forthcoming, Walking the Bones (January 2018)--and the soon-to-be-launched cozy mystery series with New York Times Bestselling author Denise Swanson, Dead in the Water (on-sale September 5).

​Both Silvis and Swanson shared their own experiences working with Sourcebooks, with Swanson noting that "Working with [Sourcebooks] is experiencing what you think publishing is going to be like before you’re actually published."
You can read the full article on Strand.com.

The Quantum Conference was held on Monday, March 13, at The London Book Fair. This year’s conference focused on the consumer by looking at “how different audiences discover, purchase and interact with content.”

Dominique Raccah joined Nigel Newton, founder and CEO of Bloomsbury Publishing, and Jacks Thomas, director of The London Book Fair, for a conversation on the future of publishing and re-defining the role of publisher in that space.

​The Bookseller, a book business magazine, ran this write-up of the panel:

Raccah hails publishing's 'golden age of opportunity'

Published March 14, 2017 by Natasha Onwuemezi

Publishers should make the most of the “golden age of opportunity” the industry is currently in, Dominique Raccah, publisher and c.e.o. of Sourcebooks has said, while urging publishers to use this opportunity to redefine their roles.

Speaking at the London Book Fair’s Quantum Conference yesterday (13th March) in conversation with Nigel Newton, c.e.o. and founder of Bloomsbury, and LBF director Jacks Thomas, Raccah advised new publishers to consider their strategy and what they bring to market in an age where books have to compete with film, music and TV for the consumer's time.

​“We are watching the collapse of entertainment in terms of formats", she said. "In terms of your time, you now have immediately available to you at all times not only a book, but music, TV, film. [A smartphone] has all the entertainment I could possibly want for the rest of my life. It puts books into the same competitive frame as TV, film, and music. Music is priced at 99 cents a cut, film has a Netflix model. [These models] are changing the dynamics of the monetary exchange between us and our customers. If you want to start a publishing company today, you have to think about what your model can be to allow you to survive as the intermediary between the content creator and the consumer."

​She added: "We're now in the golden age of opportunity. There was a time when the publishers had the right to exist because we owned the printing presses. There was an immediate role for publishers; today that role is less immediate, so now you get to define it."

THE WATTPAD COMMUNITY SPENT A COMBINED 282 YEARS READING "CHASING RED"

Sourcebooks, a leading independent book publisher, has acquired the worldwide English rights to Wattpad’s most-read story of 2016, Chasing Red. With over 126 million reads, the Wattpad community spent over 148 million minutes, the equivalent of 282 years, reading the story by Wattpad Star Isabelle Ronin. Revised and with new original content from the author, Sourcebooks will publish Chasing Red in two volumes, releasing in September and November, 2017.

Based on proprietary data and insights, Wattpad identified Chasing Red as an up-and-coming story in early 2015. Once Isabelle finished serializing the story in early 2016, the story’s popularity skyrocketed further. That week, Isabelle saw an influx of new readers—more than double the number of readers from the week prior. Since then, Chasing Red has ignited a voracious fan base that includes thousands of reviews, multiple trailers, a petition for a major motion picture, fan art, and around a million new reads each week on Wattpad.

“The numbers alone for Chasing Red are extraordinary. This story has touched millions of readers and is attracting new reads every week,” Sourcebooks CEO Dominique Raccah says. “Once you start reading, it’s easy to see why. Readers get sucked into this world and these characters. It’s addictive. We are excited to bring this wonderful author and reader experience to published form this fall.”

Thousands of Wattpad stories have been adapted as novels around the world, while others have become blockbuster movies and television shows. “We’re excited to build on past successes with Sourcebooks and are confident Chasing Red will be as successful in bookstores as it’s been on Wattpad,” said Ashleigh Gardner, head of partnerships for Wattpad Studios. “Not only is Chasing Red a massive hit within the Wattpad community, the high levels of engagement around the story have prompted several international publishers, including Hachette Livre, HarperCollins Germany, Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, and Mondadori, to acquire rights to the story.”

With Chasing Red, readers fall in love with Red and Caleb, frequently commenting on how “real” they feel. The story follows cynical straight-A college student Veronica “Red” Strafford, who gets kicked out of her apartment. When notorious basketball player Caleb Lockhart offers her a place to stay, their close quarters create a problem when he pursues her, and she is far from ready to open up about her painful past.

Isabelle Ronin is a 30 year-old writer based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. As part of the Wattpad Stars program, Isabelle has also been tapped by brands like E! Network to craft custom content that drives huge engagement among young people.

​Wattpad and Sourcebooks first partnered in 2013 to publish Wattpad writers through the Sourcebooks Fire YA imprint as well as to market Sourcebook authors to the global Wattpad community. Since then, Sourcebooks has successfully published My Life with the Walter Boys by Ali Novak and The Cellar and The Cabin by Natasha Preston, both of which spent a combined thirty-seven weeks on the New York Times young adult paperback bestseller list. This year, Sourcebooks will publish more stories from popular Wattpad storytellers, including A. V. Geiger’s Follow Me Back, Juliet Lyons’s Dating the Undead, and Alyson McLayne’s Highland Promise.