Finally, I had to put together a plan for Sourcebooks’s entry into the mystery category. I compared the data I had to Sourcebooks’s strengths, looking for places where we could capitalize on our existing knowledge and skills to reach readers in new ways. Women-oriented mysteries were a clear opportunity for us—as a well-known romance and women’s fiction publisher, I suspected we might also find success with books featuring female sleuths that tackle issues of importance to women readers. Since we also have a strong historical fiction program, historical mysteries in the tradition of Jacqueline Winspear and Susan Elia MacNeal were an area I was eager to explore. Our well-established mass market romance program and strong presence in the library market could lend itself to development in the mass market cozy mystery space, and our passion for book club fiction and fantastic storytelling led me to wonder if we might not want to publish books in the vein of Tana French, Lori Roy, and Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger.

​All of this research and planning went into a 108-slide PowerPoint presentation, which I shared with our publisher and senior staff to propose the development of a mystery program at Sourcebooks. A year and a half later, we are releasing debut author Radha Vatsal’s A Front Page Affair, the first book in an exciting historical mystery series set in World War I New York City that has received outstanding trade reviews, is a Library Journal debut of the month, and represents the beginning of what I hope will be an important evolution in the Sourcebooks fiction program.

Technology: How Kids Are Reading

​Kleeman kicked off the panel with trend information from quarterly research among 1000 families in the UK and the US on the reading habits and preferences of children. His results show that 70% of children prefer to read printed books over digital, and that when children are sharing their favorite books with friends the easiest way to do that is with a printed book.

Kleeman identified five major trends they are seeing:

1.      Smartphone + tablet + TV = foundation of kid’s technology
2.      YouTube is a kid’s Google
3.      Connected worlds – examples include Google Cardboard, Magic Leap and virtual reality
4.      Personalization
5.      Gen Z communicates in emojis

Bird shared that they have seen a big increase in people obtaining library cards and many of those people are joining the library in order to have access to ebooks, but ebook sales on picture books are flat to down. Medlar pointed out that children’s behavior patterns are often picked up from their parents, so when they see a parent constantly on their phone texting or playing games, they want to do the same. There is a book out there for every person, but the reader has to find it, which is what librarians help facilitate.

Picture Books

For decades picture books have been a very backlist-driven business. Yearly sales have historically been roughly 75 – 80% backlist and 20 – 25% frontlist, but in recent years there has been a big shift in people purchasing new, frontlist titles. Bird felt that new printing technology has allowed for brighter, more colorful books. Geck pointed out that there has also been a tremendous shift in the way the art for picture books is put together. Most artists now work with some sort of digital art, as opposed to sticking solely with more traditional techniques like watercolor and gouache, which also allows for brighter colors and a wider variety of styles.

Middle Grade

​Medlar pointed out three trends that he sees represented by the 2016 Newbery Medalists. First, Last Stop on Market Street was an example of a picture book tackling a deeper and more complex issue. This is something that more picture books are taking on. Second, Roller Girl is a graphic novel, an area where demand continues to increase. And third, The War That Saved My Life is very much in the category of classic literature that has always had strong readership.

​Thomas is also seeing a lot of stand-alone mystery titles that are expanded into series when the initial book is successful in stores.

#weneeddiversebooks

Diversity of reading materials and characters continues to be a trend. Thomas said there has been a significant increase in the number of teachers and librarians shopping in the store looking for books that feature diversity. Bird also noted that there has been growth in nonfiction featuring obscure and unknown stories, far more than what has traditionally been published in the past.

Thomas would love to see more authors who are Muslim or biracial writing about biracial children and Muslim children, and Bird would like to see more international books translated to English.

Social Media

When it comes to social media, Medlar noted that the influence really depends on “the height of the patron.” YouTube is most effective for the youngest readers, Snapchat is where many school-aged children are, and Pinterest is a great platform for reaching adults. Geck told how he saw this play out for the picture book The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes. [cover image to be included] Published in the fall of 2011, sales increased dramatically over the summer of 2012 when parents and educators began recommending it on Pinterest for children feeling pressured to succeed in school. The book has enjoyed a similar sales bump every summer. Thomas said that many authors have great success with engagement when posting on Instagram.

These five major trends give both booksellers and publishers some insight not only into what kind of books young readers will be looking for, but also the ways that those readers are discovering, sharing and learning.

Panelists Becky Anderson (Anderson’s Bookshop), Cynthia Compton (4 Kids Books and Toys), Meghan Dietsche Goel (BookPeople), and Valerie Koehler (Blue Willow Bookshop) have been running children’s events for years and shared the benefit of their knowledge with the bookseller audience:

• The stores that have many successful events today started out with no success stories and had to build up their event program. It can take years, but you have to keep doing the work.
• Local connections are key with PTA and PTO organizations, service groups, mom’s groups, or whatever is in your community. The key is to connect with these organizations and partner with them to create all types of successful events.
• Working with local authors is crucial. This can be done through launch parties, school events, and community outreach and can grow to a national presence for the author. The local indie bookseller can then provide books for those events.
• All bookstores start from a place of fear that they will do everything right for an event but no one will show up. Everyone has had this experience--you just have to keep moving forward.

Ultimately, there are no silver bullets to creating a great event, but lots of local connections really help. Events are a lot of work, but as you continue to create amazing experiences for your customers, you will see your reputation, your knowledge, and the success of your events continue to grow.
 
​Publishers Weekly also did a great writeup of the panel, which you can check out here.

The romance community is often stigmatized, and with the RT Booklovers Convention in Las Vegas last week, we took the opportunity to launch the #ireadromance social media campaign, which highlights all of the wonderful reasons why people read romance. A Twitter follower of ours may have said it best: ​

The conference is organized by RT Book Reviews and this year more than 2,500 attendees—composed of readers, bloggers, librarians, booksellers, and published/aspiring romance, YA, and fiction authors—gathered at the Rio All-Suite Las Vegas Hotel & Casino to celebrate all things romance!

We armed our authors with dry-erase boards and #ireadromance buttons and asked them to connect with readers and fellow authors. We wanted them to ask attendees to share just one of the reasons why they love reading romance. What we received was a wonderful mix of powerful pictures that showcase all of the diverse reasons why people love to read romance novels.

​Enjoy these photos, check out more on Twitter @SourcebooksCasa, and tell us why you read romance on social media by using the hashtag #ireadromance. 

The idea is to give aspiring authors another way to connect with us, beyond the traditional submissions process. Now, a writer can just add the tag submit2sourcebooks to their story on Wattpad and our editors will take a look. It lets writers circumvent the usual process of query letters, and also lets us see how readers are responding to and interacting with the story. We get a sneak peek at how readers will respond to a story, which is really useful data.

​And now we are excited to share that we’ve acquired our first romance project through Wattpad! It’s a light paranormal romance series titled the Undead Dating Service, by Juliet Lyons (julietlyons). It’s described as “Bridget Jones’s Diary…with vampires, a fresh concept, a touch of suspense, and a whole lot of snark.” We can’t wait to bring it to readers! 

​This is just one of the many projects we hope to acquire through the ongoing partnership. The Undead Dating Service series will begin releasing in spring 2017. Head over to Wattpad and search submit2sourcebooks to check out some other fantastic submissions! We can’t wait to hear what you think! 

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of joining a group of American book professionals (booksellers, publishers, distributors) visiting the Havana Book Fair in Cuba as part of the first US Publishing Mission (created by PublishersWeekly, the Combined Book Exhibit and PubMatch).
 
​The Havana Book Fair is a giant open-air book festival that takes place annually in the Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Cabana. There is music everywhere! Publishers exhibit in old prison cells (now turned into booths); authors launch new books and give talks to crowds of readers. It is a once-a-year opportunity to see the entire publishing market of Cuba in one place.

​"Many families only buy books once a year," says Zuleica Romay Guerra, President of the Book Institute of the Cuban Ministry of Culture. "You see families saving for months to go to the book fair and buy as many books as they can." (from Calvin Reid’s During Panels, Realities of Cuban Publishing Market Laid Bare)

The Cuban book business, being largely run and subsidized by the government, is extremely different from our own industry. A few examples (at least as I understood them):
​

•       The whole business is run through government subsidies
•       Every year, each publisher gives the government the publishing plan
•       The government pays for printing and runs the printing presses
•       The government pays the royalties to the authors, the government pays the employees
•       Distribution is based on population, so each region obtains their population ratio of the distribution of a new title
•       Books are typically only printed in paperback
•       A book typically costs less than a dollar

Some numbers as supplied by the Instituto Cubano del Libro:

•       11.3 million people in Cuba
•       313 bookstores (mostly used)
•       300 public libraries
•       170 publishers

 
This is an industry undergoing major change right now, and they recognize that it will likely take a generation to turn over to a different business model, but they are excited about the future.
“I know you will take this work seriously. And I can promise you that we will also be serious about it.”
— Zuleica Romay Guerra, Book Institute of Cuba

One of the challenges in Cuba is the availability and the cost of books. Fuentes says that while about 70% of Cubans are used to reading digitally, there is a shortage of digital reading devices available in Cuba. As their connectivity improves in the coming months and years, it will mean greater access to ebooks and digital reading.

"We have started but not as fast as our readers. Readers are actually ahead of us. It is one of our challenges."
-- Zuleica Romay Guerra, Book Institute of Cuba

As part of the final panel of the conference, we talked about what the digital transformation has looked like in the U.S. and what that has meant for our industry. In my presentation at the book fair, I highlighted that what is particularly relevant for the Cuban industry right now are what I called the 5 major outcomes of ebooks:

1.     The Self-Publishing Boom
2.     Lots more content = the challenge of discovery
3.     Development of mobile
4.     The global opportunity
5.     The development of new business models

 
One of the things I highlighted in my talk (as I have in other talks elsewhere) was the persistence and importance of print. As we know, in the US, we are part of an additive transformation, with ebooks and physical books co-existing in the ecosystem rather than ebooks replacing physical books. We also know that different categories of books behave differently with respect to ebooks. And that in our market, the ebooks revolution was driven by women who are also the key purchasers of books in Cuba. I covered a lot of these points as part of the final panel of the conference. 

I’ve posted the full presentation to Slideshare.
 
For more about this Cuban book journey, please see:
​

• The Publishers Weekly articles, which sum up various parts of the journey
• People en Español's editor in chief, Armando Correa, shares his feelings on his first journey back to his native country in 17 years
• The Publishing Perspectives article on the Cuban publishing mission as a whole
  

This morning President Obama is in Cuba. Over the weekend The New York Times had a fascinating photo-essay which may give you a sense of Cuba today.

​Publishers Weekly and many in the book publishing industry (including Sourcebooks) have urged an end to the Cuban book embargo. You can read about that in the Publishing Perspectives article on the background of the petition, and the content of the petition itself which was started by Publishers Weekly.

I was surprised by how much Cuba touched me—the people, the culture, the sense of change (both the excitement and the fear). I’ll leave you with my favorite picture of Cuba, which I took on the very first day.

Gracias!

Dominique

​P.S. A huge thank you to Cevin, Jon, Janet, and the many new friends we made in Cuba!

If you want a whirlwind of a life, then I recommend working as a salesperson for a book publisher’s gift division. Not only is it an amazing job, but twice a year, we have gift show season. For six to eight weeks in January/February and June to August, every customer you might want to see goes to all of the major gift shows to see what’s new—which means you get to spend six to eight weeks traveling around the country, showing off all the great books and gift products they’ll love.

​Such was my life for the past three weeks, attending as many gift shows as I could and meeting as many customers and readers as possible! 

​First stop:

Atlanta boasts the largest gift show and gift mart in the country.  If you are a gift customer or a supplier and you aren’t there, you are missing out. Trust me when I say I was there (Tuesday through Sunday)!

​Featured in the RPM Gifts and Greetings Showroom, my reps and I met with hundreds of people and talked books, wrote orders, and discussed future opportunities and titles.

…and touched base at the Sports Licensing and Tailgate Show. ​

This was a new show for my coworker, Peter Vanaria, and me, where we launched our new line of MLB activity books to a new type of customer—sporting goods stores!

​But while in Vegas, I made sure to visit our rep group California Marketing Association at one of the fast-growing gift marts, the Las Vegas Market.

Liz Otte

​National Accounts Manager—Gift and Regional

We were all saddened to hear of the passing of Hillel Black, our executive editor here at Sourcebooks for nearly 10 years.

Hillel’s impact on the company that Sourcebooks became cannot be understated. It was Hill’s deep love for authors that helped form a cornerstone for the sort of publishing company we sought to create. As the former publisher of Macmillan and editor-in-chief at William Morrow, he joined what was then a small publishing house trafficking entirely in nonfiction. Simply put, Hillel Black put us on the map.
​
Indeed, Hillel is the reason we have both the Sourcebooks Landmark fiction imprint and a New York City office. Soon after he joined us in the year 2000, Hill was here in Naperville to visit and took Dominique out for dinner. I received a call at home that night from Dominique: “I think I just committed us to starting a fiction program,” she sheepishly told me. To be frank, it was a huge risk.

But Hillel would get it done, famously asking Dominique over sushi what kind of novels she’d like to publish. “Writers like Michael Malone,” she said. Hill being Hill located one of Michael’s old books, found the agent in the acknowledgments, and soon thereafter Sourcebooks Landmark was publishing Michael’s first new novel in more than a decade, placing it on the New York Times bestsellers list. As we’ve recently reported, Sourcebooks Landmark had its best year ever in 2015, and 2016 is off to a rollicking start. Hillel got it all off the ground and would be delighted.

Hillel’s care for books and authors was unparalleled, and his drive to find the next big book was never-ending. He was a mentor to me and to many others here. Several of us have been commiserating today about his phrases of wisdom that have become vocabulary around here – a “publishing prophet” is just one way of explaining his impact. Go for it, ask a long-timer, they’ll have a Hillel story to tell you.

​Most importantly, though, Hillel was a dear, dear friend. His was a kind and genuine soul. He will be missed. Our thoughts are with his family and friends.

Todd Stocke
VP Editorial Director