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!
As we announced last week, we've set up our first Digital Show and Tell in New York City (and it's FREE), scheduled for January 20, 2011 | 3:30 PM to 6:30 PM | Sotheby's Institute of Art, NYC
IF YOU'D LIKE TO SHOW YOUR WORK: We have room for for 16 presenters. If you want to present, PLEASE REGISTER AS SOON AS POSSIBLE (see link below). Let us know you want to present, and 1 or sentences about what you'll be presenting. I think Sourcebooks is going to demo a new app that we've been working on for about a year. I'm excited to see what people think. For those of you tweeting: The hashtag for the NYC Digital Show and Tell 2011 is: #digiST. I'm hoping we'll have a great tweet stream. Please feel free to post links to this event, forward this email and/or to tweet it and let people know. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO ATTEND or YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO SHOW & TELL, please let us know by registering at this BISG page: http://www.bisg.org/events-0-628-nyc-digital-show-and-tell.php This event is being co-sponsored by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and BISG's Executive Director Scott Lubeck and Deputy Executive Director Angela Bole, will be joining us. We're having a Board Meeting that day so we might see others from the Board as well. The event is at: Sotheby's Institute of Art Cambridge Information Group 570 Lexington Avenue, 6th Floor New York, NY 10022 And yes, this event is FREE! It's being put on by our LinkedIn Ebooks, Ebook Readers, Digital Books and Digital Content group (http://linkd.in/dGMuAe) and BISG. Really looking forward to seeing your work! 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 With this new generation of our website, we're trying something a little bit different. And it speaks very much to the company we're becoming.
We developed the underlying concepts for this website by asking: Who is coming to the sourcebooks.com web site? What do they expect to see? What do they want to do? As a result, our site has moved from being a purely catalog site. You can still find our books—in fact, our search functionality has been seriously improved—but the site’s much more about the people with whom we work. And that turns out to be authors, readers and other people interested in the transformation/digital development of the book. For Authors We believe that publishers are in the business of making authors known (to make public=to publish). In fact, for a very forward-thinking publisher, Sourcebooks has some old-fashioned ideas about what it is that makes a “publisher.” So we set up a whole section of the website aimed at authors. Part of that section explains who we are, for example: We publish authors not books. We invest in authors and their careers — and help our authors to build long-term, meaningful relationships with their readers. The fact that year after year our authors return to publish their new books with Sourcebooks is one of our greatest joys. The Buzz @ Sourcebooks explains just some of what we do for our authors. In fact, I was tempted to call that section “what we’re doing for our authors TODAY.” It’s where you’ll see some of what our publicity and marketing people are doing for the books and authors we’re publishing. The Authors section is also where you’ll find our submission guidelines and an explanation of what we’re interested in publishing. For Readers By far the most comments that we get on the sourcebooks.com site has to do with the books and authors we publish, and they’re from Readers. When are you publishing this author’s next book? What’s the right order in which to read this author’s books? Do you have a reading group guide for this book? This is where we aim to answer the very practical questions you have about the authors you know and love. Beyond that, we’re also going try some broader experiments. So the Readers section of sourcebooks.com is all about helping or supporting discovery or as we think about it: Helping you discover your next great read. We have some tools that we’ll be introducing down the road for Readers because it’s clear that there are lots and lots of ways to discover great books (and not just the books that we, Sourcebooks, publish). Next Sourcebooks Next represents the future that we're working on. We hope to show you what we learn as we learn it (or a bit later depending on how busy we get...). It’s where we’ll post our new apps or web apps or our new community sites. And we’ll talk about what we’re seeing in the industry. Again, not just what we’re working on, but what others are doing as well. The book publishing industry is in transformation, and we believe that transformation could be great for books and authors. The initiatives you’ll see here are focused on the same goal: Unleashing the power of books and authors This is the heart of Sourcebooks Next. Perpetual Beta One last note: we plan for this site to be perpetually in development. So expect to see changes, from tweaks to major redesigns. We would of course appreciate your help and input. Please tell us about problems or annoyances and share any ideas for new sections or redesigns. And obviously, we’re launching with the expectation that we will have loads of changes immediately. Any recommendations (either short- or long-term)? That’s what comments are for. Just let us know. Looking forward to our conversation, Dominique @draccah As reported in this morning's Shelf Awareness...
Congratulations to Dominique Raccah, publisher and CEO of Sourcebooks, who has won the 2010 Woman of Vision Award, which honors "groundbreaking, inspirational women who have made a difference in Chicago's business community" and is sponsored by the Chicago law firm of Arnstein & Lehr. Raccah will be presented with the award at a luncheon on August 5 in Chicago. Award presenter Cynde Hirschtick Munzer lauded Raccah for "having built her own publishing house from the ground up. Dominique's risk taking, fierce determination and independent vision have grown Sourcebooks into the largest woman-owned trade book publisher in America." Congrats Dominique! Dominique Raccah and Sourcebooks were profiled in an article published in today's Naperville Sun entitled "Sourcebooks CEO ready for future of books." This story is the first in an occasional series about the men and women at the top of Naperville business.
"The subject of the digital transformation of books is something we have been engrossed in and find the work very compelling," she said. "We've wanted to be aggressive about the digital era and were the sixth publisher of over 20,000 in the nation to sign on with Apple allowing access downloads of our titles on the iPad. The digital era will be a very important one for publishing." http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/napervillesun/business/2380696,6_5_NA11_FROMTHECEO_S1-100611.article Sourcebooks CEO Dominique Raccah was featured in a recent Shelf Awareness article - BEA: Mobile Apps: A Publisher Roadmap.
"Sourcebooks' Dominique Raccah provided the most practical information for bookstores, publishers and writers who are contemplating creating an app. She began by citing Steve Jobs's new characterization of Apple as "a mobile device company," upon the release of the iPad. Like Cairns, Raccah evoked Mary Meeker's findings and posited that consumers are now driven by "connectivity expectation." Raccah asked, "With customers who expect to be connected 'anytime, anywhere, by any device, with any format,' how do we meet that expectation?" Mobile is ideal, Raccah suggested, because it's "personal, permanently carried, always on, with a built-in payment channel, and available at the point of creative impulse." For those who are contemplating creating an app, Raccah suggested thinking through these elements:
Raccah then discussed the importance of "Wire Frames," the blueprint for developers like Koppel at ScrollMotion. "Josh defines the screens, and if it's not right, either it doesn't work, or it's not functioning," Raccah said. "But there's good news for publishers... we can fix it!" She gave a range of examples from Sourcebooks, such as Gruber's Shortest SAT iPhone app; iDracula, a retelling of Dracula through text messages and a Web site; and an iPhone app that's coming out three weeks before the book's release that will offer 30% of the content free (consumers will have to purchase the book or app to see how it ends)." http://news.shelf-awareness.com/ar/theshelf/2010-06-09/bea_mobile_apps_a_publisher_roadmap.html Sourcebooks CEO and publisher, Dominique Raccah, and Senior Acquisitions Editor, Deb Werksman, are featured in a romance column in this week's Publishers Weekly (on newsstands today) discussing paranormal romance and the future of romance trends! Their comments are in bold in the article below, which can also be found at this link: P Is for Paranormal--Still.
P Is for Paranormal--Still Everybody knows they're hotter than hot, but why is that? By Lucinda Dyer May 24, 2010 There's no new way to say it, except possibly en francais, the language of love. Paranormal is le dernier cri in the romance category-its hold on readers and publishers alike defies any logic or explanation. In its first year it was a phase, then it became a definite trend. Now, it's a sea change, with no evidence that the tide's waning. So, sure, everybody agrees about the Pword, but what, exactly, is its appeal- why is this romance genre so, er, bloody popular? As Deb Werksman, Sourcebooks senior acquisitions editor, puts it, "Humans have their limits-the sweet guy we go home to at night is maybe going a little bald and getting a little paunchy and certainly doesn't have fangs, feathers, or fur. We can escape into a hot paranormal romance story where heroes have remarkable sexual powers and then project them onto our own all too human sweethearts." Sourcebooks Founder and CEO Dominique Raccah Receives the Sue Nisson Distinguished Service Award5/13/2010
Sourcebooks Founder and CEO Dominique Raccah Receives the Chicago Book Clinic’s Sue Nisson Distinguished Service Award
(Chicago-May 14, 2010) – Sourcebooks Founder and CEO Dominique Raccah is the 2010 recipient of the Sue Nisson Distinguished Service Award, which is the Chicago Book Clinic’s highest award. Previous winners include prize-winning author and radio personality Studs Terkel, renowned poet Gwendolyn Brooks, legendary bookseller Carl Kroch, and award-winning newspaper columnist Bob Greene. The award was presented during the organization’s President’s Night on May 13 at Rosewood Banquets in Rosemont, IL. President Elect of the Chicago Book Clinic Eric Platou says the Sue Nisson Distinguished Service Award recognizes an individual who has been successful in the publishing industry, but more importantly, has shown a new path and willingness to share their success and knowledge with others. “The success of Sourcebooks alone has shown that Dominique has not only understood how to compete in the publishing industry, but also how to pursue the changes and challenges our industry faces,” Platou said. “Dominique’s willingness to discuss and share these strategies with other publishers and professionals in our industry so that they too have the opportunity to pursue similar successful outcomes makes her a perfect choice for the Sue Nisson Distinguished Service Award.” “I am honored to accept the Sue Nisson Distinguished Service Award for the collaborative nature it represents” said Dominique Raccah. “My philosophy has always been that Sourcebooks publishes authors, not books, and I am excited about creating the next page in publishing’s history – the digital transformation of the book.” About Sue Nisson Susan Nisson previously worked at Scott Foresman, currently known as Pearson. During her time there, she steered many dynamic changes with diligent work, dedication and commitment. Her unique vision on the industry and the idea that vendors should have a partnership-type relationship complete with workable solutions void of battles led many to seek out and trust her views and opinions. Sue also encountered various male-related work environment issues and was on the forefront of change during those challenging times. With her open door policy, she became a valuable resource for the Chicago Book Clinic, welcoming industry-related discussions. After passing away at an early age due to cancer, the CBC decided to rename their service award as the Sue Nisson Distinguished Service Award in her honor. The award recognizes industries and companies who have challenged and persevered in their journey to success. About Chicago Book Clinic Founded in 1936, the Chicago Book Clinic encourages excellence in publishing by providing a platform for educational, social & professional interaction of our members. Our members are professionals in book and media publishing, printing, editorial, design, and all business aspects of our industry. About Sourcebooks Sourcebooks is a forward-thinking, independent publishing house with a passion for books and a dedication to the belief that books change lives. We are committed to innovative publishing, where every book is personal and every author’s voice has a place. We are a group of passionate, energetic and enthusiastic book lovers, and we are committed to helping readers experience each book. Sourcebooks has over 70 employees, publishes over 300 new titles each year, and celebrates their success with 14 New York Times Bestsellers. Sourcebooks is proud to be a leading publisher of poetry, as well as the largest woman-owned book publisher in the country. Visit www.sourcebooks.com for more information, and check out the Sourcebooks blog. Dominique Raccah, Publisher and CEO of Sourcebooks, Inc., to present at IBPA's Publishing University on May 24-25-the only educational conference created BY publishers FOR publishers.
Dominique Raccah will be one of the industry experts slated to appear at IBPA's Publishing University, now in its third decade of offering the best in publishing education. Speaking in the session entitled "Ahead of the Curve: Meet Sourcebooks' Dominique Raccah," Raccah will be sharing the nuts and bolts of Sourcebooks' vision as well as her venture into the digital arena with attendees. Join Raccah along with mega marketer and best-selling author Seth Godin, PW's Fast Growing Indies roundtable, and enjoy more than 20 breakout sessions, general sessions and the Benjamin Franklin Awards Gala at IBPA's Publishing University in New York City on May 24-25. See www.thepublishinguniversity.com for details and register now for early bird pricing. See you at the U! |
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