My amazing publisher: Sourcebooks

It's always a good thing when an author loves their publishing house, and I've been very fortunate to love mine. The owner of Sourcebooks, Dominique Raccah, is a fascinating woman, who approaches authors and the industry in an entirely different way, and perhaps this is the reason for Sourcebooks fantastic success...especially during a time when most publishing houses are cutting back and/or closing lines.

So it's with a great deal of pride that I'm passing along an article about Sourcebooks that appeared in Shelf Awareness (one of several articles that can be found here: http://news.shelf-awareness.com/mv/a1/804583.html):

Sourcebooks: '21st Century Book Publisher'

"We're a company that's transforming in an industry that's transforming," said Dominique Raccah, founder, CEO and publisher of Sourcebooks, Naperville, Ill. Her goal, she said, is to make Sourcebooks into "what a 21st Century book publisher would look like."

Here's how it looks so far:

Sourcebooks has been in the forefront of offering e-books, enhanced books, iPhone apps and just last month launched a poetry website that, Raccah said, is creating a community for people who love poetry--and may be a model for creating revenue. (Among other things, it sells poems for download, iTunes style.)

After deciding a year ago that it wasn't going "to participate" in the recession and that it would have no layoffs, the company involved all 75 employees in extraordinary efforts to build the company's business in a range of measurable ways, including improving cash flow and inventory, expanding markets, working better with customers and more. By doing so, Sourcebooks has tried to take advantage of being "in that funky space between big and small publishers," Raccah said--big enough to have a presence but small enough to be limber and both act and react quickly.

Sourcebooks continues to publish some 300 new titles a year in a range of subjects--test and study guides, poetry, historical and women's fiction, children's and YA books, reference, romance and more--using many e-tools to nurture both readers and writers. The house, Raccah emphasized repeatedly, is publishing "authors, not books," and many of them have become bestsellers. Sourcebooks was founded 22 years ago as a reference publisher.