Photo by Hannah Matriccino
By Lily Papendick, Assistant Editor of Arts & Entertainment
“If you ask me at 2 a.m. what I want most, I’d say I want to change the fucking world,” Dominique Raccah stated during Susquehanna’s annual Publishing & Editing lecture this past Tues. on Feb 10 in Isaac’s Auditorium.
Founded in 1987 from the inside of her home, Raccah created Sourcebooks from scratch and transformed it from a press that only published guidebooks to its current status as the fifth largest publisher in North America, having recently surpassed MacMillan by print units sold and disrupting the long-standing ‘Big 5’ that dominate the publishing industry.
The lecture, created nine years ago as a means to discuss and explore the multifaceted and ever-shifting world that is the publishing industry, has brought many accomplished individuals to Susquehanna before, including director of the Columbia publishing course Shaye Areheart in 2024 and acclaimed actress and writer Tajja Isen in 2023, and is a widely-anticipated event throughout the entire English department.
Raccah’s lecture was preluded by an introduction from senior Music and Publishing & Editing student Madelyn DeMatt, who described Raccah’s various accolades and received awards over the years, including being named “Person of the Year” by Publisher’s Weekly in 2016 followed by making it in the “Top 25 Book Business Changemakers” in 2022.
The lecture focused on Sourcebooks’ success as an independent publisher, particularly through its entrepreneurial and data-driven approach. Raccah described her company as “reinventing publishing from the ground up,” completely altering everything previously established in the industry. With the motto “books change lives,” Sourcebooks is known for their author-centric approach and the genuine relationships they create and maintain with their authors. Frequently throughout the lecture, Raccah mentioned authors she has personally worked with, such as Fifty Shades of Grey author E.L. James, and praised their work both on and off the page, attesting to Sourcebooks’ strong commitment to their authors.
Raccah described her concern over the next generation of readers, particularly those in the middle-grade range, due to their collective lack of interest in reading leisurely. She explained how her company tracks these trends of data and uses them to better market towards struggling demographics, asking questions like “what do people want to be reading?” and “what elements do they want to see included in a story?” By constantly tracking data and testing out every element of a book from covers and blurbs to potential publicity and reader reviews, Sourcebooks helps prevent certain genres and markets from dying out and keeps those readers excited and engaged in the act of reading literature.
The importance of a publisher’s marketing team was consistently emphasized throughout the lecture, with Raccah directly saying that “if a book fails, it’s 100% the fault of marketing.” She used the recent example of her marketing team pulling the YA romance novel If He Had Been With Me by Laura Nowlin off their backlist and remarketing it during the ‘Colleen Hoover romance’ trend on ‘BookTok’ during 2020-2021, resulting in three million copies sold in just the last two years, despite the book being over a decade old.
Raccah accredited Sourcebooks’ success to their consistent innovation and desire to identify new opportunities, always keeping the reader at the forefront of their decisions. “Discovery is a science,” Raccah said. “We test. We measure. We pioneer.”
When asked during the prior Q&A session about what aspects of the publishing industry need to change, Raccah expressed her desire to leave the past behind and increase the speed of the entire publication process, from acquisition to final print. Referring to the current production speed as belonging in the ‘horse and buggy era,’ she emphasized her wish to move production timelines from 18 months to simply 8 weeks, noting that although that can’t be expected for every book, it is definitely possible for some.
Raccah concluded her lecture with an optimistic outlook on the future of the industry as a whole. “There has never been a more exciting time to be in book publishing.”
