Sourcebooks Ranks 31st on FAST COMPANY'S 100 Best Workplaces for Innovators
Fast Company announced its fifth annual Best Workplaces for Innovators list, honoring organizations and businesses that demonstrate an inspiring commitment to encourage and develop innovation at all levels. Sourcebooks, a women-led, entrepreneurial, independent publisher, came in at No. 31, for developing a culture of innovation that resulted in its books having a success rate more than 68 percent higher than the rest of the top ten publishers in the book industry.
Fast Company highlighted that, “[Sourcebooks] runs a Summer Sprints program – an inclusive, annual experiment that encourages all team members to participate and gain insights from various corners of the company. This three-month sprint project aims to increase awareness and sales of the company’s backlist titles, which typically experience a sales decline after 12 months on the market.”
Sourcebooks has created extraordinary success for its authors and retail partners by honing in on what readers want in innovative ways including developing data-oriented training experiences for employees around the fastest-growing areas of the business; using proprietary market-testing methodologies to calibrate how new books will resonate; a mathematical model developed in-house to ensure more accurate performance projections for each part of the business; and robust, centralized data access for all employees to empower them with even more industry knowledge, so they can make informed decisions in their work, whether they’re in marketing, sales, editorial, shipping and fulfillment, IT, administration, finance, or manufacturing.
Dominique Raccah, CEO & Publisher.
“One of the key aspects of our investments in both data-centricity and growth mindset has been creating a culture that’s deeply experimental and where innovation flows at every level and in every department,” said Dominique Raccah, CEO and Publisher of Sourcebooks. “At any given time, there are hundreds of experiments taking place across our business.”
Driven by its mission that books change lives, Sourcebooks has positioned itself with other key voices in the publishing community’s response to the national book banning crisis and became the first independent publisher chairing the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) 2023 benefit.
Sourcebooks also held the sixth cohort of its BIPOC Editorial Training Program this spring, an innovative paid program that aims to bring more diversity into the industry workforce. “It’s incredibly exciting that our women-led organization is having such extraordinary impact,” Raccah said. “There are so many new ideas, experiments, and models coming from our teams in every corner of Sourcebooks! It’s not just about one big book or one big idea, but a collection of ideas, both big and small, created by lots of different team members. And at the center of it all is our commitment to our authors, and our passion for giving voice to powerful stories that will change lives.”
Developed in collaboration with Accenture, the 2023 Best Workplaces for Innovators ranks 100 winners from a variety of industries, including entertainment, biotech, consumer packaged goods, marketing, education, healthcare, and many more. Fast Company editors and Accenture researchers collaborated together to score nearly 1,000 submissions, and a panel of eight distinguished judges reviewed and endorsed the top 100 companies. The 2023 awards feature workplaces from around the world.
Interested in reading more about Sourcebooks? Read more here: “Get to Know Sourcebooks & Its Unique PRH Partnership.”