Ten years ago this month, Random House launched the Author Newsletter, a monthly mailing to our authors to better prepare them for the wild world of publishing. Here are some of the most popular articles over the years.
Marketing Tips
You may have noticed that each month, we include at least one Marketing Tip. The PRH Author Newsletter works with experts within the company to provide publicity and marketing resources to all our authors. In essence, we help authors help themselves by answering the myriad questions authors have about marketing, publicity, and social media. Because of this, these articles are often the most popular every month. Here are a few standouts:
- Monthly Marketing Tip: Email Tips & Tricks (October 2012): This early article details best practices for email marketing. We expanded on newsletter tips in later articles, but this decade-old advice still rings true!
- Ten-Minute Tip—Your Amazon Author Page (September 2015) became one of our first breakthrough marketing tips, shining a light on the Amazon author page, which is likely to be one of an author’s highest-traffic pages.
- Five Tips on Taking a Good Author Photo (February 2019) breaks down everything you need to know about getting a good author photo to use for the promotion of your book.
- Understanding the Differences Between Your Publicity and Marketing Teams (April 2019) aims to clear up the confusion between two teams that may seem similar at first, but ultimately perform very different roles to aid in the success of your book.
- The Waiting Period: Five Tips for Maximizing Your Presence Before Book Promotion Begins (April 2021) answers one of our most popular questions: “What can I do to help my book be more successful before book promotion officially begins?”
CEO Announcements for Major Events
Though the PRH Author Newsletter was initially developed to provide tips and advice, we quickly learned that our mailing list was also one of the most efficient ways to get news out to all of our authors directly from PRH corporate.
- A Letter to Authors from CEO Markus Dohle (July 2013) discussed the historic merger of Penguin and Random House.
- Q&A with New CEO of Penguin Random House U.S. (May 2018) gave readers the opportunity to learn more about Madeline McIntosh shortly after she took the role of PRH U.S. CEO.
- Supporting You . . . During the Coronavirus Crisis (April 2020) & A Letter from Our U.S. CEO, Madeline McIntosh (May 2020), two of our most clicked articles of all time, spoke about our response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Behind the Scenes at PRH and Other Popular Articles
- From the Editor: Getting Ahead with Revisions (March 2016): We spoke to editors across the company to get their tips on revisions, which became one of our most popular articles of all time.
- Producing Audiobooks in Quarantine with PRH Audio (September 2020) put the spotlight on one of the teams affected most by the COVID-19 pandemic. Without access to our in-house professional studios, PRH Audio had to get creative to keep producing high-quality audiobooks. Other great PRH Audio articles include The State of the Audiobook (September 2015) and A Tour of Penguin Random House’s Audio Studios (November 2017).
- Our “Behind the Scenes” series took authors on a tour of the company, highlighting PRH teams that don’t always get the spotlight:
- Designing Your Book’s Cover (July 2016)
- Designing Your Book’s Interior (August 2016)
- Special Markets: Five Unexpected Places We Sell Your Books (October 2016)
- International Marketing and Publicity (February 2017)
- How Penguin Random House Gets Your Books into Libraries (August 2017)
- Our Digital Video Team and In-House Studios (October 2017)
- Meet the PRH Consumer Marketing Team (May 2021)
- Helping Educators Meet Their Needs During the Pandemic (September 2021)
- Meet the PRH Author Development Team (February 2022)
From its humble beginnings, the author newsletter has sprawled to a mailing list of nearly 13,000 PRH authors and 1,500 agents. It’s been an honor assembling, coordinating, and distributing these mailings over the last decade. If there’s anything you’d like us to cover in a future article, reach out to us at portaladmin@penguinrandomhouse.com—we’d love to hear from you!
Phil Stamper-Halpin is Associate Director, Author Development for Penguin Random House.