Dear PRH authors and illustrators,
This month marks the tenth anniversary of this newsletter and of our Author Portal. While one decade is just a blink in the history of books, so much has happened in our community in the past ten years that we don’t want to miss the chance for a little commemoration.
Back in 2010 when we first started talking about this project, we were at a moment of high anxiety in publishing. In the throes of the digital transition, many were calling into question the value of publishers: If readers were going all-in on ebooks, would authors really want to still work with us?
Looking back now, that question seems quaint. First off, it turns out that as much as some readers love all-ebooks-all-the-time, we’re selling more print books and audiobooks now than ever before. Second, as we quickly recognized, the formats themselves are only peripheral to the author-publisher relationship.
As hard as those early digital growing pains were, I think they made us stronger partners for you: We became much better at understanding and engaging with readers than we ever had been before, and we embraced a far more comprehensive and transparent approach to communicating with you. In the olden days, there was a notion that authors should hear only from their editors, and that in general we shouldn’t occupy your attention too much with the actual business of selling books.
The Author Portal and this newsletter developed out of the idea that you might, in fact, be curious to hear a lot more from us—not only more about your book and ways we could work together to build an audience for it, but also about the world of books in general. As it turns out, that idea seems to be the right one.
In the ten years since the launch of this newsletter, a whole ecosystem of information and events has been built to serve that central idea of communicating with you, with the belief that you want to play an active role in engaging with readers. The most recent addition to the mix is the PRH Author University program, which was itself born out of suggestions from authors.
Thank you for being such great partners for us, and please know we’re always eager to hear what we can do better. Challenging us does indeed make us stronger.
Happy reading,
Best,
Madeline