The year-round appetite for scary stories among young readers continues to grow. This Halloween, the PRH Consumer Insights team delves deeper into the cultural forces behind this trend, asking: Why is horror having such a powerful moment?
When it comes to connecting with potential readers online, most social media platforms have specific primary audiences. TikTok is great for the young adult and romance spaces. LinkedIn can be perfect for business, self-help, and journalism. What if there was a website with a curated space for every audience? Reddit may be the answer.
For authors, book publicity often feels like one of the more mysterious and ever-changing aspects of publishing. What’s involved in the publicity process? What exactly do book publicists do? And where do authors figure into this part of launching a book into the world?
On August 26, 2025, Penguin Random House celebrated the official ribbon cutting of its expanded national distribution and fulfillment center in Crawfordsville, Indiana.
New reader-focused platforms are gaining popularity. Author Development’s summer intern, Natalie Peña-Galvis, shares insights into two recently introduced spaces and the opportunities they offer authors.
At Penguin Random House, direct communication and relationships with readers are key to marketplace success, and strong consumer marketing and outreach begin with understanding our audience. Penguin Random House Consumer Insights is excited to present Moments Fall 2025, a report that anticipates consumer sentiment and behaviors we may see during the coming quarter.
Impersonation has become an increasingly popular tactic used by bad actors in the publishing space, leading to significant personal and professional harm. Recently, the PRH Corporate Information Security Team has been notified of several phishing schemes in which employees at PRH and other publishing-industry companies are being impersonated to target authors and agents.
In this newsletter and through Author University events, we at Author Development have frequently recommended forming connections with readers and bookish content creators to help build your audience. When you’re starting out, forging those connections can be tricky. To help, we spoke with three bookish content creators about how they prefer to interact with authors online.
Hope you’re all staying cool this summer! Catch up on recordings from the latest Author U session and some Author News articles on topics affecting authors right now.
For thirty-two years, Penguin Random House has supported the next generation of writers and promoted a diverse range of voices through the Penguin Random House Creative Writing Awards, which entered into an innovative new partnership with We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) in 2019. Through this program, Penguin Random House awards six U.S. high school seniors nationwide with college scholarships of up to $10,000. The program focuses on underrepresented communities and honors students who dare to be unique and are unafraid to take risks.