Video: How Sourcebooks Innovates New Book Products & Solutions

The video below is excerpted from the recent Book Business webinar, “Publishers: It’s About Innovation!” The full webinar is available on-demand here.

According to Sourcebooks CEO and publisher Dominique Raccah (and many entrepreneurs that have cut their teeth in the startup world) the key to innovation is iteration. And not enough book publishers are embracing that mantra, said Raccah during a recent Book Business webinar. “Book publishers tend to have a fixed world, a world in which the content is done and you move on to the next book. This is a world in which you actually learn from your experience and you evolve a new kind of product,” said Raccah.

To innovate, publishers don’t necessarily need to invest in the most cutting-edge, pricey technology. Rather they should begin by thinking about the customer and their experience with publishers’ products. How can that experience be improved? What new solutions can publishers provide? “You have to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around,” said Raccah.

In the following video Raccah discusses how Sourcebooks iterated its products, learned from past mistakes, and identified new problems to solve for their customers.