The languid limbs of a maple tree just outside a Victorian house in Naperville are listing toward a window, perhaps for a peek at the curious energy inside. A brown UPS truck has blocked one lane of the very busy boulevard out front and the driver, chest heaving, is making another delivery.
He steps inside and into what elsewhere in the publishing industry might have been a gleaming, tasteful, even understated lobby. Here, at 121 N. Washington St. in Naperville, of all places, the lobby of Sourcebooks Inc. looks like the reference room of the public library might look after a zinger of a cocktail party.
Brown boxes are strewn along shelves and nearly everywhere else, disgorging books. Books on male menopause and personal motivation, books encouraging women to stuff their brassieres with banana pulp. And wear them.
A voice in one of the 18 rooms squeals, “Oh my God, you just made my day!” The message board in one of the rooms carries hand-scrawled quips: “We are all cremated equal,” one says. Another states, “It could be worse. It could be raining.”
It could be much worse for Sourcebooks. In fact, it was, and not all that long ago. Dominique Raccah remembers.
In 1990, Naperville, the teeming technoburb carved from a sleepy community founded around farms, a couple of breweries and a furniture manufacturing plant, was in mid-boom. Construction had begun on an estimated $30 million NiGas headquarters. The city had issued permits for Fox River Commons, a $10 million-plus shopping center with about 20 stores, including three large anchor retailers. Naperville had gotten one of the nation’s first Saturn car dealerships. Construction had begun on a $20 million city hall.
Raccah was there, too, in 1990–barely. The Paris native with degrees in psychology and philosophy had left a lucrative marketing research job three years earlier to establish in an upstairs yellow bedroom of her home an information provider business for financial services. That venture spun into a tiny book publishing startup, which was beginning to show promise.
Then it collapsed. A distributor who owed Raccah $25,000 was teetering on bankruptcy and refused to pay. In 1990, while much of the rest of Naperville was chugging along, she sat down, thought about how grueling the last three years had been and sobbed.
“What I couldn’t do was face my husband,” Raccah recalled. Ray Bennett, her husband, had been supportive in word and deed, rewriting two of the books from authors’ submissions, building three long tables from plywood and allowing Raccah’s business to take over the living and dining rooms of their home.
“I felt I had failed him,” she said. “It was just so devastating for me.”
That, as they say in cheesy movies, was then. This is now:
Naperville has continued to churn. Today, it’s a city of 123,000, home to some of the nation’s most innovative companies, including Lucent Technologies Inc., Spyglass Inc., Nalco Chemical and Amoco. As if things weren’t rosy enough for Naperville, last year Zero Population Growth rated the city the best place to raise children in U.S. cities of at least 100,000. A few months later, a magazine for relocating executives rated Naperville’s school district among the top four in the country.
And Dominique Raccah? She is president of one of the fastest growing independent publishing companies in America.
It’s quite a story.
It includes one woman’s circuitous journey to a destination she hadn’t set out to reach. And it unfolds against a backdrop of a dynamic yet dichotomous relationship between a city that epitomizes high-tech economic vigor and a publishing company that grew from near bankruptcy to national prominence in part by embracing old-school philosophies.
Beyond that, the story of Sourcebooks is representative of perhaps the only encouraging news in book publishing.
Dominique Raccah learned to speak English by watching episodes of “Lost in Space” and “Perry Mason” after her family moved to Sudbury, Mass., from Paris in 1964. She was 8 and the oldest of four children. Her father, Paul, a physicist, accepted a job at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the family stayed on the East Coast until about 1975, when her father took a job as head of the physics department at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
By then a 19-year-old college student, she transferred to UIC, where she earned bachelor’s degrees in psychology and philosophy, followed by a master’s in mathematical psychology–academic verbiage for statistics–from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
She began pursuing her PhD in the same field but found the academic life too isolated. In 1980, she started working for the Leo Burnett ad agency’s consumer research unit and rose steadily. But in 1987, she cashed her $17,000 401(k) and embarked on an entrepreneurial odyssey that began with something called Financial Sourcebooks.
“I was doing great at Burnett,” she recalled. “I was one of the fastest-moving people there and I was very happy, and if this hadn’t worked out, I would have tried to go back.
“But you really independently can’t make a significant difference at a place that large, and I really wanted to know what I could do,” she said. “I think a lot of people do. It’s a point at which you want to find out what you’re made of and I needed to know that, and it was also about finding something I could be passionate about.”
And that passion was stirred by . . . a directory of financial research, marketing surveys and services for bankers and insurance companies?
“I saw it as a growth opportunity,” she said.
Raccah was right, to a degree. She wrote and published the book directory and started a newsletter to update it. The book sold about 2,000 copies. The newsletter felt stale to her.
But a newsletter contributor, who happened to be writing a business book, persuaded her to publish his work, called “Outsmarting the Competition.” A lifelong book lover who once applied for a job at Simon and Schuster, she published the book and others followed. The business crept throughout the house.
Then the crash of 1990 struck. When Raccah collected herself, she filed a lawsuit against the distributor and mothballed the publishing business. The family refinanced the house and she learned a valuable lesson: If you want the distribution of your books to go smoothly, become a distributor.
She found four partners and formed Logan Publishing Consortium, a book distribution company. Over the next four years, Raccah worked there, strengthening the business and orchestrating the purchase of another distributor, InBook, in December 1995.
Although she focused most of her attention on distributing books, she also began reviving Sourcebooks, and it started to blossom. That made her excited. It made at least one neighbor angry.
That neighbor contacted Naperville officials, who agreed that her house was no place to run a publishing business. After a grace period, city officials told her they were going to shut down the business. She consulted the attorney who had represented her in the distributor lawsuit, John James of Naperville, for legal advice.
Instead, he offered her a vacant upstairs office in an old Victorian house he owned on North Washington Street, and told her to pay rent when she could afford it.
She couldn’t for about four months. That was in 1993. By January 1994, Sourcebooks occupied all of the top floor. In July 1996, the company crept downstairs. In September 1997, Sourcebooks occupied the entire building. Two months later, Publishers Weekly listed Sourcebooks as the sixth fastest-growing independent publisher–those companies with no interests outside publishing–in the U.S.
Now, Raccah is looking to expand to a building just north of the Victorian on Washington Street.
How did it happen? She’s a bright woman, and setting up the distribution company helped immensely. She also learned while nearly killing herself with this enterprise.
She learned about the importance of packaging. Sourcebooks has more designers than any other independent publisher, Raccah said.
She learned to publish fewer titles and fewer numbers of those titles–both of which reduce the bane of publishers: returns.
But her biggest strength–the one most people mention when talking about Sourcebooks’ success–may be her marketing savvy. Raccah and her associates believe in creating buzz for a book outside the traditional bookstore, which forces their product inside.
To that end, Sourcebooks has pushed to find other venues to sell books: gift shops and specialty stores, catalogs and corporations. There has even been some talk of selling an upcoming book at pharmacies.
“She’s an extremely ingenious marketing person,” said Jan Nathan, executive director of Publishers Marketing Association, a non-profit organization of 3,400 independent book publishers in the U.S. “She also knows what’s going to work for her.”
Raccah contends, too, that while Sourcebooks focuses on self-help and gift books, she pushes against the conventional wisdom that independent publishing must find a niche.
And she has placed her money where her mouth is. In the last 18 months, Sourcebooks has acquired three imprints, subsidiary publishers that specialize in a specific topic. Those imprints feature books on romance, humor and legal issues.
“I tell people we’re anti-niche and the reason is that I want to publish great books,” Rac-cah said. “I’m not concerned with the category. I’m concerned with the content and authorship.”
That approach is a new twist on an old, somewhat forgotten formula in publishing.
“I really view us as a kind of throwback to the old publishing houses of the 1920s, in which publishing was about a personal relationship between a publisher and an author,” Raccah said. “We help develop and sculpt a work. It’s a very personal relationship and a rather old-fashioned one.”
As an example, Sourcebooks this fall will publish “We Interrupt This Broadcast,” a book/compact disc combination complete with CDs of radio broadcasts of 40 historic events from the Hindenburg crash in 1937 to the death of Princess Diana in 1997.
The author, Joe Garner, came to Sourcebooks with the idea in 1996. Sourcebooks hadn’t published history to that point. Now it has, and Garner is working on another book for Sourcebooks, even though he doesn’t have a contract.
Jed Diamond can relate. Diamond, a psychotherapist and instructor at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote “Male Menopause” for Sourcebooks. It is a 384-page effort that documents and offers advice for chemical and physiological changes experienced by men as they enter middle age.
Diamond has worked with Putnam and Avon, has even self-published. He chose Sourcebooks, he said, over more lucrative offers from larger publishers because the people at Sourcebooks–most notably Raccah, managing editor Todd Stocke and publicity director Renee Calomino-Emery–showed a personal commitment to compose the best book possible, make money and foster a long-term relationship with the author.
“Another publisher may make a bigger up-front offer,” Diamond said, “but if it’s not an immediate best seller, chances are they’re going to say `bye-bye,’ where Sourcebooks is going to say, `Let’s work together and keep going.’ “
All of this has exacted a toll, though.
For about a decade after Raccah started the business in 1987, the family stopped taking vacations. She shopped for most of her kids’ clothes at secondhand sales. She couldn’t afford to be tired, she said. She couldn’t afford to call in sick. Those are the sacrifices she is inclined to discuss.
“It was horrible,” she said. “Eighteen hours a day, seven days a week without any end in sight. I suspect it’s what the gulag felt like. It wears you down and . . . that’s all there is.
“I’d never do it again,” she said, smiling. “She tucked a lock of her wild, dark brown hair behind an ear. “Not a chance.”
Raccah’s relationship with Naperville remains curious. In many ways, she loves being there. Indeed, she and her husband recently completed a large addition on their home about two blocks from Sourcebooks. The yellow bedroom where Sourcebooks began is now part of a hall, she said.
And, she said, having a location far outside the publishing center of New York is beneficial to her. The company is less insulated and more liberated from the sometimes stifling conventions of the publishing industry, Raccah said.
But she also noted that it’s difficult to find experienced book publishing employees in Naperville, while “finding an experienced book editor in New York is like falling over a line.
“While it has these drawbacks,” she added, “it has a tremendous vitality and that is a great plus for us. There’s a vibrancy here and that’s a great place for any kind of growing business. Growth is kind of in the air. There’s a buzz.”
She wants to remain in Naperville, and Naperville wants to keep her.
City officials say a publishing house, even though it employs only 27 full- and part-time workers, gives the city a certain cachet. It also provides free advertising. Every Sourcebooks book has Naperville’s name on its cover, just beneath the publisher’s logo.
“That’s a big deal for us,” said Naperville Community Development Director Robert Kallien. “This is another example of us getting that identity and also being a well-rounded community.”
Added Nan Newlon, assistant director of public works: “It kind of keeps the whole cycle of quality development going. People want to go where other important people are.”
Sourcebooks will publish about 85 new books this year. That’s the total number of books it published during the first nine years of its existence. While Raccah won’t reveal her sales, she did tell Publisher’s Weekly that the company experienced nearly 90 percent growth in sales from 1994-96. Within a decade, Raccah said, she expects to be publishing fiction and children’s books.
It is a heartening forecast in an industry that has found little to be enthusiastic about in recent years. But Sourcebooks is not alone, not even in the Chicago area.
Curt Matthews is president of Independent Publishers Group/Chicago Review Press, another independent book publisher, at 314 N. Franklin St., Chicago. His company has experienced 35 to 40 percent sales growth a year for the last four or five years, he said.
The reason: superstores.
“Barnes & Noble and Borders built because there was a need,” said Matthews, who established the company in 1972. “The need arose because the American consumer is not interested in the same thing that everybody else is reading. People come into a bookstore and they want to find something just for them.”
The result is a broadening of interest that fragments the market, a scenario that wreaks havoc on big publishers’ approach of seeking a blockbuster work everyone will read.
But it’s a void perfectly suited to independent publishers that gladly and efficiently publish a book that would sell 5,000, 20,000, even 50,000 books–measly numbers for the major conglomerates.
To bolster his point, Matthews quoted a press release from Barnes & Noble in November 1997 in which the superstore stated that purchases from the 10 biggest publishers declined to 46 percent of the chain’s sales, from 74 percent three years earlier.
“This is a stunning shift,” Matthews wrote in the February Publishers Marketing Association Newsletter, “a sea change, a whole new world of possibility for independent publishing.”
He crunched the numbers and believes “this leaves over a billion dollars in sales at retail” for quite small publishers.
“At this moment, it looks pretty brilliant,” Matthews said in an interview. “I can’t see any reason why we can’t continue to grow these businesses at a tremendous rate.”
Raccah, her brown eyes twinkling behind dark, thin-frame glasses, boldly predicted that she will be a part of it. Silent people are flitting through the Victorian. Thick bundles of computer cable snake along the floor, humming with information. She has goals to achieve, expectations to reach. And she has come too far to stop now.
