We’re feeling pleasantly pre-adolescent this week as we officially celebrate the twelfth anniversary of PublishersMarketplace.com. As always, it’s hard to believe what a longer-than-expected journey this has become. It remains a privilege to serve and be part of a professional community we love, and your support and participation are the driving reasons for our existence.
The founding mission of our site remains the same — to help people in publishing find each other and do business together through the internet (later refined to “solving information problems and creating information opportunities for book publishing professionals”). As does our founding promise, to keep working all the time to expand and improve our resources and innovate on behalf of our members.
Among the notable steps forward from the past year, one of the biggest is the rollout of Super Search, which now process over 5,000 searches a day. Years in the making, Super Search finally brings data from a dozen different features into one place, and it has helped unlock easier access to resources such as our big bestseller database (now easily searchable by author and title) and our Automat collection of hundreds of thousands of publishing headlines/stories.
You’ve probably noticed our gentle, rolling redesign of the PM home page — followed by coverful additions to the Book Tracker and Reviews pages.
The past year also saw the launch (and quiet relaunch) of Bookateria, another major effort that brings detailed book information one click closer throughout much of PublishersMarketplace and Publishers Lunch. Our Publishers Lunch Buzz Books experiment from 2012 turned into an established, successful driver of trade and consumer attention to worthy forthcoming books with the added Spring/Summer “Winter Institute” edition (returning in 2014, bigger than ever) and the most downloads yet via our Fall/Winter “BEA” edition.
We added two terrific staff members, Robin Dellabough and Kathy Smith, and with their help have continued to make extensive behind-the-scenes improvements to our industry-critical databases and features. In Deals alone, we formalized and expanded our tracking of deals from digital-focused publishers; welcome New Adult as a deals category of its own; and added almost 10,000 new transactions. And then there are the quiet little things, like the recently-added @bookjobs Twitter feed that makes our industry-leading Job Board easier than ever to follow and share.
Through what we’re calling PM Services we developed and went live with private, licensable APIs to help spread our unique databases of bestseller list results and book reviews to publisher portals and beyond as part of our PM Services group. And in the daily news (the Publishers Lunch newsletter is actually over 13 years old, though it’s hard to establish a precise date of inception), there was our exhaustive (and yes, exhausting) coverage of book publishing’s “trial of the century,” with literally tens of thousands of words of reports, explanation and analysis, drawing on many hundreds of documents and thousands of pages of trial transcripts and court filings.
We could go on — but instead we’ll simply go on with our daily work, trying to sustain the same creativity, energy and passion that has fueled us for the past 12 years. In keeping with another tradition, if you have a colleague, friend or co-worker who is not a member, please help us celebrate by sharing the discount code 1315, which will let them try the site out for just $15 for the first month. The code should be entered on the second page of our registration form, under “payment plan,” where it asks a Promo Code.