Updated April 1st, 2024: They are currently closed to nonfiction work, but their romance and horror imprints remain open to unagented submissions.
Sourcebooks is based out of Illinois, they also have offices in Connecticut and New York. Sourcebooks was started in 1987 by Dominique Raccah. They also have several imprints, all founded within the last decade. Within the last few years Penguin Random House has gained 70% of ownership over Sourcebooks, although the publisher still operates independently. In 2025 they will be launching an audiobook imprint that operates within Penguin Random House Audio.
They started out publishing business books, but then expanded to gift books, nonfiction, and in the past five years in particular, fiction books.
They’ve published a number of New York Times Bestsellers recently including Radium Girls by Kate Moore, Sold on a Monday by Kristina McMorris, and The Only Woman in the Room by Marie Benedict.
They now publish fiction and nonfiction in a large variety of genres, including romance, literary fiction, young adult and children’s books. A good way to get a feel for what they publish is to browse their catalogue here.
They list all their imprints here. It is clearly mentioned if an imprint is closed or open directly under the listing. At the time of publication of this review, only nonfiction and romance are open to direct submissions. But that changes regularly, although nonfiction and romance are generally open for submissions, with the other imprints having shorter submission windows.
To learn more about their submission guidelines you can go to their main page here.
Emily Harstone is the author of many popular books, including The Authors Publish Guide to Manuscript Submissions, The 2019 Guide to Manuscript Publishers, Submit, Publish, Repeat, and The Authors Publish Guide to Children’s and Young Adult Publishing.
She occasionally teaches a course on manuscript publishing, as well as a course on publishing in literary journals.
You can follow her on Facebook here.
