In just seven short years, Sourcebooks has transformed Poisoned Pen Press (PPP) into one of the leading mystery imprints in the country. Since being acquired in 2018, the imprint has experienced both commercial and critical success, with PPP authors like Freida McFadden seeing her books, sometimes several at a time, top the New York Times Best Sellers list and bestselling novelist William Kent Krueger calling PPP author Joshua Moehling “the best new voice in crime fiction.” The imprint also has tons to celebrate on the awards front – recently two of their long-time authors, Sulari Gentill (The Mystery Writer) and Katarina Bivald (The Murders in Great Diddling), took home prestigious Edgar Awards.

How, in such a short time, has the publisher managed to break into this extremely competitive category and pull off this impressive feat? The publisher’s signature style has a lot to do with it.

Sourcebooks is known for not following the traditional publishing playbook, and that, it seems, has been the key to its success. In 2024, Sourcebooks made Fast Company’s list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies, and it’s that dedication to innovation along with an entrepreneurial spirit that’s been a winning formula for the publisher. In an industry where sales were down last year, Sourcebooks’ sales were up by double digits.

Not all the sales figures can be attributed to the meteoric rise of Poisoned Pen Press, but the acquisition of the press proved a wise decision. Years before launching the new imprint, Sourcebooks devised a plan. “We recognized the massive potential in the crime fiction category,” says senior editorial director Anna Michels, and to realize that potential Sourcebooks started publishing books with crossover appeal to their existing audiences. Given the publisher’s strong presence in historical fiction, they set about acquiring historical mysteries, and by 2017 they had published their first breakout contemporary thriller, Two Days Gone by Randall Silvis.

Not long after, the venerable Poisoned Pen Press, known for publishing well-regarded mysteries, was looking for a partner. “We saw the potential to bring Poisoned Pen Press’s unparalleled editorial quality together with Sourcebooks’ commercial sensibility, strong distribution, and marketing firepower as a real opportunity,” Michels says.

That it was. Since the acquisition, Sourcebooks has expanded the imprint to include thrillers, suspense, horror, and even cozy fantasy, making Poisoned Pen Press more of a dark genre than a purely crime fiction imprint. “That diversity in the publishing program is a strategic choice that allows us to tap into different audiences, explore trends, and expand our impact by reaching different sets of readers,” Michels says.

This approach allowed assistant editorial director Jenna Jankowski to acquire global sensation Freida McFadden, who since the summer of 2023 has published 11 frontlist and backlist titles with Poisoned Pen Press. This move, Jankowski says, has “brought the imprint to an entirely new level.”

In another countercultural approach, Sourcebooks looks to readers to help inform what they should publish. They analyze market data and listen to feedback from retailers and booksellers to decipher readers’ desires. “When we orient ourselves around the idea of letting the reader tell us what they want rather than being the gatekeepers of content,” says Mandy Chahal, associate director of publicity and marketing, “we find our books become stickier and resonate better. Our success over the past few years has really been driven by agility
and a reader-centric mindset.”

Then it's a matter of ensuring those books are available in all the formats and in all the places their readers are looking for them. “Our goal,” Chahal says, “is for all readers of mystery, thriller, horror, and other dark genres to look to Poisoned Pen Press as the go-to place to find their next amazing read!”