[Press Release]
BOOK COUNTRY MEMBERSHIP TOPS 10,000
Book Country, Penguin Random House’s online writing and publishing community, announced today that their membership has grown to over 10,000 members.
Book Country Director Brandi Larsen noted that this means the Book Country membership has doubled in just nine months. “It’s so exciting to welcome new members to Book Country,” Larsen said. “Book Country is the place for writers from all over the world to connect with each other, create better books, and discover the first audience for their work.”
63% of Book Country’s members hail from the United States; Book Country also has members from Ireland, Croatia, India, the UK, Canada, and many other countries worldwide. On Book Country, writers can workshop manuscripts in over sixty literary categories, including science fiction, romance, literary fiction, memoir, and young adult.
National Public Radio’s weekly show “On the Media” featured Book Country in their broadcast over the weekend. “On the Media” host Bob Garfield said that Book Country “enables thousands of writers to exchange manuscripts and notes, and self-publish their work. A few have even gotten traditional publishing deals.”
Molly Barton, the Global Digital Director for Penguin at Penguin Random House, who founded the site in 2011, “The benefits of self-publishing within the context of a community make Book Country stand out.”
Later in the segment, “On the Media” host Garfield summarized the dramatic shift Book Country brought to author Carl E. Reed, a Book Country member who had been writing for four decades without finding mainstream publishing success, as follows: “[He] struggled with his fantasy novella for years, before finding aid and comfort among unseen collaborators.”
Reed responded that because of Book Country, he’s able to say “Yes. I’m a writer. Because there is somewhere to go with the work, and there’s a vehicle for feedback, you know that somebody’s going to be reading the words; it makes the act of writing very real.”
Reed now has four e-books for sale in the Book Country bookstore and on all of the major e-book retail platforms.
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Penguin Random House (http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/) is the world’s first truly global trade book publisher. It was formed on July 1, 2013, upon the completion of an agreement between Bertelsmann and Pearson to merge their respective trade publishing companies, Random House and Penguin, with the parent companies owning 53% and 47%, respectively. Penguin Random House comprises the adult and children’s fiction and nonfiction print and digital trade book publishing businesses of Penguin and Random House in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and India, Penguin’s trade publishing activity in Asia and South Africa; Dorling Kindersley worldwide; and Random House’s companies in Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, and Chile. Penguin Random House employs more than 10,000 people globally across almost 250 editorially and creatively independent imprints and publishing houses that collectively publish more than 15,000 new titles annually. Its publishing lists include more than 70 Nobel Prize laureates and hundreds of the world’s most widely read authors.