Good if you need experience, bad if you want a career - Anonymous employee Sourcebooks Employee Review

1.0
Nov 5, 2012
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good experience in the publishing industry. You'll get a lot of responsibility even if you are an intern. CEO is very ambitious and is broadening the company into interactive media- lots of opportunities to get into new things.

Cons

Office environment is quiet and anti-social. The day to day is more based on individual effort rather than working as a team. Salaried workers are treated as hourly workers with minimal flex-time. A lot of the company's software is built by it's own IT department so working with the web site and content management system is very frustrating since their are several bugs/glitches that go unfixed. Because of this, training people is a nightmare since there are numerous workarounds you have to explain in order to get things to work right.

Explore other reviews about Sourcebooks

5.0
Jun 20, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Incredible managers, great team, genuine openness to growth and learning, meaningful work

Cons

None to speak of at this moment

1.0
Apr 20, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

In hindsight, I'm not sure if there were any apart from some friendly coworkers.

Cons

I infuriatingly see promotions handed out left and right via LinkedIn, but just know that actually being someone to get to that level means literally grovelling and being lucky enough to be in the good graces of the egotistical CEO. Upper management brown-noses her as their main job, and they will prevent you from any upward mobility if you're not one of her favorites (which seems to be picked based on how much you kiss up to her, and if you keep your own opinions to yourself, and other factors entirely unrelated to your actual performance). Absolutely criminally high monthly healthcare premiums, paired with insanely high deductibles, bare-minimum PTO, and mat leave. HR is a joke and not one HR employee seems to last very long. Salaries are abysmal, even by publishing standards. Most books acquired are bottom-of-the-barrel since they don't pay most of their authors much, and they have to be edited within an inch of their lives to be readable and marketable. I left the industry after this company and have never been happier.

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