On September 15, U.A.E.–based organization PublisHer hosted a panel of women publishing executives who spoke to the power of data, innovation, and, of all things, pestering, when it came to advancing their careers.

The event, held at New York University’s Center for Publishing, Writing, and Media and entitled “The Women Shaping the Future of Publishing,” featured Dominique Raccah, the founder, CEO, and publisher of Sourcebooks; Madeline MacIntosh, cofounder and head of Authors Equity; and Chantal Restivo-Alessi, chief digital officer and CEO of international foreign language at HarperCollins. The panel was moderated by Namrata Tripathi, founder and publisher of Penguin Random House’s Kokila imprint.

While women in publishing panels are often critical of how infrequently women are hired to positions of leadership in the field, the PublisHER panel did not emphasize top-down change, instead focusing on how women publishers can create their own success. The three speakers, who all took different paths into publishing leadership, discussed the industry’s resistance to change, and how they were able to chip away at it.

“Publishing is not an experimental business. I didn’t know that when I started,” said Raccah, who was a statistician prior to founding Sourcebooks in 1987.

Raccah attributed Sourcebooks’ growth to its data-driven practice. “Data has been the secret weapon,” she explained. “We use it to better connect our books to readers.” Following the numbers, for instance, freed Sourcebooks from the myth that “publishers, and not readers or authors, decide what’s good,” Raccah noted, and from the old hierarchy of prestige publishing—literary fiction at the top, and mass-market at the bottom.

“We’re now the sixth largest book publisher in America, and I’m the only woman CEO in that top six,” Raccah said. “And no one hired me for that job.”

Like Raccah, Restivo-Alessi came to publishing from the outside from a background in corporate strategy. “The thing I found very surprising compared to other industries I’ve been in was the fact that publishing is not very global at all,” she said. “A lot of the effort in my job is really to create that global service, coordination, [and] networking, which is very different from just occasionally meeting your colleagues [abroad].”

Shortly after starting as chief digital officer at HC in 2012, Restivo-Alessi noticed that the company had the tools to globalize. Seeing rapid globalization in other sectors, Restivo-Alessi said she pressed CEO Brian Murray to lean into foreign-language publishing. A year later, Restivo-Alessi was named head of HC’s new international publishing division.

“I mean, basically the story is I’m a pester power,” she joked.

In contrast to the other two women, McIntosh described herself as a “corporate animal,” working through publishing’s ranks to eventually become CEO of PRH in 2018. She stepped down in early 2023, and launched Author’s Equity just over a year later. “We wanted to bring the expertise that we had gained inside the system, but take it outside the system to create change,” McIntosh said of her and her cofounders.

Author’s Equity shares a high percentage of sales revenue with authors, which help level the working relationship with their publishers, McIntosh said. “60 to 70% of the profit in the publication is always going to go to the author,” she explained. “And the author is going to have complete cooperation in making the decisions about how money is spent, and where time is spent.”

McIntosh was adamant that the complexity of the book business should not be a “hall pass” to follow a templated approach, though she acknowledged the temptation. She emphasized, to her surprise, how “simple” the Authors Equity model felt. “I was not a statistician—I was a history major—but I can understand the math,” she said.

As the panel wound to a close, Raccah reiterated that her and her fellow panelists’ success was self-made. “No one hired Madeline for her job, and I would also say, in a very real way, no one hired Chantal for her job,” she said. “So, if you want to think about innovation, you perhaps want to think about innovation in your own career.”

The panel was PublisHer’s second annual event at NYU. This year, PublisHer attended the Bologna Book Fair, as well as its home fair in Sharjah, and will have a presence at Frankfurt for the first time next month.