Our Company
We connect people interested in designing better user experiences with the best expertise available—in the formats that make the most sense, and in ways that demonstrate the value of UX.
As UX becomes mission critical for more industries, organizations, and people, we expect to be there—as a trusted source of really helpful, really valuable expertise that helps make sense of user experience design. Here are the ideas that are driving Rosenfeld Media:
We don’t publish books; we publish expertise.
We started with books, expanded to teaching and consulting, and continue to explore new ways to get you the best UX expertise. We’re format-agnostic; we just want to make sure you have what you need in the ways you need it.
We try to make sense of user experience.
User experience is an overwhelmingly large, dynamic field. Like you, we’re trying to make sense of it. Identifying experts and publishing a library of books is our effort to define user experience and make its incredible value more accessible for you.
We take our own advice.
We’re very serious about the experience we deliver to you—from our highly-rated customer service and award-winning book covers, to the value of our Twitter feed, and even the experience of the UX bookmobile we push around at conferences.
We want to be an indispensable part of the conversation.
The best outcomes are driven by discussion, not monologue. Regardless of its format, we strive to make our expertise generate momentum in the user experience community’s dialogue.
We do what we do by staying small and nimble.
What it means to be an expertise-centric business is different from what it was five years ago—and from what it will be in five years. We see ourselves as infrastructure—and just enough—to make sure the best UX expertise gets to market in the ways that make sense today.
We don’t do things a certain way because they’ve always been done that way.
It’s become incredibly easy and inexpensive for organizations to experiment, make mistakes, and learn from them. So there’s no excuse for being held hostage by legacy systems and thinking. We’ll keep trying out new ideas so we can do our best at providing UX expertise.
We’re truly convinced that good UX will make the world a better place.
User experience humanizes technology and information—and Rosenfeld Media helps people all over the world create better user experiences.
Our Team
Staff
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Lou Rosenfeld
Founder/Publisher
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Ed Rosenfeld
Managing Member
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Karen Corbett
Director of Operations
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MJ Broadbent
Sketchnoter in Residence
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Melissa Burnett
Senior Design Cross-Product Lead, Dell Technologies
Lead Facilitator -
Nathan Gold
Speaker Coach in Residence
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Phyllis Imbriale
Full-Charge Bookkeeper/Office Administrator
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Marta Justak
Managing Editor
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Elle Kyle
Operations Coordinator
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Michelle Kaplan
Director of Business Development
Curators
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Jemma Ahmed
Advancing Research Curator
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Bria Alexander
DesignOps Curator
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Uday Gajendar
Enterprise Experience Community Curator
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Chris Geison
Advancing Research Curator
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Saara Kampari-Miller
DesignOps Curator
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Farid Sabitov
DesignOps Curator
For Event Organizers
If you organize community events—whether a huge annual conference or an informal meetup at the local bar—you’re one of the true heroes of our field. May we help by being an in-kind sponsor for your next community event? We help over 100 UX-related and other events each year by:
- Providing complimentary copies of our books—ideal to raffle off at your event, or use as registration incentives, or reward volunteers
- Offering a custom discount code—good for 20% off any of our books—to share with your event’s attendees
Sound good? Just complete this brief form, and we’ll take care of the rest. Or contact us with other ideas or suggestions.
For Book Clubs
Help for Book Clubs
For more reasons than you can shake a stick at, we adore book clubs. And we’re thrilled when a club selects one of our books to read and discuss.
If you’re a book club organizer, please let us help! Get in touch and we’ll:
- Send you a code for a whopping 30% discount for you to share with your book club members
- Send you a complimentary copy of the book (paperback and ebook versions to US-based clubs, ebooks only outside the US)
- Cajole (if you like) the author into joining the discussion via Skype or equivalent; they’re usually quite willing!
Please complete this short form so we can help out. And let us know if there’s anything else we can do to help.
For Prospective Authors
Writing a Rosenfeld Media Book
Thanks for thinking about writing a book with Rosenfeld Media! We’re a small publishing house that collaborates closely with its authors to develop and promote books on user experience design and related topics. We typically publish between four and six books annually, and we lavish each title with tender loving care throughout the processes of writing, production, and promotion.
Writing a book is a difficult, time-consuming, and occasionally painful undertaking. Even proposals are a lot of work! So, like the rabbis who turn away prospective converts at least twice before saying yes, we’re going to encourage you to give this a lot of thought before committing. Start by asking your loved ones if they can cope with having quite a bit less of you in their lives for a good year or two. Then, before you do anything else, read the rest of this page.
What We’re Looking to Publish
Most of our books cover user experience design principles, tools, and methods. UX is a broad field that synthesizes ideas from many disciplines—from architecture to graphic design to human factors to librarianship—with the goal of helping people use and enjoy their experiences with all kinds of products and services. Our UX books teach craft and actionable skills to designers, researchers, writers, and other people who care about delivering great user experiences. These books tend toward practical advice: a rule of thumb is 25% “what and why” content, and 75% “how” content.
As UX is becoming increasingly critical to business success, we recently introduced a new imprint, Two Waves Books, that explores the convergence of business and design. These books make the design world’s big ideas accessible to a growing audience interested in learning more about how design can help them address common personal and business challenges.
In all cases, we emphasize a house writing style of warmth and accessibility. Through the use of plain language and a conversational tone, and an emphasis on stories and examples, our authors serve as “trusted guides” rather than authoritative experts.
Our books tend to be short (our sweet spot is 45,000-70,000 words) and rely on illustrations to make for a more enlightening reading experience. We publish an annual article describing the topics we’re hoping to sign in the coming year. And we prefer topics that are “evergreen”: while some of their examples might be especially current, each book’s principles and frameworks should stand the test of at least a few years’ time.
What We Avoid Publishing
Never say never, but we generally avoid publishing books that are:
- On topics we’ve addressed in a recent book. We avoid covering the same topics twice in the space of a few years; it’s simply not fair to our authors. Please review what we’ve published or are planning to publish and make sure we don’t already offer a recent book on your topic.
- Already written. Most publishers love receiving a manuscript that’s “ready to go.” We’re not one of those publishers. We prefer to pool your ideas with ours about the topic, its audience, your research, and the writing and production of the book. If you’ve already written a manuscript, it’s actually more work for us to produce your book.
- Compilations written by multiple authors. Regardless of how good the editor is at herding cats, compilations often suffer from uneven coverage, voice, tone, and quality.
- Repackaged blog entries. “Writing short” can be a good way to test your ideas and content in public, and it can get you part of the way toward a full manuscript. But a book is more than the sum of its parts; you’ll still need to make significant changes to your individual entries before they work together as a book.
- Based on a proprietary process or method. You or your company may do uniquely brilliant work, but will other people be able to repeat it simply by reading your book? Given that you’re the only person familiar with it, will anyone else take the idea seriously?
What’s Different about Our Approach
- We’re in this together. We work with you from the very start—developing your idea into a proposal, your proposal into an initial draft, and your draft into a beautiful, well-written book. Throughout the process, you’ll work closely with our publisher, editors, and marketers. If you’d prefer to go away and write your book in a garret, we’re probably not the right publisher for you.
- Research equals promotion. Collaboration goes beyond you and us. We’ll work together to engage influencers, subject matter experts, and the broader community with your ideas with two goals in mind: to help you improve your content, and to give them a sense of and stake in the final outcome. The more people who feel a part of your book’s development, the more who will support and promote it once it launches.
- We invest, you invest. We assign a developmental editor to each book. They work with you as a writing coach/project manager to get you through the process. And our marketing team works directly with you from development through launch. Both of these things are rare in our industry. In return, we expect you to be an equal partner in creating and launching your book—not just writing it but working hard to promote it.
- Speak with, not to readers. We want the world to be a better place thanks to your ideas and expertise. So we work with our authors to avoid jargon and other forms of poor communication that can get in the way of our readers learning from our books.
- We don’t play favorites. Our books receive an equal amount of editorial and marketing support, and all are consistently produced to meet our uncommonly high quality standards. If we’ve signed you, we are about you as much as any other author.
Other Stuff to Know
- Business terms. We pay royalties twice annually on net sales (the money left over after production and printing costs are covered). Our royalty rates are typically higher than the industry standard. We don’t pay advances.
- Book formats. Our paperbacks are 6” x 9” (15.24cm x 22.86cm), and are printed on high-quality paper with four-color covers and interiors. Our ebooks come in four DRM-free digital formats: PDF, ePUB (for iPads), MOBI (for Kindles), and DAISY (for people with impaired vision).
- Distribution. We sell directly via our website and fulfill orders globally. We also sell via Amazon and via retailers and wholesalers that do business with Ingram Publisher Services.
- Covers. We’re glad to have your input, but the final design up to us. We’ve worked with the acclaimed design team from The Heads of State to develop each of our covers.
What Happens Next
Ready to pitch your idea? Great!
Unless you have a fully fleshed-out book proposal to share, please complete our one-page “pre-proposal” (details here). It’s short, but it’s not easy: your challenge is to communicate the essence and value of your idea—and your voice and tone—within some tight constraints.
If we’re interested, we’ll work with you to grow your pre-proposal into a more formal proposal (with a writing sample). We’ll ask a few industry experts we know to provide feedback, which we’ll then share with you. If your proposal successfully jumps through all these hoops, we’ll send you a contract. Then the real fun begins.
As you might imagine, we receive a lot of proposals. We do our best to review them at least once per quarter. Please keep that in mind if you don’t hear from us right away. And if you decide to go in another direction, please let us know.