Penguin Random House Launches Site for Parents of Young Readers
New York, NY — Today, Brightly, a new online resource that encourages parents to raise lifelong readers, launches as a Penguin Random House initiative. Brightly aims to provide moms and dads with inspiration and guidance around creating a reading life for their families. This lifestyle site dedicated to reading, shares book recommendations from across the children’s publishing world for every age and stage, as well as reading tips and insights, special author and illustrator content, seasonal activities, and more. Brightly makes this information accessible to today’s mobile, connected parents on the social channels they frequent, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.
The program launch includes a site redesign, email newsletter, and expanded content offering informed by positive feedback from readers of the beta version of the site, which debuted in October 2014. Brightly is co-founded by book lovers and moms, Amanda Close and Christine McNamara, who, in the course of their book-publishing careers, discovered that there was an appetite for more lifestyle content for parents that offers sincere and relevant guidance about reading, books, and authors.
“As a lifelong book lover, I want to share my interest and passion with my family, especially with my son, but as a working mom, I’ve seen firsthand how our busy lifestyle can make this a challenge,” said Close, Senior Vice President, Consumer Marketing Development at Penguin Random House.
Brightly’s editorial direction is led by Liz Kotin, formerly of DisneyBaby.com. Kotin brings together some of the best voices covering reading and parenting on the Web to create a dedicated resource for families that offers inspiration and ideas around reading, in a space that heretofore has been largely academic in scope. Parents can expect to find age-specific content, news about books and authors, and articles on broader topics like reading aloud to big kids, diverse books, questions to ask librarians, understanding the Common Core, and book recommendations for grown-ups.
“Brightly is like your fun, friendly, and well-informed kid-lit pal. Our focus is on celebrating and embracing different kinds of readers, kids, and interests. Brightly gives parents insights into which books and authors their children might get excited about and what activities might enhance a family’s experience of reading,” said Kotin.
Christine McNamara, Penguin Random House’s Vice President and Director of Partnerships added, “We estimate that there are more than a quarter of a million children’s books on the market, so finding the right book for the right child at the right time can be challenging. Unfortunately, not everyone is blessed with a fantastic local bookstore or librarian to guide them. I wanted help navigating those stacks and we’re finding that other parents do, too. Hopefully, Brightly will help provide that for us.”
About Brightly
At Brightly, we believe reading has the power to illuminate kids’ lives. But we also know how hard it can be to connect kids with the right books at the right time and keep them engaged with reading as they grow. We want to make it a little easier, and a lot more fun, for parents to raise children who love to read. That’s why we started Brightly. Founded in 2014 by a small team of passionate bookworms and parents, Brightly is a resource to help moms and dads raise lifelong readers. Launched as a project at Penguin Random House, Brightly features book recommendations from all book publishers for every age and stage, reading tips and insights, seasonal inspirations, author essays, contests, gift guides, and more.
About Penguin Random House
Penguin Random House (http://global.penguinrandomhouse.com) is the world’s largest and first truly global trade book publisher. The company is made up of 250 editorially and creatively independent imprints and publishing houses that collectively publish more than 15,000 new titles annually worldwide, along with the works of more than 70 Nobel Prize laureates and hundreds of the world’s most widely read bestselling authors. It employs more than 11,500 people across the adult and children’s fiction and nonfiction print, audio, and digital trade book publishing businesses of Penguin and Random House in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, India and South Africa; Penguin’s trade publishing activity in Asia; DK Worldwide; and Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial’s companies in Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Central America, and its Portuguese-language company in Portugal. Penguin Random House was formed on July 1, 2013 and is jointly owned by Bertelsmann (53%) and Pearson (47%).
