Our very first book, Suze Orman's Women & Money, an instant New York Times bestseller with over 1 million copies in print, has made history: More than 1.1 million copies of Women & Money were downloaded after the announcement on The Oprah Winfrey Show on February 13 that the e-book edition would be available for free on the show's Web site, www.oprah.com, for a period of 33 hours. More than 19,000 copies of the Spanish language edition were downloaded too. The offer marked the first time that Winfrey has extended a giveaway to her home viewing audience. The phenomenal response was widely reported in the media and excitement for the book reached across all formats. One year after publication, Suze's book reenters The New York Times bestseller list on March 2nd at # 2.

This is a celebratory moment for us. We are officially launched. We have books in the bookstores, we've hired our last editor, Tina Pohlman, who comes to us from Harcourt as Senior Editor, hardcovers, and Editorial Director of our paperback list. We're thrilled to have her with us.

We held a memorable and spirited party to commemorate the launch, attended by our authors, their agents, and other industry folk. It was a tremendously moving experience, after two years of building a list of books, to stand among so many friends and colleagues. But what made it particularly special was that so many of our authors were able to attend. Iain Pears (and his agent Felicity Bryan), Rebecca Stott (and her son Jacob), and Jane Kamensky flew in from England; Janelle Brown came from L.A. via Sundance; Dan Baum and Marianne Szegedy-Maszak from D.C.; Jill Lepore and Saher Alam from Boston; Mary Johnson from New Hampshire; Philipp Meyer from Austin; Aviya Kushner from Iowa; and Suze stopped in before her Larry King appearance. Sara Gruen, who'd bought her plane ticket and packed her bag, unfortunately came down with the flu and couldn't make it. We're trying to create an online community of authors and readers with this Web site, but the night of the party was a moment of real (not virtual!) community. Click here to view party pictures.

But even authors who couldn't attend in person were with us, as you'll see in this month's multimedia feature: we debuted our "I Am Spiegel & Grau" video at our party but it's up in perpetuity on our site. The message of the video is clear: Our authors are what make us possible; they inspire us daily. We're glad to have the opportunity to introduce you to some of them now.

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