PW Sales Rep of the Year 2026: Nic DuFort
For Nic DuFort, a rep at Penguin Random House and this year’s Sales Rep of the Year, the job is all about making connections—with stores, booksellers, and readers.
“It’s the people that keep me coming back,” she says.”Being a rep is relationship-based, and independent booksellers are so dedicated to their communities. You really can make a difference in this world we find ourselves in.”
DuFort, whose territory spans Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas, knows something about bookselling. Back in 2008, she was working as a Barnes & Noble manager in Washington, D.C., when a Random House sales rep recruited her to represent Random House Children’s Books. She spent 14 years specializing in children’s lists, then took on the catalogs of Penguin Random House Publisher Service’s third-party independent publishing houses.
“Four years ago, we created a new sales group for our client division, so I rep all of the client independent publishers that we do sales and distribution for,” DuFort says. “It’s been a big learning curve and a big learning joy—the acquisitions that come through the independent presses are so impressive.”
Her early campaigns included a push for Mi’kmaq author Amanda Peters’s 2023 debut novel from Catapult, The Berry Pickers. “We were a fairly new sales group, and we very quickly jumped behind it,” DuFort says, noting that Peters’s The Birthing Tree will be published by Catapult this September. “She’s been a big discovery. I would also mention The Lilac People by Milo Todd, which taught me a lot of our history—it’s tough, but it’s good.” The 2025 novel, published by Counterpoint, is a saga of queer and trans people during the Holocaust.
“I’m always excited to make connections” between indie authors, booksellers, and publishers, says DuFort, who organized a livestream event with Todd for the Mountain Pride Book Club at Colorado’s Bookworm of Edwards. “Hearing an author speak is so impactful,” she says, recalling how Todd learned to translate German as part of his research. “Those background nuggets are so much fun.”
In nominating DuFort for sales rep of the year, Alix Teague, a buyer and event manager at Bookworm of Edwards, wrote, “She takes time to highlight authors from or living in her region. This saves me, and other regional booksellers from small and rural bookstores, so much time. She also calls out unique marketing opportunities like exclusive preorder campaigns and display contests.”
Kai Burner, another buyer at Bookworm of Edwards, who also nominated DuFort, agrees, writing that she is “devoted, caring, passionate, and intensely capable,” plus “proactive about reaching out. We’ve dubbed the PRH mailings ‘Nic Mail,’ and it improves everyone’s day when they arrive.”
DuFort loves finding the perfect fit for local and specialty titles, whether that means a Shambhala title for Boulder Bookstore in Boulder, Colo., or something spooky for Murder by the Book in Houston. “I just helped Nowhere Bookshop in San Antonio, Tex. run a preorder campaign for Be Your Own Bestie by Misha Brown,” she says. “It was a little out of the ordinary for them, and we had to cut off the preorders, it went so well.” Published by Hay House, Brown is an Austin, Tex.-based author, and Texans snapped up his self-care advice. “Sometimes I take my chance,” DuFort says.
Izzy Mumm, events and marketing manager for Off the Beaten Path Bookstore in Steamboat Springs, Colo., appreciates those insider tips. “She gets to know the booksellers and all their weird tastes, because she knows that booksellers will find the one to six other folks who will also love that weird book,” Mumm wrote when nominating DuFort, adding that the sales rep “wants to know how moving a table increased sales” and “how the heck this one store sold the most copies of that one book.”
DuFort says that in addition to the pleasure of connecting with people and readers, one of the job’s perks is the thrill of getting a first peek at new titles. “We’re some of the first who get to read things,” she says, “and there’s always the discovery of the book, right?”