An independent publisher, built deliberately.

I have four nephews. The oldest is not yet five.

Their dad works with his hands. So did mine. I grew up in a family HVAC business, where dinner conversation was about trucks, schedules, and who called back. For the past 15 years I have advised the owners of businesses like that one, families who built something real and then had to decide what happens to it next.

When I went looking for a picture book about what their dad does, I could not find one. There are shelves of books about firefighters and astronauts. There is almost nothing about the plumber, the carpenter, the electrician, the roofer, the HVAC tech, and the mason. The six trades that build and keep the house a kid sleeps in.

So I wrote one. My brother-in-law is a roofer, and he is the roofer in the book.

Then I went looking for a publisher. For a first-time author with a picture book about blue-collar work, the honest timeline is one to two years of queries, most of them never answered. I did not want to spend two years waiting for permission to give my nephews a book. So I printed it myself.

What I learned in that first year was not really about my book. It was that every author who tries this hits the same walls, alone, and pays for the same expensive lessons from scratch. The walls are not creative ones. They are structural, they are knowable, and somebody should write them down.

That is what this is. A small publisher that makes a few books a year, and publishes what it learns while making them.

What we learned the hard way →   How this book got made →

Cordis House publishes books for working families and the businesses they build: picture books for the children who wait for the sound of the truck, and business books for the owners of the companies those families work in.

The list is small on purpose. Every title is edited by the founder, made to one standard, and built for the long shelf rather than the season.

The house is one person. That is a choice, not a stage it is passing through. A house this size can say no, take its time, and stand behind every page it prints.

Read the founding letter →   How a book gets made here →