What a publishing house is for

People who know my background ask the same fair question. You had a finished book and the means to print it. Why go to the trouble of building a publishing house around it? The honest answer is that I have spent my life watching what happens to work that is made carefully versus work that is just made, and I wanted the first kind. A house is the difference.

Self-publishing is a fine tool, and I hold nothing against it. But it puts one person in every chair — author, editor, designer, and final judge — and a person grading his own work tends to grade gently. I did not want to grade my own work gently. I wanted a standard outside myself that the book had to meet before it earned a spine. That is the first thing a house is for: it is a place where the standard lives somewhere other than the author's pride.

A house is a place where the standard lives somewhere other than the author's own pride.

The second thing is permanence. A house keeps a backlist. It keeps a book in print, keeps the files, keeps the rights organized, keeps the thing alive after the launch noise fades and the algorithm moves on. I have advised enough family businesses to know the difference between a thing built for a season and a thing built to be handed down. I wanted Cordis House to be the second kind — an institution that outlasts any single book, including mine.

The third thing is the editorial office itself. A house is not only a printer with a logo. It is a small standing body of people who read, argue, cut, and decide — and who can do that for the next author as readily as for the founder. The whole point is that the list is edited to one standard, not to one ego. When the second author arrives, and the tenth, I want them met by a house, not by a man.

So I built the house first and published the book second, which is the slower order and, I am convinced, the right one. Cordis House exists so that the books made under its name are held to something — and so that the working families they are made for can trust the name on the spine.