Your Business is an independent literary publisher founded in Brooklyn in 2014. We publish eleven titles a year on a deliberately small, slowly growing list. We have eleven full-time staff. We have never taken venture funding. We do not plan to.
When I started Your Business in 2014, in the front room of an apartment that I could not afford and would lose three years later, the working assumption among everyone I knew in publishing was that a small house would not last. The math, I was told, didn't work. The wholesale terms wouldn't allow it. The audience wasn't there. The audience that was there couldn't be reached. The reach, even if you reached it, wouldn't pay.
Twelve years later, the math has done what it does. We have ninety-seven titles in print. We have a parlor floor in Carroll Gardens that we own. We have eleven full-time people, all of whom have health insurance. We acquire eleven new books a year and we keep almost all of our backlist available, because that's the whole reason for being a press: to keep books in print.
What I did not understand in 2014 — and what I want to say plainly here — is that the smallness of a press is not a weakness to be defended against. It is the entire competitive position. The reason we can edit a manuscript for two years is because we are small. The reason we can sew the boards by hand is because we are small. The reason an author can call us at 7 a.m. on a Tuesday and reach a person they know is because we are small.
The thing we have to keep deciding, every year, is to stay that way. We will. The list will get a little better. The shop in Hudson will run a little longer. The Press Box will continue to ship four times a year, on time, in cotton paper, from our front door.
Thank you for reading our books. Thank you for telling other people about them. Thank you for buying them from your local bookshop, where the margin is better for everyone. We will keep making them as long as you'll keep reading them.
Clary publishes Six Apartments by H. Marolt, a 96-page essay collection set in metal type at a Brooklyn shop, in a print run of 600. It is sold at one bookstore. It sells out in eleven days.
We move our type-setting and letterpress work to a small shop in Hudson, NY, run by Devon Park. Theodore Hawes joins as senior fiction editor. The first novel — The Postman's Census — appears that fall.
We launch the quarterly subscription with 184 founding subscribers. The first box includes three Clary titles and one chapbook from a writer who would publish her first novel with us four years later.
We buy the parlor floor of a brownstone in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, and move every part of the press except the type-setting work into one building. The cat, who is a different cat than the one who would arrive in 2024, arrives.
For our tenth-anniversary list, we begin reissuing out-of-print midcentury essay collections by women writers who deserve to be in print. The first is Marisol Reyes's What the House Knew, originally published in 1968.
Three new titles, one reissue, the next Press Box ships May 18. We are reading roughly 2,400 unsolicited submissions a year and writing a personal reply to each. We have no plans to grow beyond eleven titles per year.
We read year-round. We read everything ourselves. We respond to every submission, signed by the editor who read it, usually within twelve to eighteen weeks. We do not require an agent. We do not require an MFA. We do require that you have read at least two books on our list before you write to us.
We are looking for: novels, essay collections, short story collections, novellas, translations from any language. We are not looking for: poetry collections (we publish two a year, both from inside the house), memoir, self-help, business books, or anything by a publicly-traded company.
Open the submission form →For anything that doesn't fit a category below — usually a thoughtful question, a corrected typo, or a found copy of a book we lost track of.
For interview requests, festival invitations, the press kit, and review copies. Marisol replies within a week.
For booksellers, libraries, distributors, and trade educators. We sell direct, with proper trade terms, and we ship from Brooklyn.
For Press Box address changes, missed boxes, gifting questions, and cancellations. Hassan replies usually within a day.
For questions about the submissions process. (Manuscripts go through the form on submissions.yourbusiness.com — not this address.)
We're a working office, not a shop. But for journalists, authors, and the rare quiet visitor, we're at 318 Carroll Street, parlor floor, Brooklyn.