Introducing The Stable Book Group

Answering questions about the latest and greatest venture in indie publishing

This week, it was announced in Publishers Weekly that She Writes Press (the hybrid publishing company I cofounded with my friend and colleague Kamy Wicoff in 2012) will be joining forces with The Stable Book Group.

This is the second time in its 13-year history that She Writes Press is merging with another company. In 2014, Kamy and I partnered with Crystal Patriarche, CEO of SparkPoint Studio and founder of SparkPress, which was how I became the publisher of two imprints.

Just as was the case then, this new collaboration is a pivot toward growth and opportunity. Since I write about publishing here, and because I have a lot of authors with more questions, I’m taking this opportunity to get ahead of what curious minds might want to know about this new endeavor.

What’s a Book Group?
A book group, also known as a publishing group, is a group of publishers who join forces either as a collective or as a result of corporate consolidation (mergers/acquisitions). During my time at Seal Press, we operated under two different book groups. When I was hired in 2004, the imprint was housed under The Avalon Publishing Group; later, in 2007, Seal Press was acquired by The Perseus Books Group. Random House Publishing Group is the largest, if not the largest, existing book group with 18 imprints housed under it.

Who are The Stable’s founding team?
I’m joining The Stable as COO alongside The Stable’s founders, Chris Gruener (CEO) and Keith Riegert (President). Chris is the former VP of business development at Abrams Books and CEO and publisher of Cameron + Company and Keith is the current CEO of Ulysses. Vimbly Group CEO Sam Lundin is our CSO, and Chris Yeung, Vimbly founder and CTO at Perfect Bound (which is cofounded by Keith), is our CTO. The five of us make up the executive team, and you can read our bios and see what we look like here.

What are the six founding imprints of The Stable?
She Writes Press, Trafalgar Square Books, Ulysses Press, and VeloPress—with the newly established Galpón Press (founded by Michael Jacobs, retired CEO of Abrams Books), coming in as a client, and Mountain Gazette Books, as a partner.

What’s the backstory of the executive team coming into The Stable?
I know Keith and Chris because we all have deep California publishing roots, we’ve all been doing this more or less for the same number of years, and we all started in publishing very young. We have a shared ethos and west coast sensibility, and we’ve run in the same publishing circles for years. Ulysses was founded by Keith’s parents, Ray Riegert and Leslie Henriques, in 1983 out of the front bedroom of their Berkeley home. Chris’s wife’s grandfather, Robert Cameron, was the founder of Cameron + Company, originally established in 1964. Chris and Nina ran the company together out of Petaluma, California, until it was acquired by Abrams Books in 2020. A perfect storm of events—Keith’s cofounding of Perfect Bound, Chris’s leaving Abrams, Chris and Keith’s vision for growth in a very tough market, and Keith supporting me in SWP’s transition to Simon & Schuster for distribution—led to us coming together, and I can’t wait to see where The Stable will go from here.

What’s the vision for Stable’s future?
The Stable Book Group is looking for other publishers to fill its stalls. 😊 The publishers that join The Stable in the future will share our indie spirit and want to join a hard-working team that’s excited about the future of indie publishing.

What’s The Stable’s connection to Simon & Schuster?
Simon & Schuster is or will be the distribution partner for all of the imprints under The Stable Book Group.

What’s The Stable’s connection to Perfect Bound?
Keith is the cofounder and CEO of Perfect Bound, and Chris Yeung is its CTO. Perfect Bound will serve as the title management system for the imprints under The Stable, which means a central database for tracking metadata, print runs, subrights, and much more.

Why is it called “The Stable”?
Chris tells me that his wife Nina came up with this name, and I can’t wait to see her to tell her how much I love it. In book publishing, all houses refer to their teams as “stables.” We have a “stable of editors” and a “stable of designers.” In addition to that, there’s the Western sensibility of the name, plus the fact that many imprints will be housed under The Stable, including Trafalgar Square Books (see below), which is a happy coincidence more than a designed plan. On a word level, we love the allusion to stability (as we are a very stable team) and the many many horse puns at our disposal, which get dropped into meetings on the regular.

Where does hybrid publishing fit in?
Notably and important to me, the team at The Stable doesn’t see any difference or barriers when it comes to hybrid-published books. Our shared value is in producing great books—the end. As I’ve written about recently, what matters is the quality of the books, first and foremost, and then the distribution relationship. Simon & Schuster’s sales team doesn’t care who’s financing the book or what the back end of the royalties look like. A sale is a sale—and their job is to go get as many as they can. For The Stable, hybrid publishing allows us to diversify what we do. We are launching Stable Studios, which will offer hybrid, design, and custom production services. (Iain Morris, former creative director of entertainment and licensing at Abrams, will serve as VP and creative director of that division.)

What’s the upshot of this move for She Writes Press?
For me, it’s always been about what’s the best next thing for my authors. As a hybrid publisher, SWP has been an underdog from its inception. In the beginning, all I did was fight for legitimacy and equal treatment. Over time, I relaxed into things because the books we publish speak for themselves, and because our sales gave us all the legitimacy we needed. But still, we’re small, and the appeal of partnering to gain some of the operations support from a bigger team has always been appealing. This partnership with Chris and Keith is that, plus thought partnership, which I’ve been craving the bigger SWP gets. Joining The Stable is about a shared vision for our future, which honors the traditions of indie publishing while staying flexible and open to the inevitable changes this industry will thrust upon all of us. Traditional publishing can be rigid, slow to embrace change, and stuck in its ways. This team is the least rigid group I’ve ever encountered, and I can’t wait to see what we’ll do with the creative engine of our vision for the future plus our very experienced workforce that’s pulling so much talent from across all the imprints.

What will happen to SparkPress and to other authors SparkPress might publish that She Writes Press won’t?
SparkPress will continue to publish books through 2026. We will sell in our front list SparkPress titles as we always do to Simon & Schuster. Nothing will happen to backlist authors. Those books will continue to be for sale and supported by our team internally, and sold by Simon & Schuster. As for the prospect of publishing authors that aren’t an automatic fit for SWP under other hybrid imprints, yes, we want that and we will be looking for other and new hybrid solutions to support different kinds of authors and their books as we grow.

Where does Trafalgar Square Books fall into all this?
Trafalgar Square Books is an incredible equestrian publisher, and so of course they’re the most natural fit for The Stable 🐴. Publisher Caroline Robbins retired not too long ago, and former Managing Director Martha Cook is now the publisher, carrying forward the legacy of this important imprint. TSB was founded in 1985 with the publication of the iconic book Centered Riding, by Sally Swift, which has been published in 16 languages and sold over half a million copies worldwide. Just like the other imprints in The Stable, the independent spirit courses through TSB’s veins.

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Thanks for reading about what’s happening at The Stable Book Group. I’m celebrating this next milestone, and excited for what the future holds for the entire group, and also for hybrid publishing.