SAVE THE DATE for A Publishing Industry Party in San Francisco
Calling all booksellers and publishing professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area– mark your calendars!
Remember the heyday of book publishing when indie booksellers and small presses banded together to start the San Francisco Bay Area Book Festival? Remember when we were young and figuring this publishing thing out? Remember when we used to have parties?
You’re invited to join a publishing industry party celebrating the 1980s and 1990s San Francisco publishing scene and the release of Vicki DeArmon’s memoir Foghorn: The Nearly True Story of a Small Publishing Empire. You might just find yourself in its pages!
Hosted by Sibylline Press and publisher Vicki Morgan DeArmon, join us at San Francisco Presidio on Saturday, April 5th from 2-5pm for an afternoon full of refreshments and festivities!
Stay tuned for more updates!
About Foghorn: The Nearly True Story of a Small Publishing Empire:
The heyday of small press publishing in San Francisco lives again!
This is the never-before-told story of a unique time in San Francisco as well as in book industry history, when Bay Area small presses—armed with arrogance and personal computers—took the publishing field. At Foghorn Press, Vicki Morgan was an ambitious woman publisher, young and brash, coming-of-age while quixotically building a book publishing company from scratch with her eccentric brother to help.
As part of their optimistic Morgan heritage, the siblings strive to grow Foghorn Press with no capital, 100-hour work weeks, cheap beer, irrepressible belly laughs, and no book publishing experience. They assemble a cast of preposterous authors and resistant staff while surviving a drunken ex-husband, a con artist, calculating distributors, a fleet of good ol’ boys, terrible cash flow, and their own differing aspirations. Books are brought to market and miraculously sell from their offices in the Boiler Room. Foghorn is soon a resounding success with sales, media, acclaim. But in the end, there are costs, to relationships, to family, and maybe even to the truth.
About Author Vicki DeArmon:
Vicki DeArmon has been in the book industry for forty years as a respected publisher, bookseller, and innovator. She started her San Francisco publishing company Foghorn Press with a small advance on her credit card when she was twenty-five, growing it into a $2 million enterprise before selling it fourteen years later. She worked as the marketing and events director at Copperfield’s Books for eight years and as consultant to California’s independent bookstores. She’s also a writer whose short stories and essays have won awards and appeared online and in print. Vicki is one of the founders of Sibylline Press and serves as its publisher.
