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About 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 to 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. She lives in California.
FICTION | $20
Trade Paper | 5.315” x 8.465”
ISBN: 9781960573926
Pub Date: 4/1/2025
Foghorn: The Nearly True Story of a Small Publishing Empire
by Vicki DeArmon
Get it wherever great books are sold
The heyday of small press publishing in San Francisco lives again
This memoir that reads like fiction recounts the never-before-told story of the heyday of small presses in the 1980s and 1990s in San Francisco when Bay Area presses—armed with arrogance and personal computers—took the publishing field. This is the story of one of those presses and its intrepid publisher, Vicki Morgan (DeArmon).
At Foghorn Press, Vicki was 25, young, brash, and ambitious. She quixotically built a book publishing company from scratch with her eccentric brother to help with no book publishing experience but fueled by 100-hour work weeks, cheap beer, and irrepressible belly laughs. Over 13 years, they assembled a cast of often preposterous authors and resistant staff while outlasting a drunken ex-husband, a con artist, inscrutable distributors, a fleet of good ol’ boys, terrible cash flow, and their own differing aspirations. Books were brought to market and miraculously sold from their offices in the Boiler Room until Foghorn became a resounding success with sales, media, and acclaim. But of course, the story doesn’t end there.
Praise for Foghorn: The Nearly True Story of a Small Publishing Empire
“Packed with heart, humor, and hard-earned wisdom, it’s a story you won’t want to put down—or see end.”
—Nina Schuyler, award-winning author of In This Ravishing World
“Foghorn is a beautifully written time capsule of a book. It captures a bygone era in publishing and a heady chapter in a young woman’s life.”
—Julie Checkoway, author of The Three-Year Swim Club
“This is so well told and personal that every step along the way is both entertaining and heart felt. I was mesmerized and deeply engaged. A book not to be missed for many reasons, not the least about what it takes to run a publishing company from ground zero.”
—Sheryl Cotleur, Buyer, Copperfield’s Books
