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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.

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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

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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.

Praise for Foghorn: The Nearly True Story of a Small Publishing Empire

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HISTORICAL FICTION | $18
Trade Paper | 5.315” x 8.465”

ISBN: 978-1-7367954-2-2
Pub Date: 8/08/2023

The Bereaved

by Julia Park Tracey

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A Historical Novel about the Orphan Train and the Mothers Left Behind

Based on her research into her grandfather’s past as an adopted child, Julia Park Tracey has created a mesmerizing work of historical fiction illuminating the darkest side of the Orphan Train.

In 1859, women have few rights, even to their own children. When her husband dies and her children become wards of a predator, Martha—bereaved and scared—flees their beloved country home taking the children with her to the squalor of New York City. But as a naive woman alone, preyed on by male employers, she soon finds herself nearly destitute. The Home for the Friendless offers free food, clothing, and schooling to New York’s street kids and Martha secures a place temporarily for her children there.When she returns for them, she discovers that the Society has indentured her two eldest out to work via

the Orphan Train, and has placed her two youngest for adoption. The Society refusing to help and with the Civil War erupting around her, Martha sets out to reclaim each of them.

Here's what Lynn Cullen, author of Mrs. Poe and The Woman with the Cure had to say about The Bereaved:

“I worried about, admired, and grieved with the indominable Martha Lozier, the heroine of Julia Park Tracey’s exquisite novel. With a sharp eye for just the right details, Tracey brings Martha’s harrowing, astonishing, and ultimately heartrending journey to life. This “everyday” mid-19th century American woman is anything but. How right for her story to be told."

Christian Kiefer, author of Phantoms and the newly released ***The Heart of it All*, said:**

"In The Bereaved, Julia Park Tracey reopens America’s wounds in prose that is propulsive and resonant. Martha’s struggles are the stuff of classic literature. Theodore Dreiser comes to mind, but so, too, the fine contemporary novels of Jo Baker and Maggie O’Farrell."