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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 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
“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
