38 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ APRIL 6, 2020
Fast-Growing Indie Publishers
Based in Bend, Ore., Blue Star’s core staff of five employees are all 35 years old and
under and work from Los Angeles and Austin. Licalzi attributes a large part of the
company’s early success to its relationship with its authors, whom it considers creative
business partners and friends. “We are very selective about who we collaborate with,”
he says, “and have worked hard to carefully nurture these relationships and get our
authors excited about releasing a series of new titles with us year after year.”
Founded in 1964 by aerial photographer Robert Cameron, Cameron + Company
was acquired in 2009 by his granddaughter Nina Gruener and her husband Chris
Gruener following Robert’s death. The couple
moved the boutique publisher of photography,
art, food and wine, children’s, and regional
interest books from San Francisco to Petaluma,
Calif. The company has seen its strongest sales
period over the past few years, growing 25%
between 2017 and 2019, led by a particularly good 2019. Chris, who is the publisher,
attributes its recent success to a number of factors.
Cameron’s most important initiatives include the 2016 launch of the Cameron Kids
imprint, which was formed to complement its line of children’s picture books and is
headed by Nina, who is also a children’s author. Cameron Kids publishes picture and
chapter books, and though it began by releasing two books per season, it will release
12 in 2020, Chris says.
A second growth area has been Cameron Studios, which offers custom book, packaging,
and design services for movie studios, video game studios, artists, photographers, and other
publishers. Cameron has also seen solid gains in its Roundtree Press imprint for general
nonfiction. Roundtree is distributed by PGW, and in 2018 Cameron signed with Abrams
for sales and distribution of its Cameron list.
A final contributor to its strong sales last year was the fall release of what Chris says
were two of the biggest books in the publisher’s history: Rick Baker: Metamorphosis, a
$250, slipcased, two-volume set on the Hollywood legend, and the children’s picture
book The President Sang Amazing Grace, which Chris describes as “a lyrical account of
the day President Obama sang with a grieving nation following the 2015 shooting in
a black church in Charleston, S.C.”
Brown Books Publishing Group president
and chief operating officer Tom Reale says the company
was able to overcome sluggish sales to Barnes & Noble to
post its fifth consecutive year of gains and make PW’s fast-
growing list for the third consecutive year. He adds that
offsetting slower sales to B&N were a strong backlist per-
formance, a refocus on online and independent store sales,
the addition of direct sales, and an increase in export sales.
One of Brown Books’ big titles of 2019 was Ed Curtis’s Why Texas: How Business
Discovered the Lone Star State, which features interviews with business leaders describing
why they moved their operations to Texas. “As a Dallas-based publisher, Brown Books’
leadership felt a strong affinity towards publishing this title,” Reale says.
Another Texas-themed book also performed well last year: Hold Texas, Hold the Nation:
Victory or Death, by former congressman and retired Army officer Allen B. West, saw a bump
in sales following West’s announcement that he would enter the race for the chair of the
Texas Republican Party. His follow-up, We Can Overcome: An American Black Conservative
Manifesto, had strong early sales following its publication in February 2020, Reale says.
Brown Books has been adding more titles from military veterans, he explains, noting that
Baghdaddy: How Saddam Hussein Taught Me to Be a Better Father sold well last year.
Brown Books’ children’s list had a solid 2019, as well. Sweet Child Born in California,
the newest volume in Whitney Strauss’s Sweet Child series, sold well, Reale says,Fast-growing
independent
publisher for the
third year in a row!
Made for Me
ISBN-978-1945547690Courageous
People who
Changed the
World
ISBN-978-1945547751Big Book of
Family Games
ISBN-978-1641701334Good Moms
Have Scary
Thoughts
ISBN- 978-1641701303