About Us

The Short Version

Casperian Books LLC is a small, independent company that publishes fiction.

The Slightly Longer Version

Casperian Books LLC is a single-member limited liability company that publishes fiction and operates out of a chaotic home office with some help from the other occupants of the house and a few hearty volunteers. Realistically, that means that Constance reads manuscripts and writes copy, Tenant B acts as a reader/researcher/PO-box-emptier, Casper provides valuable criticism and order fulfillment services when I travel, and the perma-puppy warms our feet while we are reading.

How It Happened

I had just started looking for an agent/publisher for my novel Mouth of the Lion, which was never going to be an easy sell, when the general brouhaha over a certain Oprah-featured "memoir" started. With so much negative publicity surrounding a book about addiction, I figured it would be even more difficult to find a publisher willing to pick up a novel that has addiction as one of its central themes and started considering different approaches.

A few weeks later, I read this article about self-publishing in the Guardian, started poking around on one or two of the websites mentioned, and reacquainted myself with digital printing technology after a lengthy absence from the print production world.

In the process of doing so, I realized two things: firstly, digital printing has come a long way and is finally in a position where it is both economically and aesthetically feasible as an alternative to offset printing. Secondly, while on a conceptual level I am a great proponent of any kind of guerilla movement amongst creative types, none of the sites I visited presented a business model that truly merged the best features of digital on-demand printing and independent publishing into a package that appealed to me. So I decided that the world really needed yet another small press.