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, Nic keeps the network and computers in shape, fills orders, and reads manuscripts, Dad keeps links and Internet tools up-to-date, Tenant B provides valuable criticism and order fulfillment services when Nic and I both travel, and Nathan volunteers as an occasional project editor.

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 guerrilla 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.