books by s.r.

Happy Saturday, everyone! I hope your weekend is off to a fabulous start! 🙂

I took a mini blog hiatus for a couple weeks to get some writing done (yay!) and now I’m back with some fun news — our publishing company, SR Press, turned one!

It’s crazy to think we started this company a little over a year ago when so much has happened. I thought it might be cool to reflect on the company for its one-year anniversary — how we got started, what our goals are, how we’ve grown in the past year, etc. I hope you enjoy the insights!

My husband (Bryce) and I wanted to start a business together for as long as we’ve been married. It was a discussion we’d have a couple times a year, brainstorming what we might like to do, but we never really came up with something that fit. (I pushed for a bookstore, which would be awesome, but apparently, the first few years of finances on bookstores are too tough for us to swing… *cries* Maybe someday? *winks*)

Then, in March 2021, shortly after we had our daughter, Bryce approached me after getting home from a bachelor party weekend for a friend of his and said, “Hey, I thought of a business idea. What if we expanded SR Press and offered publishing services?”

You guys. The hours upon hours upon hours we discussed this, often late into the night even though we had a two-month-old… *DIES* (Or perhaps that made it better since we were up late to feed her anyways? Hmm…) This was something that we were both on board with, especially with both of us being published authors, and me having the desire to help authors on their publishing journey in any way I could. (That’s one reason why I started my freelance editing services to begin with!) However, there was so much to work out — legal stuff, company processes, narrowing down genre and target audiences, etc. How would formatting be done? Would we partner with a cover designer? (Love how I messaged Dragon Pen Designs about the possibility of collaborating together and not only was she totally in, but as a fellow writer who sent in a submission to the Press shortly after we opened, she’s also one of our authors! How cool is that?)

From there, we launched, creating a new website, updating our editing services, and adding formatting-only packages as well as the publication side of the Press. We thoroughly expected our editing to keep growing and our formatting services to take off, but we were a little nervous about the publishing press’ success. There were already other, more well-known small hybrid presses out there that had at least a couple years of experience on us… Would anyone want us to publish them?

Ironically enough, if you can believe this, we told ourselves we’d give it a year and if the publishing press just didn’t work, we’d quietly shut it down and stick to our editing-only and formatting-only side of the business.

Instead, the publishing side blew up! Interest was through the roof — we signed our first two authors within a month or two of each other and proceeded to have an influx of submissions! We also announced our first anthology and received tons of submissions for that!

In our first year of opening our publishing press, we have signed five authors for a total of fourteen novels and novellas (not all have been announced yet), as well as signed four authors for our anthology, AND we have open submissions for another anthology set to be published this year! Submissions for the press are still rolling in and I’ve requested multiple full manuscripts to read through. We’re hoping to hire a publishing project manager in the near future to come alongside me so we can open more publishing slots each year. We also well-surpassed the number of edits I was able to take on myself, so once I decided to start scaling back on the clients I took to focus on the publishing side of the press and my personal writing, we also hired a team of editors that we are so grateful for!

We’ve grown more in our first year than we dared to imagine, and now we feel like we’re able to start dreaming bigger and bigger as we take SR Press to the next level. 🙂

Over our next year of business, we will be wrapping up series with our first two authors — Antonia Kane and Everly Haywood — and beginning edits with two new authors of ours (announcement soon to come!)! We will be publishing our 4 Seasons-inspired anthology in December of 2022, and one of our new publishing clients might have a book releasing at the beginning of 2023! We also hope to add another editor or two to our team for the edit-only side, as well as hopefully get that publishing project manager to come alongside me. Another thing we are exploring and hoping to try this summer is an internship program. If it goes well, we hope to offer more internship opportunities in the future!

As always, publishing and marketing are ever-changing, so on the back end of things, I personally hope to use Skillshare, conferences/online courses and webinars, a multitude of books, and human resources at my disposal to keep learning and make sure we’re serving our clients to the best of our abilities! 🙂

It’s been a great first year, friends! Thanks so much for being part of it. ❤

If you’d like to find out more about our Publishing or Author Services, please check out our website: SR Press!