"The status quo is good for the big guys, but when it starts to break down, opportunity is created for small companies like mine. And fortune favors the bold."
By Elly Fishman@Elly33 - Chicago Reader
"I grew up on the east coast but always wanted to make my own way. I didn't want to be part of the herd. I didn't realize how challenging it would be, though, to have a publishing career outside the center. Making a career outside New York has often required pursuing unpredictable paths. By 2003 I'd worked as a publishing professional in Chicago for about 15 years. I'd spent half that time fruitlessly trying to start my own company and had become pretty discouraged. Eventually I figured out that if I kept my costs really low and made my publishing program as tight as it could be, I had a chance to survive beyond the first year. And if I didn't, I'd be about what I was—a fortysomething guy looking for a job.
"When I first started Agate Publishing in spring 2003, I was working out of my basement. I had a cell phone, a laptop, and a DSL line. That was pretty much Agate Publishing. "We originally published African-American fiction and nonfiction and business-related nonfiction. Then in 2006, we bought Surrey Books, a 25-year-old Chicago-based publisher devoted to food, dining, entertaining, and nutrition. We took our original two content areas and created imprints. The African-American imprint is called Bolden, the business-related one is B2. We kept 'Surrey Books' as the name for our food-and-dining imprint.
"Around that same time, some former colleagues of mine from a folded dot-com reached out to me about creating their own content for the schools where they then worked. I saw this as a business opportunity, so we created a new business called ProBooks. ProBooks is essentially a digital content service that creates resources and courses for textbook publishing companies and for-profit education companies.
"We finally moved out of the basement to a leafy corner in south Evanston in May 2010. This was just in time for a significant growth spurt in the company. At the time we had four staff members, and now we have 17.
"We've also created two new imprints.
Full story at Chicago Reader