All this week leading into the new year I am comparing the annual Outskirts Press holiday luncheon pictures of year’s past as a sort of short-form retrospective of the folks at Outskirts Press who make thousands upon thousands of authors’ dreams come true every year. Of course, it should be noted that these pictures never offer a comprehensive glance of ALL the talented editors, illustrators, formatters, cover designers, and other folks involved with Outskirts Press year in and year out; if it did, these photographs would feature more than 100 people each year. With what many authors would call “round the clock” support, and with a production pipeline containing between 300-500 titles at any given time, you can imagine the difficulty inherent in even getting 20 people together during a work day all at once. Plus, we have people who work across the country, which makes it even harder to coordinate get-togethers like this one:
We did better in 2009 with our largest gathering to date. Yes, you’ll recognize many of the same people from 2012, 2011, and 2010, including from the back row: Caroline, Ellen, Cindy, Patrick, Shirley, Donna; Middle row: Tony, Tanya, and the front row: Jeanine, Lynn, Brent, and Lora. Other faces you see here will become more and more familiar as we keep going back in time during this week-long self-publishing retrospective…
I should also mention that 2009 was the year we published our 5,000th book. You may remember that we published our 10,000th book in 2012. We started publishing books in 2003 (I started the company in 2002 but we didn’t publish other books or incorporate until 2003). So in other words, it took the first 7 years to publish our first 5000 books and only the past 3 years to publish our second 5000 books. That is an explosion of growth! To say that we were (and still are) in the midst of a self-publishing revolution (and revelation) would be an understatement.
President of Outskirts Press 