The Beginning.

So that’s it? That’s what we’ve been doing for the last nine months? Setting up a publishing company?

It started out with a decision to produce our own books and grew from there. We were a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, and the traditional publishing industry seemed to have collapsed.

We’d been resisting the idea of self-publishing for years. Without gatekeepers, how were we to know our books were any good? And how would we sell them without annoying our friends on Facebook?

But doing it together would make all the difference. We could use the same resources, promote each other, even give ourselves a cool name.

And by now, we’d had enough feedback from industry professionals. We knew we wrote well and our stories were good. With the right editing and design, we could produce books of the quality you’d expect from a traditional publisher. But we’d do everything online. Publishing was going that way anyway, and we were in the middle of COVID.

And then Sue Barrow joined us with her young adult thriller, SOLD, and everything changed. A previously published author was trusting us with her book. The subject matter alone - child trafficking - demanded we did a good job.

SOLD is a standalone title aimed at people who are usually too young to have credit cards and buy online. Sue already speaks about child trafficking in schools and at other venues. She needed books to sell at these events. And we wanted to license SOLD to libraries. Everything pointed to a traditional print run and the marketing tactics to go with it.

Cadence had already become bigger than ourselves. We just needed the courage to run with it.