What is New Salem Books, Publisher of "Zodiac Pets" and "Ring On Deli"?

You may have noticed that I’m publishing my books under the imprint New Salem Books. What is that?

First of all, it’s me. But to say it’s only a self-publisher’s imprint would be misleading. As I explained in the cover-reveal post, I’ve had the firm support of trusted and talented friends on both the editorial and design sides. I didn’t do this alone, or even with stranger-freelancers (a perfectly respectable path, just not the one I took).

Also, New Salem Books is not just a d/b/a for me in the legal sense. Right or wrong, it’s a concept. I’ve tried my best to put that concept into a short sentence that describes my two books while setting them apart from other types of books: New Salem Books publishes comic fiction for democracy’s future.

Whatever that statement’s flaws, it’s a lot better than the first version, “comic fiction on democracy’s crisis”! That made it sound like I’ve been making fun of democracy, or at least of its “crisis.” As if my basic tone toward the project of self-government is scathing, perhaps in the manner of Henry Adams in Democracy: An American Novel (1880). That’s not my intent. I’m for democracy, in that I favor it having a robust future, even if it’s hard to defend its current degraded state. I do satirize that—especially in Zodiac Pets—but in my view the dysfunction mainly results from a deficit, not a surplus, of democratic values and practices.

New Salem Books also evokes the American flavor and content of my writing and its connections to American history, law, culture, and politics, all of which may just be inevitable, given my background and fascinations. It does so by referring to New Salem, Illinois, the now-defunct village where Abraham Lincoln first struck out on his own. (You can visit a recreation of it.)

Here’s a map of Lincoln’s New Salem (don’t ask me why they labelled it Salem):

Despite widespread myths propagated by the lamestream media, “New Salem” does not refer to New Salem, Massachusetts, even though they make this great cider:

Here’s a cut-out from the top of the website that gives a sense of how it ties the books together, with the New Salem map cleverly inserted by Dan Visel, the site’s designer, as a background:

And then the designers at Kirkus Reviews adapted that for this half-page ad, which will go out in July:

The only other NSB trivia I’ll share is the Zodiac Pets lapel pin. There are only four in the world, one each for the members of our team!