Behind the Books

Hello, Friend! This is Nick Courtright, Founder and Executive Editor of Atmosphere Press. For those who don’t know me, I was an author and college literature professor who founded Atmosphere by accident back in 2015. By accident? A poet I was editing needed help publishing his book, so I invented a publishing company to get his book out there. Who knew that that would be the first of what is now more than 1000 books published?

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I’ve historically been more behind-the-scenes than someone who wanted a public persona, but I think it’s important for there to be a face to Atmosphere, so you can know a bit more about who we are and why we do things the way we do. So consider these messages from me your own little sneak peek into how a press runs, how we make decisions, and really, why we’re the type of people you might want to work with to bring your book to life.

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Over the coming months I’ll pull back the curtain on everything from our selection process to how I stumbled into the best Art Director in the business to why it’s so important that our staff is 60% women. I’ll tell you about mistakes we’ve made over the years, some of our greatest author successes, and why I think AI means sharing our human stories is more important than ever.

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When I founded Atmosphere, one of our 5 first principles was Transparency. As the only significant publisher with a fully public Author Contract, this is a key part of our identity. And now I want this little corner of the internet to be an extension of that. So keep an eye out, and in the meantime, all well wishes from me to you!

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All best,

Nick