PUBLISHERS OF SECOND ACTS

Devil’s Party Press LLC began because we believed that there should be someone publishing older writers who had never been published before. We believe that the older you get, the better your stories get, and the better you become at telling a story.

We believe in second acts.

All of us here have done other things when what we really wanted to do was write. And when you write, what you want the most is to be read. We know how that feels, and we want to read your stories, and poems, and help you share them with the world.

We believe in second acts, late bloomers, and aging like a fine wine. We believe in you.

By now you may be thinking,

“That’s great for authors, but why should I, a reader, choose  your books?”

Here’s why . . .

We believe that publishers have an obligation to provide readers with something more than than the latest cookie-cutter bestseller from Danielle Steele, Tom Clancy, or other same-old-same-old fiction.

We believe that intelligent readers like you are interested in hearing what fresh literary voices– whose sole agenda is to tell entertaining stories–have to say.

We believe that you have a limited amount of reading time on any given day, and we’d like to help you fill it with imaginative, compelling tales.

A POSTSCRIPT

We’re often asked peculiar questions about our company name. “Have we sworn allegiance to The Devil? Are we Satanists with a penchant for publishing?” While answering in the affirmative to either question might make for a more interesting company history, the answer to both questions is, of course, “No.”

It happens that our press began life in Milton, Delaware,  a former shipbuilding town originally known as Head of the Broadkill. The town was renamed Milton in 1807 in honor of the English poet, John Milton. It’s a lovely, little town that you’ve likely never visited.

As we were seeking inspiration and a company name that would resonate with us, we did a bit of research on John Milton. It was soon brought to our attention that author William Blake once commented that John Milton was of “the Devil’s party.” (Blake’s comment was, in fact, a reference to the fact that Milton’s artistic and innovative writing, particularly in Paradise Lost, was devised to invoke political and ideological change.) Though we are no longer in Milton, the idea of the Devil’s party, as Blake meant it, touched a chord with us, as we hope to change the reading landscape in favor of late-bloomer scallywags like ourselves, and the rest, as they say, is history.