About Blue Ear Books

Blue Ear Books publishes selected new and reprinted nonfiction books of particular global or topical interest, with a special interest in personal accounts by military veterans. Our ethos is hospitable, driven by the specific interests and priorities of the authors we publish, yet at the same time selective and rigorous in maintaining high standards in editing as well as book design and production.

How and, more to the point, why Blue Ear Books came into being is a long but instructive story. In the 1990s and early 2000s I found myself ill served, as an ambitious young author, by the business side of the publishing industry as it was traditionally structured. I also felt that the industry’s gatekeepers, especially in the United States, lacked sufficient editorial imagination to publish much-needed books on international and global subjects. This myopia was exemplified by the literary agent I told, circa 1993, that, since I was going to be based in Bangkok as a journalist, I wanted to travel around Vietnam and write a book about what I saw and learned there. Such a book might be published to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, I suggested. The agent replied that he didn’t mind if I gave it a try, but I should be warned that American readers had little interest in “foreign topics, especially non-European topics.” I never wrote that book. I wish I had, because it would have proved a point.

Similarly, another agent told me, in January 1995 – only a couple of months after the U.S.-led invasion of Haiti, following a horrific long-drawn-out crisis in that country – that “people’s interest in Haiti has peaked.” (By “people” I took her to mean notionally book-buying middle-class Americans.) Eventually (in 2012) I published that book myself via Blue Ear Books.

The name Blue Ear Books is an homage to Blue Ear (1999-2005), a pioneering online periodical I co-founded, praised at the time by James Fallows as “ambitious” and “innovative.” The original Blue Ear’s aspiration was to explore the potential of the Internet as a publishing medium capable of reaching readers instantly worldwide with minimal distribution costs.

What Blue Ear achieved in its day is most fully expressed in the book 09/11 8:48 a.m., an 80,000-word anthology of writings that I compiled and edited in ten days – the first-ever book published about the events of September 11, 2001. The media critic Jay Rosen of the Department of Journalism at New York University was my de facto co-editor, and the book was brought out – on September 31, 2001 – by BookSurge, a company specializing in then-novel print-on-demand (POD) technology. I had met BookSurge’s executives earlier that year at an industry conference in Brooklyn, and they asked me to edit the book on a ridiculous deadline to show “proof of concept” for POD. BookSurge later was bought out by Amazon and merged with CreateSpace, which in turn was merged into Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).

About 09/11 8:48 a.m., John Sutherland wrote in The Guardian:

[Casey and Rosen] have functioned like conductors of an orchestra, blending others’ talents into unity. One is obliged to think analogically, because there has been nothing quite like this before. … The content of the 320-page book (a traditional ink and paper job) is choral. It brings together dozens of witnesses, weaving their voices into a complex narrative. … On one level, 09/11 8.48am looks like a spontaneous reaction of the kind that led bereaved New Yorkers to plaster city walls with posters, advertising missing loved ones or mourning their loss. But this book has been subjected to stringent editing. … It is something complete – more complete (because truer to the event) than if it arrived next Easter.

Since then, modern printing technology and digital communications have made it both possible and necessary to write, publish, and promote books in new ways. Books that would not have been commercially viable in the past can now be made available much more efficiently and inexpensively. At the same time, the writing and publishing of books is inherently not primarily a commercial business, but rather a set of mission-driven cultural vocations. As the legendary editor Jason Epstein argued in an influential series of lectures at the New York Public Library in 1999:

Trade book publishing is by nature a cottage industry, decentralized, improvisational, personal; best performed by small groups of like-minded people, devoted to their craft, jealous of their autonomy, sensitive to the needs of writers and to the diverse interests of readers. If money were their primary goal these people would probably have chosen other careers. They might, for example, have become literary agents. … But most publishers and editors I have known prefer to think of themselves, as I do, as devotees of a craft whose reward is the work itself and not its cash value.

There is never any better salesperson for any book than its author; thus marketing of a book needs to be driven by its author. Blue Ear Books provides a community and an infrastructure of support, but the business side of every book should be controlled and led primarily by its author. This principle is reflected in the business model of Blue Ear Books itself, in which – most of the time, and at my discretion – authors bear responsibility for publishing costs and logistics and, by the same token, also reap the lion’s share of the financial upside after publication. The main costs of book publishing are:

• editing
• cover design and art
• page (interior) design
• printing

Blue Ear Books arranges for these tasks to be done, on an agreed schedule and to high standards of quality. I edit most Blue Ear Books books, hired personally by each author on a negotiable basis, depending on the scope of the work needed. Other editors are also available. We take care to pair an appropriate editor with each book and author. Decisions on both the specifications and the schedule of design work are made jointly by the authors and me as publisher.

If you are, or want to be, an author and would like your book to be considered for publication by Blue Ear Books, I’d be glad to hear from you.

Ethan Casey

Publisher, Blue Ear Books

November 7, 2023