Tomorrow, my novel is officially on sale. The Other Beautiful People: A workplace love story. Or, at least, that’s the elevator pitch. But it’s much more than that. At its heart, it’s about the tension between work and family, especially for women who are not, and have never been, traditional. I suspect now that Jaynie Royal, my editor and the publisher/owner behind Regal House Publishing, which is publishing my novel, could easily relate.

Established in 2014 and based in Raleigh, North Carolina, Regal House has amassed quite a track record in publishing writers from the DMV, and I wondered why. What makes the region special for this publisher?

The truth is, I almost missed the opportunity to be published with Regal House at all. They award the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction, won in 2020 by Martha Anne Toll for her intensely evocative Three Muses. I submitted my own finely crafted novel in 2022. No win. However, in a moment of writerly despair, I didn’t look at the email attached to my Submittable account for at least a month. When I did, there was a message from Regal House. They wanted me to submit The Other Beautiful People via their regular channels for consideration. (Regal House accepts unagented novels.) So off it went, and today, I have it in my hands — a beautiful thing.

And now, it’s time to give the woman behind Regal House — which was named Foreword Reviews’ 2021 independent publisher of the year — her close-up.

Regal House Publishing is a woman-owned-and-run powerhouse of an independent press. What was your vision when you launched it in 2014, and how has it evolved?

Great question! I was an author, actually, before I became a publisher. So I founded the press with the mandate to form a publishing house that authors would want to be a part of, one that emphasized community and literary citizenship, where authors have the broader support of like-minded literary fellows when it comes to the marketing effort in the brick-and-mortar space, as well as online (which has only become harder over the intervening years). I wanted to form a press that prioritizes transparency and clarity, where authors are welcomed in collaborative partnership, and where works of finely crafted literary merit are elevated and supported.

These precepts still hold true today, and they govern our day-to-day operations, as well as the manner in which we grow. We were delighted to be named independent publisher of the year by Foreword Reviews in 2021, and our effort since has been to continue to deserve that accolade. The manner in which the press has evolved since its beginning is really in regard to the increasing scope of reach and the focus on domestic and international relationship-building to further subsidiary-rights opportunities for our catalog.

We have a distribution partnership with the fabulous folks at IPG, who distribute our catalog domestically and internationally. We attend the Frankfurt Book Fair and the Bologna Book Fair annually; we are partnered with a number of rights agencies (both domestic and international), who sell our titles to audiobook producers, as well as to international translation; we have successfully sold a number of titles to translation, and we have acquired titles ourselves for translation to the U.S. market. We are partnered with Gotham Group, [which represents] our catalog to film and TV. So, our scope of interest has, indeed, expanded from the domestic market to the international one, with a strategic eye to growing subsidiary-rights opportunities.  

Regal House publishes writers from around the country, but in recent years, you’ve signed with or published many writers from the DC area. Just to name a few, in no particular order: Martha Anne Toll, Laura Scalzo, David Ebenbach, Tamar Shapiro, Margaret Hutton, and Mimi Herman, and (with forthcoming books) Alice Stephens, Rachel Coonce, and Norah Vawter. Is there something in the water here?

It is interesting how we acquire titles from regional pockets of the country in this regard. I think it speaks to cities that have vibrant literary communities, where independent bookstores abound, where book clubs are prolific, where authors tend to build community in support of one another. I am always delighted to acquire titles from authors who will come into the RHP community with that local support from fellow Regal House authors. This is so important, as it not only allows that in-person networking on a local level, but it often will provide each author, upon the release of their book, with a friendly face in the crowd at a subsequent bookstore event.

We are publishing over 50 titles a year at present, so invariably, as we acquire for each frontlist season, we are building author communities on a local level across the country (with over 400 authors already in the RHP family). This is particularly exciting because our strong focus on community means that authors based in New York, for example, will have fellow Regal House authors in San Francisco, Seattle, or Miami, authors with whom they can connect and network not only in the digital marketing space but also to facilitate events at brick-and-mortar booksellers in joint regional book tours. So, that extension of community from the local to the national level is really exciting to see.

What’s one thing you want writers and/or their agents interested in submitting to Regal House to keep in mind? 

First and foremost, we seek to publish works of finely crafted literary merit. We accept submissions directly from authors, as well as from literary agents. While we publish titles across a variety of genres, we are interested specifically in character-driven works that tend toward the literary, works that speak meaningfully to this ongoing conversation we have with one another about what it means to be human in this increasingly complicated world. We are looking for authors who are also generous literary citizens, who are excited to contribute to our community, as well as benefit from it. We are looking for authors who are prepared to work hard to build regional buzz for their novel and who will support our fabulous independent booksellers in their promotional efforts. 

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The Other Beautiful People goes on sale tomorrow, June 2nd! Beautiful readers, I’ll be at Politics and Prose that evening at 7 p.m., in conversation with novelist Laura Scalzo. If you can’t make it for opening night, I’ll also be talking/signing at several venues around the DC area in June and working hard to build buzz (as they say in the movie business) via word of mouth. Find a list of upcoming events here.

Caroline Bock writes stories — from micros to novels. She is the author of the novel The Other Beautiful People, forthcoming from Regal House Publishing. A graduate of Syracuse University, she studied creative writing with Raymond Carver and poetry with Jack Gilbert and Tess Gallagher. In 2011, after a 20-year career as a cable television executive, she earned an MFA in fiction from the City College of New York. She has short fiction forthcoming in the Hopkins Review. She is the co-president and prose editor at the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. She lives in Maryland with her family.