We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jamie Ryu a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jamie, appreciate you joining us today. Can you tell us the backstory behind how you came up with the idea?

To really tell the story of Contrarian Publishing, I need to talk about how I fell in love with editing. I learned about the importance of an editor back when I was in middle school. I was the kind of reader who read cover to cover, meaning I read the acknowledgements at the back of every book. And it was not lost on me, even from that age, that books are a collaborative process. While the act of writing may be solitary, publishing is not.

So, I geared my entire high school and college careers toward my goal: become an editor. I was pretty successful in my goals, so successful that I got into NYU and snagged my first internship at a literary agency as a freshman. I kept interning from there, eventually reaching the Big 5 publishing companies, and getting hired at HarperCollins after graduation.

But a pattern emerged. The people in publishing loved books, but they were overworked, underpaid, and quite locked into their roles. I’ve been very creative from a young age, so I know how to do more than edit and project manage; I also knew how to typeset, how to design, how to market, etc. At the same time, I saw a general sentiment that kept new authors in the dark about the publishing industry. The industry is very opaque, and there is a prevalent idea that (for admittedly valid reasons) you should not help authors for free, so newer authors struggle to find their footing.

I left HarperCollins for a myriad for reasons, but when I did leave, my vision was clear: go into business for myself and give authors a clearer path forward. So I started freelancing full-time and opened Contrarian Publishing. Contrarian was not so much something I felt would be a surefire success, but rather it was a risk I was willing to take because I felt so passionate about the mission of the company. We want to work collaboratively with authors and put control back in their hands while still being able to advise as a team of professionals. Our business model is fairly atypical, but we tried to design something that was equitable and fair for all parties involved.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My name is Jamie Ryu. I’m an editor and the founder of Contrarian Publishing, an assisted self-publisher and author-subsidized publisher that helps authors tell the stories they’ve waited their whole lives to tell. I worked at Big 5s like Macmillan and HarperCollins before deciding the leave my full-time role to pursue a new path. I offer editorial services myself, Contrarian Publishing is a publisher as well as a publishing services provider, spanning from editorial to design to typesetting and more.

Contrarian Publishing is an author-subsidized publisher, meaning that authors pay upfront for all our services the way they would if they were self-publishing. But in exchange, in a unique business model, we do not take royalties unless and until authors earn back what they originally paid us from the sale of their work. This allows us to be more accessible for authors, since they really are just paying what it would cost to hire freelancers, and it allows us to give them all the benefit of a publisher.

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

Surprisingly, Threads has been a phenomenal platform for us! I know it’s not the largest or most popular platform, but there is such a robust community of indie authors and book professionals there, that it’s been easy to find our people.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

Above all else, we publish books with a strong editorial vision. As an editor myself, editorial is a crucial step in the publishing process, and we will not publish anything that I am not proud to have my name on. And usually that means editorial is necessary!

Many authors are scared of editorial because they worry that the heart and soul of their project, their core ideas and messaging, will change. With us and with any good editor, that is never the case. We want to do whatever we can to help bring an author’s vision to life while also ensuring that it’s an enjoyable reading experience for the audience.

The biggest honor of my life is when I ask authors to turn in their acknowledgements and I see my name and a message to me tucked away in there. It never, ever gets old. I cry every single time.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.contrarianpublishing.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/contrarianpublishing?igsh=Y2c2bHc4cGI3OGw2&utm_source=qr
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/contrarianpublishing
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/contrarianpublishing
• Twitter: https://x.com/ContrarianPub
• Other: https://www.threads.com/@contrarianpublishing

  https://bsky.app/profile/contrarianpublishing.com

Image Credits

Charles Krause