Brooke Warner Believes in the Individual Story: Reader Turned Editor Says Good Stories Are for Everyone

Brooke Warner doesn’t believe in exclusivity. 

As the publisher of She Writes Press, an award-winning hybrid publisher for women authors, Warner works to publish manuscripts that traditional publishing tends to overlook. She believes traditional major publishing houses have a bad habit of saying no to good ideas, if they come from the “wrong” kind of people. She thinks publishing should be accessible to everyone who has a good story to tell. 

But she didn’t start her career that way. 

In fact, she hadn’t been planning to get into publishing at all. Warner graduated with a degree in international affairs, but as she began looking for work, she didn’t feel that it was a natural fit. As she began exploring her options, though, the idea of book publishing started creeping in. Right out of college, she spent a year traveling in Europe and worked at Shakspeare and Company, an independent bookstore in Paris. But that was only the first sign. 

“I came to books, really, because my mom said, ‘What do you love? If you could do something you loved, what would that be?’ And I said, ‘Read,’” Warner said. “ So many people come to book publishing from having a degree in English, or because they’re writers. I was always a reader. And there were all these little pointers, that were almost like the universe pointing in a certain direction.”

At 23, Warner landed her first entry-level role, at nonprofit California publisher North Atlantic Books. From there, she grew her career in traditional publishing for 13 years, all the way to becoming the executive editor of Seal Press, a women’s letterpress founded in a Seattle garage. She avidly worked on expanding the field for women writers and cultivating marginalized voices like transgender authors. She loved her work.

Then, Seal got acquired. And Warner began to feel disillusioned with her new corporation’s publishing preferences. Books began being scrutinized for the author’s attractiveness and celebrity name value, rather than content.

In a 2017 Tedx talk, she walked through one of the main experiences that flipped the switch for her on traditional publishing. 

One book she had wanted to acquire was by an up-and-coming transgender author. When she pitched it, her publisher told her that the new parent company of the press thought they had published enough of “those kinds of books.” Instead, a few weeks later, she got an offer from an author who had “all the right bells and whistles.” She was attractive, well-connected, and had a celebrity connection. Warner saw those two projects, juxtaposed, as “symbolic of something much bigger” in how publishing was moving.

“ I came in at such a moment where editorial was really prioritized, and over 13 years, we got deprioritized,” Warner said. “Marketing started to take over the decision-making for acquisitions. It was very frustrating.  These corporate entities buy little, tiny presses that have a certain sensibility and a certain personality, and it was awful. It was really disappointing, and so I realized I just wasn’t happy anymore.” And she began looking for a way out. 

Through an online community for women writers that she had been participating in, she found it. 

Kamy Wicoff, an author and therapist, had founded She Writes in 2009 as a way to help women authors break into and understand the publishing field. Wicoff had begun working with Warner even before Seal was acquired, to put on writing and coaching workshops for the community’s membership. 

“ It was just clear from the beginning that our missions and the things that we cared about and believed in were really aligned,” Wicoff said. “Brooke immediately became a really important part of that community, and had a great, authentic, inspirational voice there. And so when she started to identify some things that she thought needed changing in publishing, she reached out to me.”

In 2012, Warner pitched Wicoff on the idea of She Writes Press, an independent publisher dedicated to women authors. She wanted to model it based on what she loved most about Seal Press, and what she had wanted it to become.

“ When she brought it to me, it resonated from the writer side,” Wicoff said. “ For me as a writer, part of what was really exciting and appealing was that she was really devoted to finding ways to make publishing work better.  The traditional model, while it purported to be a gatekeeper based on the quality of manuscripts, really the gatekeeping was about profit, frankly—which is fine, there’s a real place for that. But I think it left many writers who couldn’t get published in that system feeling as though their work was not worthy of being read. And we both believed that was actually not the case.”

Since its founding, She Writes Press has signed 1,300 authors and published thousands of books across seven genres, a number of which have sold tens of thousands of copies. In 2019, it became the first hybrid publisher to win the Indie Publisher of the Year award by the Independent Book Publishing Professionals Group. In March of last year, it joined the Stable Book Group, an independent press collective, of which Warner now serves as the COO. 

She likes to keep busy outside of publishing, too. Warner regularly coaches authors on writing memoir, one of her favorite genres to read, and cohosts the weekly Memoir Nation podcast.

Warner still thinks corporate publishing has all the same problems. But she understands why that world works the way it does.

“ I don’t begrudge them,” she said. “Obviously, there are editors who work in traditional publishing who are falling in love with the words. But if you go to editorial and you have a really beautiful book and the author is no one, and you just did a similar kind of book last season, it won’t be acquired. It’s still based on connections. I’m not sitting here stewing over it, it’s business. But I think what happens is that books that should be published don’t get an opportunity, and it’s not because of the books, it’s not because they’re not worthy. It’s because the author doesn’t have ‘star power’.” 

Warner came to publishing as a reader. At She Writes Press, she focuses on books that she believes need to be read. 

“ We’re looking for good writing. We’re looking for a good story. And we’re not bound by these pressures,” she said. “Let’s say we did a mother-daughter memoir. [In traditional publishing,] if I had tried to acquire something similar even within one year of that, it would be, ‘Well, we already did a mother-daughter memoir a year ago.’ She Writes’ whole mission is not to be hemmed in in that way. We can publish two mother-daughter memoirs in the same season, because it’s about the writing.”

A large part of why traditional publishing looks for freshness is to maximize the chances of making a profit. She Writes Press is an author-subsidized hybrid publisher, which removes that pressure from the editorial selection process. Authors also have more creative control with She Writes Press. The press will copyright the book in their name, but the authors themselves retain their rights. 

As of January 2026, She Writes Press’ publishing package comes in at $12,000. That covers things like cover design, proofreading, inventory warehousing, and traditional distribution through major publishing house Simon & Schuster, which acts as the press’s sales force. That’s an interesting tension for Warner, who supports everything indie, to think about. 

“ Simon & Schuster is our distributor, and they’re in a lot of ways very independent, and the individuals who work there are awesome,” she said. “But also, they’re backed by private equity. I think we’re in a really challenging environment, because there’s a lot of private equity in the market, and that’s also sometimes how people are surviving. It’s hard. And when I think of an author on Random House, for instance, that individual author is someone who should be supported. Their book should be supported just as much as the next person’s. I think we live in a ridiculously capitalistic society that shoves people who want to do good and independent things into really small corners. To survive, you kind of have to participate in that structure. ”

Just like in her approach to publishing, Warner’s approach to this challenge is to focus on the individuals who work within it. 

“There is no easy answer,” she said. “But in each of those ecosystems, there’s awesome human beings working who care about books.  I worry about a lot of these high level things that are sort of out of my control, and then I try to get grounded and keep going.  By focusing on my authors, and why they’re with She Writes, and doing the best job that we can do for them, and being proud of the work that we’re publishing, and remembering the mission. It’s super gratifying. Publishing is challenging as an industry. But every single author who opens their box of Advance Reader Copies is a reminder that this matters.”