Industry veterans Kristen Gilligan and Len Vlahos, the former co-owners of Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver, have launched a new venture: Left Field Publishing. Left Field will publish both adult and children’s books and, Gilligan and Vlahos emphasize, are committed to acquiring only those books that the two are passionate about. Left Field will be distributed by IPG.
According to its mission statement, Left Field is committed to publishing “powerful, beautifully-told stories that fall outside the traditional lines.” It will focus on authors “whose work blends genres, expands minds, and invites conversation.” Gilligan added in an email to PW that “instead of asking authors to squeeze into a narrow lane, we meet the work where it lives and help it thrive in the marketplace.”
Vlahos added, “We’re drawn to books that zig when the market expects them to zag, stories that don’t fit neatly into one category, authors who color outside the lines.”
Vlahos should know: the two were inspired to launch Left Field after Vlahos’s agent had shopped his seventh novel, The Story of Oog—which, Gilligan said, is a crossover read that does not really fit into any one genre—to publishers to no avail.
“Editors liked the book, but they didn’t see a publishing path for it because it didn’t fit neatly in any one genre," Gillian said. "It got us thinking about other projects we'd encountered,” including a business book written as a novel by Walker Thrash, a Denver real estate developer. “As soon as we pivoted in that direction, other projects started coming to us," she added.
Gilligan and Vlahos, who first met while working for the American Booksellers Association, describe Left Field as “a small forward thinking publishing company created to combine the best attributes of traditional publishing with the best attributes of independent publishing.”
Left Field does split out-of-pocket costs of editing, production, marketing, and publicity with authors, but "once sales begin, we pay back the expenses to both parties, then the authors get a very generous royalty,” stated the copublishers. “In our model, authors retain creative control of the work, and earn royalties on a much larger and different scale than traditional publishing.”
Gilligan added that the company was designed to appeal to authors “what want the professionalism of a traditional house, the creative freedom of an indie press, and a partner as invested in their story as they are.”
Left Field will make its debut with two November releases: Thrash’s business book/novel, The Dealmaker’s Will: The Story of One Deal—And the & Rules That Made It Happen, along with the project that launched Left Field: Vlahos’ The Story of Oog: Or, A New Thinker’s Guide to the Forest.
Left Field also has scheduled for publication in fall 2026 two debut novels: The Crimson Traveler by Matt Stroller, “a gritty, literary supernatural horror thriller," and Fortune and Glass, a World War II novel by John Mutter, the editor-in-chief of Shelf Awareness.
The publisher hopes to build up to publishing three to five frontlist titles each year. Left Field also plans to host a writers group and a literary salon in Denver.
“We've spent our careers immersed in the book world —from running bookstores to leading the American Booksellers Association, to writing and promoting books, to working with publishers, distributors, and authors at every stage of the journey,” Gilligan said, “What we haven’t done, until now, is publish the books ourselves, so, hey, why not?”
