About Brighid's Fire Books

Hi.

My name is Dawn Rivers Baker, and I am the editor and publisher here at Brighid's Fire Books.

This imprint got its start in life because of my own frustrations with shopping an unagented fiction manuscript in the publishing industry of the early to mid-1990s. I had a lot of faith in my fantasy novel — and that faith turned out to be justified, according to all the reviews I've gotten — but I just couldn't get anybody to read it!

Of course, a lot has changed since then but it still isn't much easier to get published when you don't already have a track record or a built in audience.

It occurred to me that there must be a lot of wonderful works of fiction out there that deserve to be brought to the public, and a lot of talented writers who deserve a change to get their start as published authors. So, I launched this imprint in 2002 with the publication of my own novel, The Rise of The Phoenix.

If you know anything at all about the publishing business, you'll know that I'm not running this book imprint to make money. The real mission of Brighid's Fire Books is to launch writing careers, to bring quality writers to the public where their voices have not been given a chance to be heard.

To fulfill that mission, we look for talented debut authors of quality debut manuscripts. Since we are entirely self-funded, we don't necessarily expect runaway sales for any of these books - although, with enough help from our authors, we can achieve respectable sales in a very crowded marketplace. But sales, for us, is not the point. The point is what happens next.

In the best of all possible worlds, our contest winners will leverage their success with us in order to further their writing careers elsewhere. For example, our first published author, Justin Gustainis, parlayed the release of his horror novel The Hades Project, into a subsequent deal with a rather larger publisher. His second novel, Black Magic Woman, was released late last year and, I understand, enjoyed even better sales. And, more to the point, his career as an author well is on its way.

Brighid's Fire Books takes its name from the Celtic fire goddess Brighid (prounced breed), who was believed to hold sway over the smithy (work), healing and the hearth fires (home), and over the bards — filling them with fiery inspiration. Under the circumstances, I thought She was the perfect patron and symbol of a home-based business publishing first fiction.

Brighid's Fire Books, the fiction imprint of Wahmpreneur Books, specializes in publishing debut fiction. Brighid's Fire Books publishes up to five genre and/or mainstream fiction trade paperback titles annually.

Both the Wahmpreneur Books and Brighid's Fire Books imprints are subsidiaries of Wahmpreneur Publishing, Inc.