Conlan Press

Conlan Press is —

Connor Freff Cochran: President, Publisher, and Vortex

David Roudebush: Co-Publisher and Systems Guy

John R. Douglas: Editor and Voice of Reason

Jim Lively: He Who Makes Things Sound Spectacular

Conlan Press Associates —

James Dowaliby: Media Projects and Business Planning

Kim Flournoy: All Things Beagle

Barbara Randall Kesel: Comics and Graphic Novels

Atsuko Roudebush: Japanese Business Development

Justin Souter: Web and Technology Consulting

Gray Tan: Our Rep in China and certain other Asian countries

Sue Willett: Promotion and Voicecasting

Business plan guidebooks all say that a company needs a Mission Statement. Well, the mission statement for Connor Cochran, Inc. (parent company of Conlan Press) is as simple as you can get and still paint an outrageously large picture: "To make great things and eventually have a CCI product, of some kind, in every house and office and schoolroom on Earth."

Luckily, our subset of that task is a good deal narrower and more specific.

We're all about written, spoken, and visual communication in distributed form. Of course, the definition of "distributed" is necessarily shifting in a web-connected world. (Technology, meet consensual social reality and language — when was the last time you literally "dialed" somebody's phone number? Yet that's still what we say when we do. And there was a time when a "freelancer" was a guy who owned his own halberd or pike...) Luckily, even when the goalposts move it's still easy to know whether or not you are on the playing field. As publishing changes, we will change right along with it, in every way but one: i.e., our devotion to putting out material we care about passionately (and only material we care about passionately). Better a noble failure than a half-assed and personally embarrassing success.

Certain other principles are inevitable corollaries of our passion:

Except for special editions which are deliberately limited (as with our printing of Two Hearts, the sequel to The Last Unicorn), no Conlan Press title will ever go out of print. If it is good enough to publish once, then it's good enough to publish forever.

We will make as direct a connection with our audience as possible, even when "middlemen" are required by local restrictions of commerce.

Perfection is unattainable, but seeking perfection is not, and should be given the highest possible priority.

Everything we do is a collaboration between us, our writers and artists, and our audience. All three corners of the triangle are equally important. Without each of them there is no shared experience.

Books are a physical art form, a source of esthetic pleasure, entirely apart from the quality of the packaged information they convey. By extension the same idea applies to all physical formats, and all means of delivery. We will make everything we release a beautiful object in its own right. In the case of downloadable goods, where there is no physical object, just data, we will do everything we can to make the process itself satisfying and effortless.