There’s nothing more fitting for a first post for the Emergent Realms website than a statement of who we are and why we’re here. At the risk of sounding grandiose, I want to talk about this small creative company’s mission and how we plan to accomplish it.
Emergent Realms is a story lab focused on creating the best Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror you can find. We want to be more than a small press. We aim to be a collective built by storytellers who understand the transformative power of stories. Our goal is to bring you more than just a story. We want to give an experience you'll never forget.
ER’s founders are A H Serrano (the gal editing this) and Jim Wilbourne (the guy writing this). We met at a NaNoWriMo meetup, kept in contact, and eventually decided that it would be a lot more fun to attack this whole publishing thing together rather than doing it alone. It took a few years of hard work and struggle to put together our first few releases for the press, but instead of worrying about who might be passing us in the left lane, we decided to do things on our own terms and ignore the advice to just “toss something out there” and grow as you go. Logically—and not at all wrong for most startups—this bootstrapping mentality for growing a company from the ground up makes a lot of sense. But not for us. We had to be true to ourselves and to our mission.
Creativity, Honest and Open Communication, Active Listening, Authenticity, Excellence, Passion, and Anti-competition. These are our core tenants at Emergent Realms.
We trunked what was supposed to be our first five releases because we didn’t feel like it was what readers deserved. That was especially painful for me (Jim) because I’d penned the majority of those. Yes, they may have done well on the market and probably would have made our launch easier by providing us with the startup funds we needed to fuel our passion projects, but they didn’t quite meet our tenant for Excellence.
We postponed our launch yet again so that we could stay true to ourselves.
But our time has finally come.
We’ll be announcing our first release date on August 8th.
It’s finally happening. And it’s on our terms. That means it’ll be the very best thing we can produce as of 2020—the ground floor of what we’ll bring to you from now on.
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