History

Company Overview

Sunbury Press, Inc., headquartered near Boiling Springs, Pennsylvania, is a publisher of hardcover, trade paperback, audio, and digital books featuring established and emerging authors in many fiction and nonfiction categories. Sunbury’s books are sold through leading booksellers worldwide.

Sunbury Press is a traditional royalty-paying publisher, leveraging the latest digital capabilities. We receive over 1000 proposals from authors and agents over the course of a year. We publish about 100 titles per year, many of them from our existing authors. Our most successful categories have been history, biography, self-help, historical fiction, horror, police procedurals, and mysteries.

Our editing and design staff are employees of the company. When we invest in a manuscript with our time and money, our goal is to produce the best quality book possible, while getting it to the market as quickly as possible.

Our books are sold on all major bookseller websites and eBook platforms. Our best-selling titles are distributed to stores and libraries via Ingram.

 Our Mission

Sunbury Press, through its many imprints, seeks to reward our readers with meaningful information and enjoyable entertainment, our authors with a multitude of opportunities, our suppliers with honest rewarding partnerships, and our trade customers with high quality products that sell.  

Our Vision

Sunbury Press will be a leading publisher of books and related media, worldwide, wherever books are sold. 

By 2010, the company had transformed its business model to leverage new developments in the publishing industry such as eBooks and print-on-demand. The company grew five-fold between 2009 and 2010, and nearly tripled the next year (through 2011). Titles such as Prohibition’s Prince and Fireproof Moth achieved regional and international acclaim. Sunbury also became known for the Keystone Tombstones series by Joe Farrell and Joe Farley, which was mentioned on numerous broadcast and cable TV affiliates. The company signed its first foreign rights deal (with a Taiwanese publisher) in 2012.

Late in 2012, the company moved from offices in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, to Main Street in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and began hosting book release parties and author signing events at the venue. 

2013 was a big year for Sunbury Press. We exhibited at Book Expo America in New York at the end of May. Also, one of our books, The Cursed Man by Keith Rommel, was made into a motion picture in Hollywood. The company also completed its first acquisition of publishing assets from a North Carolina publisher.

We celebrated our tenth anniversary in 2014, including an anniversary party at our headquarters. Keith Rommel, author of The Cursed Man appeared at our company store, as did Brahm Gallagher, who played the lead role in the film. (Brahm since appeared in Game of Thrones.)

Sunbury Press participated in Mechanicsburg’s Jubilee Day in 2015, interacting with the 60,000+ patrons who participated in the largest street fair in the eastern US.  The action was right in front of our office/bookstore.  Keith Rommel’s The Lurking Man was also signed to a Hollywood deal. Sales at the Press nearly doubled in 2015.

At the start of 2017, Sunbury Press moved its offices to the Knorr family’s historic (established 1765) Christian Baker Farm, near Boiling Springs, Pennsylvania. The third floor of this restored home has been the Sunbury Press office ever since. (Sorry, we are no longer open to the public.) Also this year, the company diversified the branding of its titles via new imprints. Previously, all books were published under the Sunbury Press imprint. Now, in addition to Sunbury Press, titles are published under imprints such as Milford House Press, Brown Posey Press, Oxford Southern, Hellbender Books, Ars Metaphysica, Catamount Press, Distelfink Press, Home & Hearth, Local History Press, Loch Ness Books, Radio Free Press, Roswell Press, Scriptoria Press, The Agency Books, Verboten Books, and Speckled Egg Press. 

In 2018, the company inaugurated the BookSpeak Network on the BlogTalk Radio Platform. Numerous podcasts are now hosted on this platform including the Sunbury Press Books Show, Milford House Mysteries, Brown Posey Press Show, and the Suicide Earth series. 

In 2019, G. David Bohner and Jake Gronsky won the Christian Indie Award in the Relationships & Family category with their book A Short Season. Lawrence Knorr's Gettysburg Eddie was nominated for the Larry Ritter book award by SABR.

During the pandemic of 2020, the company added audiobooks to the mix of products, signing agreements with major producers in this field.

In 2021, Sunbury Press, Inc. became part owner of Blood Moon Comics, LLC, producing comic book versions of our fiction titles as well as works by other creative teams. Sherye Green and Mildred Janzen won the Mississippi Library Association's award for nonfiction with Surviving Hitler, Evading Stalin. Cordelia Biddle's Biddle, Jackson, and a Nation in Turmoil was a finalist for The Athenaeum of Philadelphia 2021 Literary Award.

In August 2022, Sunbury Press, Inc. acquired the estate rights to the novels of Herbert Stover, to be published under the Catamount Press imprint. The estate rights to the various works of Fredric Klees were acquired for the Distelfink Press imprint.  The company also attended SABR 50 in Baltimore.  Dan Joseph’s Pete Reiser biography, Baseball's Greatest What If, won the 2022 SABR Ron Gabriel Award for the best book about the Brooklyn Dodgers. Meanwhile, Thoughts and Prayers by Lee Anne Post won the Florida Authors & Publishers Association, Inc. (FAPA) gold medal in fiction.

In March 2023, Sunbury Press and its Catamount Press sponsored the Writers Conference of Northern Appalachia held at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In April, the casting call for Pig Hill, the movie, went out. This is the movie based on the Hellbender Books novel Pig by Nancy Williams.

In May the company was one of the sponsors of the Penn Writers Conference in Pittsburgh. Two baseball titles were announced as finalists for SABR's Lawrence Ritter Award. 

For 2024, the company celebrated its twentieth year in business with special deals for readers.

In March 2024, Sunbury Press again sponsored the Writes Conference of Northern Appalachia, featuring its Catamount Press imprint. Ben Moyer's Smoke to See By won the annual award for the conference. 

In April, Sunbury Press again released actor Laurence Luckinbill's autobiography, Affective Memories.

In May the company again participated in the Penn Writers Conference held in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In October, we learned that Ben Moyer's book had also finished as the runner-up for the Outdoor Writers Association of America, 2024 Excellence in Craft Awards.

In November, the company moved its podcast platform from BlogTalk Radio to Buzzsprout. You can now listen to our podcasts here:  BookSpeak Network

The company also continued its migration from promoting on "new media" versus traditional media platforms and embracing artificial intelligence for marketing activities.