MAIN NEWS HEADLINES
March 1-15, 2004 Edition
Michalson, Ramey
to Launch New
Publishing House
DENVER, CO./2/17/04—Greg Michalson and Fred Ramey, who founded Denver-based MacMurray & Beck (which evolved into the now defunct BlueHen, an imprint of Penguin Putnam), have acquired private funding to begin a new publishing house called Unbridled Books. The company plans to release about a dozen books per year.
The new publisher’s strategy will be to offer authors small advances with the hope of developing them into bigger names over a period of time.
Penguin Putnam closed the BlueHen Books imprint, which was run by Michalson and Ramey, at the end of 2002, after only a year and a half in operation. Putnam hired Michalson and Ramey to develop the imprint while they were editing and publishing novels for Denver-based McMurray and Beck. BlueHen debuted its first list in the summer of 2001 and released about 16 titles before closing. The imprint was created by former Penguin Publisher Phyllis Grann, who left the company suddenly last September.
Michalson and Ramey unsuccessfully sought to have BlueHen partner with one of several houses such as Carroll & Graf, which is part of Avalon Publishing Group.
Unbridled Books will use commission sales people to represent their titles.
Ramey is based in Denver while Michalson is based in Columbia, Mo. The new publisher will have offices in both cities.
Ramey and Michalson previously headed the Denver-based publishing house MacMurray & Beck, where Ramey was the publisher and Michalson was general fiction editor.
