I never set out to start a publishing company. The plan was to write the books, hand them off to someone who knew what they were doing, and go back to being an engineer who happened to have a few novels on a shelf somewhere. That was the plan. It didn't survive very long.
The Turning Point
By the time I finished the Ember Tides series, all six books front to back, I had queried agents, researched traditional publishers, and stared at timelines that stretched years into the future with nothing guaranteed at the end. I had a full catalog sitting on my hard drive. Eighteen books across four series, written between engineering shifts, after the kids went to bed, during lunch breaks, on planes. These weren't rough drafts. They were done. Edited. Ready to go.
And they were sitting there doing nothing.
The traditional path is built for patience and I respect that. But I'm an engineer. When I see a problem I don't sit around waiting for someone else to figure it out. I build the solution. So I built Mythroot Publishing.
What "From the Roots Up" Actually Means
Mythroot is not a vanity press and it's not a shortcut. It's a real publishing company built the same way I build everything else: with structure, with standards, and with the understanding that every single detail matters. The name comes from the Treenosphere series, where a massive root network beneath the earth connects and sustains everything. That felt right for what I wanted this to be. A foundation that holds the stories up.
I taught myself formatting. I learned cover design from scratch. I figured out the ISBN system, the distribution pipelines, the metadata standards that determine whether your book actually shows up when someone searches for it. I learned KDP inside and out, not as someone uploading a file but as a publisher. Every decision, from trim size to paper stock to pricing to categories, was thought through.
The Late Nights
My wife Nathaly has been next to me through every draft of every book. She's also been next to me through every formatting disaster, every cover revision at 2am, every moment where I realized a barcode was slightly off and the proof copy would need to be reordered. Starting a publishing company while working full time and raising two kids is not something I'd call efficient. It is not optimized. It is a lot of late nights held together by stubbornness and way too much coffee.
But I wouldn't trade any of it. Every late night taught me something. Every problem I solved made the next book launch a little smoother. And every time I held a finished copy in my hands, real paper, real ink, my name on the spine, it was worth everything.
What Mythroot Is Becoming
Right now Mythroot is home to four series and eighteen books, all mine. But the foundation I've built is bigger than one author. The systems are there. The standards are set. Whether Mythroot stays a home for just my work or eventually opens its doors to other writers who care about craft the same way I do, that's a question for down the road.
For now the next thing on the horizon is the Elementari Series. Six more books. A new world. Same late nights.
You don't need permission to tell your stories. You just need a foundation strong enough to hold them.
If you're a writer thinking about going this route, or a reader who's curious about what actually happens behind the books you hold in your hands, this blog is for you. Welcome to From the Root. There's more coming.