| December 1, 2025 | Purple Feather Press |
Completed projects – so far
It was a busy year for Purple Feather Press, and we’re still working on more to come.
We helped author and Mitigation University founder Victoria Rusk re-launch her first book The Handbook for Mitigation as well as the Spanish translation version, El Manual para Mitigación. These are both “a practical guide for community around a criminal case” – and both are available to order at bookstores nationwide!
We also worked with two authors who took their years of experience as teachers in a classroom to create a wonderfully detailed workbook to help other teachers keep their students engaged in writing. Bill Martin and Christine Gorychka have Teaching Writing in a Way That Students Embrace Enthusiastically available to order at bookstores nationwide!
Available now!
Unbinding a book
I spent lunch hours, any free time, and any classes I could skip in the library when I was in junior high school, more content to shelve and sort titles according to the Dewey Decimal System than be around other people. One of the best librarians was a wonderfully kind woman whom I got to work with twice in my life, first with the books and several years later with aviation history at a museum. The school was slowly transitioning to a digital checkout system with a scanner and bar codes on books, and she let me enter titles and ISBNs even handle checking out other students.
She taught me how to put the plastic jackets on certain books and magazines so they wouldn’t get as messed up from all the teenage readers flipping through them. And she taught me how to repair and rebind books that had been damaged. It’s a sacred thing, to repair these tomes of knowledge and information.
Now here I am, decades past that junior high library and basic ability to repair or even create books, and one of my projects was to unbind a book! It gave me pause, but I knew I could do it without damaging the pages or cover, to the best of my ability.
Sometimes, taking things apart, deconstructing how they were built in the first place, allows us to learn how to build or create something new.
This book was a history project from over 30 years ago, and it’s now been fully scanned so it can be reprinted and updated for a new generation of readers.
As a very small, independent publishing company, I realize every day how all the skills I’ve learned along the way impact the work I do now. I may not meet the “standards” of certain industries – book sales and data that apply to publishers that have hundreds of books and employees are vastly different than what we can achieve here, and marketing that involves videos or ai is a hard “NO” from me – but the ability to help craft good stories and create good works is still vital to this business.
Along with the books, which includes cover design work, editing, layout, alignment, and sending it all to the printers, I’ve also been working on research for a few different genealogy projects, website and brochures for small businesses, and design work for a museum and a regional historical group. It’s all fascinating stuff and I’m loving all of it! And it all lets me be creative and support other small businesses, organizations, and authors as they create their things to share with the world.
Into 2026 we go…
Upcoming projects include a memoir, another couple of history books, two genealogy books, hopefully a script, more museum display design/content, and a book about mediation.
See you next year!
Sincerely,
Heather – Purple Feather Press
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