{"id":265395,"date":"2026-08-14T16:34:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T16:34:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/265395\/"},"modified":"2026-08-14T16:34:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T16:34:09","slug":"philly-is-a-hot-new-hub-for-publishing-insiders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/265395\/","title":{"rendered":"Philly Is a Hot New Hub for Publishing Insiders"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNews<\/a>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Literary agents, best-selling authors, and industry conveners \u2014 they\u2019re having some of their biggest successes in Philly.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

Literary agent Jennifer Herrera moved to Philadelphia from New York, and has had great success here \u2014 including the publication of her new novel. \/ Photographs by Matthew Slutsky<\/p>\n

It\u2019s happy hour at a local brewery and the New York literary agents are huddled, discussing market trends. Someone from book production is ordering a drink, an editor is going over her manuscript wish list, an agent is showing off his client\u2019s most recent bestseller. But these literary types \u2014 most of whom made their bones in New York publishing \u2014 are not in New York. They\u2019re in Philadelphia, which has, in recent years, become a something of a magnet for the literati who once felt professionally tethered to Manhattan.<\/p>\n

Although Philly has a vaunted history of publishing (Bibles and textbooks, particularly), New York has long been the heartbeat of the industry; Philadelphia didn\u2019t even get a homegrown mainstream publisher until 1973, when Running Press Books was founded. Originally focused on prescriptive non-fiction books (the industry term for self-help and how-to), Running Press evolved over the years to have several notable successes: Jen Sincero\u2019s runaway hit You Are a Badass sold over 4 million copies, while RP\u2019s \u201cmini kits\u201d \u2014 tiny books paired with toys \u2014 sold more than 6 million copies in 2025 alone.<\/p>\n

Philly\u2019s second mainstream house, Quirk Books, came along in 2002, and had its own share of \u201cquirky\u201d successes over the years \u2014 the outlandish mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies sold over 1.8 million copies, and the unsettling Miss Peregrine\u2019s Home for Peculiar Children and its sequels have sold more than 9 million copies combined.<\/p>\n

From the outside, Philly publishing has always seemed like that oddball cousin who\u2019s forever coming up with bizarre ideas. And most of the serious industry people lived, worked and conducted their lives in NYC . But over the past handful of years, a groundswell of writers, editors, and agents have shifted the narrative, turning Philly into a micro-hub for publishing insiders.<\/p>\n

Take, for example, Eric Smith<\/a>, founder of the Philadelphia Bookstore Crawl<\/a>, and Trellis Literary Management\u2019s Dana Murphy<\/a>, both of whom have been shouting from the rooftops about Philly for years.<\/p>\n

\u201cI always encourage publicists, if you are making a book tour, to send your author to Philly,\u201d Murphy says. \u201cIt\u2019s a hyperliterate and literary city.\u201d<\/p>\n

Murphy has herself made it her mission to champion Philly voices. She sold Queen Village resident Kelsey McKinney\u2019s non-fiction book You Didn\u2019t Hear This From Me to Hachette, a Big Five house, at auction. (The book went on to become a New York Times bestseller.) She also represents Olivia Muenter \u2014 who was a Philly author at the time Murphy approached her. Muenter\u2019s book, Little One, which also sold at auction to an imprint of Hachette, became a USA Today bestseller.<\/p>\n

\"Writer<\/p>\n

Writer Emma Copley Eisenberg, who released Fat Swim this past summer \/ Photograph by Kyle Kielinski<\/p>\n

Other players on the scene include Emma Copley Eisenberg<\/a>, who wrote this past summer\u2019s hit Fat Swim, and Joshua Demaree,\u00a0co-founders of the literary organization Blue Stoop<\/a>, a load-bearing center for Philly\u2019s literary community. Eisenberg also organized the first bimonthly Philly Publishing Meetup, which draws about 130 Philly-based publishing professionals to local bars to trade notes, build connections, discuss industry changes and, naturally, gossip.<\/p>\n

Meantime, New York publishing types are flocking to Philly \u2014 which is now home to people from every major American publishing house. Liz Kossnar, senior editor at Little Brown Books for Young Readers, and her husband Charlie Olsen, literary agent at InkWell Management, relocated to Philly in 2020 to escape their tiny NYC apartment. They hadn\u2019t meant to move long-term, but the personal and professional communities they\u2019ve been able to nurture encourage them to stay. \u201cWe wouldn\u2019t be able to have there what we have here,\u201d Kossnar says.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also Lexy Bloom, vice president at Alfred A. Knopf. There\u2019s Bailey Thomas, divisional sales director at HarperCollins. There are nearly two dozen literary agents, such as Veronia Goldstein of Dunow, Carlson, & Lerner, Leslie Zampetti (who owns her own agency), and, well, yours truly, a literary agent at the David Black Agency.<\/p>\n

I moved to Philly in 2020 and wasn\u2019t planning on making it permanent. As a literary agent, I worried that living so far from New York City would hurt my career. But the truth is that since moving to Philly, I\u2019ve experienced some of my biggest successes: I\u2019ve had my first New York Times bestseller, my first IndieBound bestseller, and I\u2019ve written and published two novels. In fact, most of the publishing insiders I spoke to for this article say their careers have actually reached new heights since they moved here.<\/p>\n

Philadelphia is no longer the quirky cousin. While New York may still be the heartbeat of publishing, Philly is where the magic happens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"News Literary agents, best-selling authors, and industry conveners \u2014 they\u2019re having some of their biggest successes in Philly.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":265396,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[69,71,70],"class_list":["post-265395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}