People ask me, usually politely, why I built a publishing house at a moment when the publishing industry is, by every available data point, contracting. Margins are tight. Big houses are consolidating. Indie bookstores are closing. The economics look bad. The timing looks worse.
I built it anyway, and I want to be honest about why.
The shelf I kept looking for
For a long time I went looking for the shelf my books would fit on. The shelf where leadership lived next to true crime, where a Santa Fe travel guide sat near a psychological suspense novel set in Abiquiú, where the dating advice book and the kids' biography of a soccer player were both treated as serious work.
That shelf does not exist in traditional publishing. Houses are built around genres. Imprints exist to keep things separate. The reader who reads across genres, which is most actual readers, is told to look in five different sections of five different bookstores.
I built Thrive Collective Publishing because the shelf I kept looking for had to be built.
The publishing model I wanted to be published under
After decades inside business and leadership, I knew what good publishing felt like. I also knew what bad publishing felt like. The version of bad I had seen up close: writers ground down by contract terms they did not understand, marketing dollars promised and then withheld, brand identities flattened into whatever the marketing team thought would sell.
I wanted to publish the way I wanted to be published. With care. With craft. With the long view. With the writer in the room.
That meant building from scratch instead of franchising someone else's model.
Direct relationships with readers, not algorithmic ones
When you publish through Amazon alone, the reader is not your reader. The reader is Amazon's reader. Amazon owns the email, the purchase history, the recommendation engine, the relationship. You are a vendor in their store.
I have nothing against Amazon. We publish there, and we are grateful for the reach. But I did not want to build a publishing house that depended entirely on a single channel and a single algorithm.
So we built our own infrastructure first. ThriveCollectiveHQ.com is the primary store. Direct buyers get signed copies, exclusive bonus content, and first looks at new releases. They get an email from us when their book ships. They get a thank-you. They get the actual relationship.
Amazon and IngramSpark are channels we use, not landlords we depend on.
Why Santa Fe
There is a quiet indie publishing scene here. Stalking Horse Press, Synergetic, Sunstone, Terra Nova, Museum of New Mexico Press, the Santa Fe Writers Project. Southwest Contemporary recently called it a renaissance, and they are right. Something is happening in this region.
Santa Fe is also the kind of place where the work the writers in this state make, work rooted in landscape, identity, and lineage, is taken seriously. That matters. I did not want to publish from a city that treats books as content.
I also live here. The drive between Santa Fe and Abiquiú shows up in the Casita Series for a reason. The light here is in the writing.
The catalog
Six imprints. Six voices. The range is deliberate.
- Kimberly Burk Cordova for leadership, business, AI, and personal development
- K.B. Cordova for psychological literary suspense, starting with The Mother I Did Not Know
- Eliza Hawthorne for historical true crime in the Shadows of the Past series
- Liam Cruz for children's sports biographies in the Young Legends Collection
- Noelle Varden for dating, relationships, and love therapy
- Cordova Creations for journals and keepsakes
Each imprint has its own brand, its own readership, its own design system. What unites them is the standard. Books built to last. Voices worth coming back to.
What the long view actually looks like
The long view means we did not chase trends. We did not optimize for Amazon algorithm tricks. We did not publish things we did not believe in to fill out a season.
The long view means we built infrastructure that compounds. Every author page, every direct relationship, every email, every book we publish strengthens what comes next. The Mother I Did Not Know publishes August 31, 2026. Book Two of the Casita Series is already underway. Eliza Hawthorne's seventh title is in development. Liam Cruz's basketball book is out, hockey is next.
That is what an independent publishing house is supposed to look like. Not a startup. A house.
If you are here
If you are a reader, thank you for being here. Thank you for the way you have shown up for our books already. There is a place for you on the email list at the bottom of this site, and there is more coming.
If you are a writer, especially a writer with a body of work that does not fit one shelf, write to me. We are not actively seeking submissions in 2026, but we are paying attention to who is doing the work.
If you are watching the publishing industry from the outside and wondering whether this is a good moment to build something, I will say this: it is a good moment to build something that is built to last. Anything else is going to get pulled apart by the next quarter's panic.
We are not in a quarterly publishing house. We are in a long one.
Kimberly Burk Cordova
Founder and Publisher
Thrive Collective Publishing
Santa Fe, New Mexico