About the imprint
A single desk,
a single question.
GrassMan Publishing is an independent small press publishing eclectic nonfiction and fiction on the human spirit — released from one editor's desk, distributed exclusively through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.
The mission
“Publishing truth about the human spirit — whether that truth arrives as a memoir of consciousness, a field-report from the farm, or a story about the next machine.”
— GrassMan Publishing, in continuation
An independent small press publishing eclectic nonfiction and fiction on health, the human spirit, economics, AI, agriculture, politics, and society — distributed exclusively through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.
Daniel Jennings, editor
One reader,
every manuscript.
I started GrassMan Publishing because I wanted to read the books I wasn't finding — works that took consciousness, health, agriculture, AI, and spirituality seriously in the same breath, without forcing them into the same clinical subgenre.
I'm a writer and editor with a long background in independent press work. Before GrassMan, I spent years as a manuscript reader for small literary magazines and as a freelance developmental editor for nonfiction book projects. The imprint grew out of the conversations I had been having with authors whose work I admired — writers whose manuscripts were too eclectic for one imprint's acquisitions list, too quiet for another, but unmistakably of a piece in their concerns.
I run the press from a single desk. Every proposal passes through the same inbox. I read everything, slowly. All titles move through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing on purpose: a single-vendor, low-overhead model means our budget goes to the books, not to a sales infrastructure. Copyright stays with the author — the standard agreement grants the press exclusive distribution, marketing, and reproduction rights, and nothing more.
We are a small house. We plan to stay that way.
What makes a GrassMan manuscript
Eclectic,
not random.
Different surfaces, one question underneath — what is true about the human spirit, and what stays true when the day's working distractions have fallen away.
What makes a GrassMan manuscript? The press reads across genres because the question underneath them is the same. A field-report from a regenerative farm and a memoir of silent practice are different surfaces, but they are both asking what is true about the human spirit — and what stays true when the day's working distractions have fallen away.
We publish health writing that respects the body's instruments. We publish consciousness writing that respects the reader's experience. We publish on AI without letting the engineering metaphor drive the moral argument. We publish agriculture that treats the farm as a workshop, not a backdrop. We publish spirituality that has done its homework. We publish linked fiction when the stories are doing the same cross-genre work the nonfiction does.
The criterion isn't topical fit. It is concern — a sustained, formed attention to a question the writer has carried long enough to write from. If your manuscript is wide-eyed on a real question and honest about the limits of its own answer, it probably belongs here. If it is narrow on a fashionable answer and confident about everything around it, it does not.
We are not the press for every book. We are the press for these — written slowly, by writers who kept asking the question after the easier answers had stopped being useful.
Next step
Trust is built book by book.
The page above only matters because there is a slate behind it. Read what we have already, or send us what you have been carrying.