The Innovators

The young press has made a huge impact within its vertical, not only offering quality fly-fishing books, but also author-guided fishing trips and author speaking engagements. The multi-channel, community approach is a proven success, as three of Stonefly's four titles (all launched in 2013) are generating profits.

In this innovator interview, Clouse discusses the importance of creating an author-centric experience for readers—an approach he expects to be increasingly important to book publishers.

What were you trying to accomplish with the launch of Stonefly Press?

While I have always come at Stonefly Press from a book perspective, it's really more of an intellectual property perspective. How do I circulate that property? In my previous careers, I knew that author speaking engagements were very lucrative. But we want to do more than that.

So we looked at the [fly-fishing] industry and asked, "How do we create a whole community rather than focusing on one piece of it?" There are companies in fly fishing that do nothing but exotic fishing travel. Some are book publishers and do nothing but publish books. And there are others that are heavily into social media as the circulation of their model, and they have created enormous followings. We wanted to bring all of these together into one community.

Our revenue streams are threefold: publishing, exotic travel, and the three-day events with authors. Because I come from book publishing, all of those events are tied into authors. For example, when we do an exotic trip to the Madison River, which is a tailwater, we're going to take the author of our tailwater book. It's not just about going out with a guide and fishing for the day; it's about the entire Stonefly experience.

What has the reception been?

We targeted the best authors in the field, because the authors have to be gifted to do keynotes and events. These authors also happened to be the people everyone already knew. So when we started the launch, there was quite a bit of a buzz.