Publish With Us
Have a Book—or a Story—that Belongs Here?
Village of Care Press works with thoughtful authors whose books contribute something meaningful to the larger conversation—whether through healing and reclamation, leadership and the greater good, or stories rooted in women’s lived experience.
We welcome both emerging and established authors, offering a deeply collaborative approach to developing and publishing books with purpose, integrity, and care.
Not every important idea needs to become a traditional full-length book. Some belong in a short-format book. Some are strengthened by being gathered with the voices of others in a community publishing format. Some begin as a manuscript that needs thoughtful development before the right publishing path becomes clear.
Our work begins there with one question
What are you trying to bring into the world, and what form will serve it best?
Full-Length Books
Through our three imprints—Village of Care Press, Council House Press, and Red Tent Press—we publish selected nonfiction, memoir, poetry, and other works aligned with the purpose and character of each imprint.
Our authors are active collaborators in the publishing process. We work together to clarify the book's purpose and audience, strengthen the manuscript, create a professional finished book, and determine how it can best find its way to the people it was written to serve.
Explore Our Imprints
-
books for healing, resilience, and becoming
For coaches, healers, clergy, chaplains, spiritual companions, retreat leaders, and other helping professionals whose work tends the human spirit.
-
stories by women for women
where your story becomes her medicine
Books rooted in women's lived experience, transformation, reclamation, and the wisdom that comes from engaging deeply with life.
-
leadership wisdom for the greater good
Books for leaders, practitioners, educators, and changemakers who understand that leadership is lived, relational, and deeply human.
Short-Format Books
A meaningful work doesn't have to be long to matter.
Some ideas need 300 pages. Others need 75. A short-format book offers writers a way to publish a beautifully produced, focused work around a single story, journey, question, body of poetry, methodology, or idea. These are intentionally concise books—not abbreviated versions of something larger, but complete works designed around the size and shape of what the author has to say.
For a helping professional, educator, leader, coach, healer, or practitioner, a short-format book might capture a methodology developed over years of practice, explore one compelling idea, or make hard-earned wisdom accessible to the people who need it.
For a memoirist or storyteller, it might hold one season of a life, one threshold crossed, one relationship, one place that changed you, or a collection of stories that belong together.
For a poet, it might be a traditional chapbook—a carefully curated body of work gathered into a beautiful volume.
Small enough to read. Substantial enough to keep.
We believe short books deserve the same editorial care, thoughtful design, and beautiful production as longer works. A book does not need to be large to feel significant in the hand—or to have a lasting impact on the reader.
Short-format books can stand entirely on their own, become part of a series or evolving body of work, introduce readers to an author's larger body of thought, or give an emerging writer an accessible first experience of authorship. They also offer established writers another possibility—the freedom to follow an idea or story without asking it to become something larger than it needs to be.
And they offer readers something increasingly precious—a meaningful work they can enter deeply and finish in an afternoon, an evening, or a quiet weekend.
Across our three imprints, short-format books take three different forms.
-
Short books about the experiences that change us.
Stories of Becoming are beautifully produced short-form books centered on a particular story, season, journey, question, or threshold in a life. A Story of Becoming might explore a time of change, loss, healing, discovery, pilgrimage, identity, belonging, relationship, or return. It might gather several related stories or reflections around a common thread. It might capture an experience too substantial for an essay but too focused to require a full-length memoir.
These books honor a simple truth: we do not need to tell our entire life story for one part of our life to matter. Sometimes one journey contains a world. Sometimes one season changes everything that comes after it. And sometimes the most powerful story we can offer another person is simply:
This is what happened to me. This is what I discovered. This is who I became.
Stories of Becoming give those stories a home.
-
Short books by women illuminating one thread of a life.
A woman's life is made of many threads. Some are inherited. Some are chosen. Some are handed to us before we are old enough to decide whether we want them. Some break. Some become tangled. Some disappear for years and are found again. Together, they create the intricate and unfinished fabric of a life.
Threads of Life are short-form books by women that follow one of those threads: a relationship, an identity, a loss, a longing, a place, a body, a calling, a rupture, an inheritance, a liberation, or a moment of becoming. They need not tell the whole story. Instead, they invite a writer to follow one thread deeply enough to discover what it has meant—and perhaps to see the larger pattern it has been creating all along. A Thread of Life might be a single extended narrative, a small collection of interconnected stories, or a series of reflections woven around a common theme.
These books belong to the ancient lineage of women making meaning from experience—gathering the strands of ordinary and extraordinary lives and weaving them into something that can be carried forward.
Not the whole cloth of a life. One thread worth following.
-
Short books carrying wisdom from practice into the world.
Some of our most valuable knowledge does not begin as theory. It is learned in classrooms and boardrooms, hospitals and community centers, congregations and nonprofits, organizations and neighborhoods. It emerges through years of doing the work, paying attention, making mistakes, asking better questions, and discovering what actually matters.
Field Notes are concise books grounded in that lived and practiced wisdom. A Field Note might explore a leadership practice, professional insight, methodology, framework, emerging question, lesson learned over a career, or one powerful idea that deserves deeper consideration.
These are not condensed business books or oversized essays. They are intentionally focused works designed to respect both the complexity of the author's thinking and the reader's time. An educator may have developed an approach that transformed a classroom. A leader may have discovered something about building trust that no leadership manual ever taught them.
A helping professional may have spent decades learning something that the next generation should not have to learn entirely on its own. A practitioner may not need to write the definitive book on leadership, education, organizational life, caregiving, community, or change. They may simply have something important to contribute. And 50 or 100 beautifully considered pages may be exactly enough.
Community Publishing
Some books are meant to be created together.
Through our Community Publishing work, we partner with organizations, communities, and groups to create collaborative books that gather many voices around a shared experience, purpose, or theme.
Learn more about our community publishing model.