Zippers, Tariffs, and the Price of Telling the Truth

"We don’t want to build just a press—we want to build a life raft."

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Hello, Lovelies,

The problem started, as many good problems do, with a zipper.

More specifically: the pink one, half-unzipped, stretched across the cover of Quickies, our soon-to-launch book of midlife intimacy lessons by Dr. Heather Bartos. It’s cheeky. It’s empowering. It’s selling faster than we can print it. And it was made—beautifully, ethically, and on sustainable bamboo stock—by an artisanal women-run press in China.

And now? That same zipper is, metaphorically speaking, caught on a new tangle of proposed tariffs and the closing of the de minimis loophole, which previously allowed smaller shipments to skip customs delays and inflated duties. What does that mean for a fledgling press like ours? It means everything just got more expensive—especially for those of us printing books abroad.

We’re not printing in China because it’s cheap. We’re printing in China because it’s possible. The technology is decades ahead, the paper is tree-free, and the women we work with love books. They get what we’re doing. They handle small batch runs like they’re first editions, with foil embossing and French flaps and all the little luxuries that tell a midlife woman: yes, this story is worth wrapping in gold.

We want to keep doing this. We want to keep paying our writers well—really well. We offer a royalty rate that makes our accountants twitch and our authors cheer. But that’s the deal. We don’t want to build just a press—we want to build a life raft. For authors. For readers. For ourselves.

Isn’t this a gorgeous life raft? The Brand Fairy has been good to us!

We’re not printing in China because it’s cheap. We’re printing in China because it’s possible. The technology is decades ahead, the paper is tree-free, and the women we work with love books.

So what now?

We never flinch. We double-check our math. We adjust print runs if necessary. We lean on our Pennsylvania-based short-run printer for event support. And we hope—fervently, fiercely—that someone in Washington realizes that books are not the enemy. That the publishing industry, especially small, women-run indies like Empress Editions, cannot absorb this kind of blow without turning around and charging our readers $40 for a paperback. (And I don’t care how gorgeous the French flaps are—no one wants that!)

One solution? Tariff exemptions for cultural goods. A “low-carbon” certification for sustainable paper sourcing, regardless of origin. A White House roundtable with indie publishers where no one has to pretend they understand Excel. Just a few ideas.

And in the meantime? We keep going. Because for every frustrating spreadsheet, there’s the thrill of a new manuscript landing in our inbox. There’s a sentence so good it makes us gasp. There’s a midlife woman who sees herself—finally—on the page, not as a sidekick or a cautionary tale, but as the star.

That’s why we built Empress Editions. To give power, beauty, and commercial muscle to the kinds of stories that once lived in the margins. To turn women in the second half of life into bestselling authors, cultural voices, and literary icons.

To put it plainly: we may be taxed, but we’re not stopping.

Because there’s nothing more powerful—or more unruly—than a woman with a story to tell and a team who knows how to typeset it! Huzzah!

Yours in letters - xoxo - gotham girl

PS - I am a human typo. Amnesty appreciated.