Doing the Big Thing
- Jean Shields Fleming
- Apr 7
- 6 min read
Meet Vicki DeArmon: Serial entrepreneur, publisher, author and champion of older women's writing
At 25, Vicki DeArmon did the first in a series of life-defining Big Things. She maxed out her credit card.
Then she bet on herself.
Taking that money, Vicki started Foghorn Press, a publishing company in San Francisco. The year was 1985 when San Francisco was still more Beatnik than Tech Bro. In those dawning years of the desktop publishing era, the city retained a scruffy allure, and opportunity was there for the making. Vicki captures this spirit in her delightful new memoir, Foghorn, at turns laugh-out-loud funny and tear-in-the-eye poignant.
Now, nearly 40 years later, she’s placing another big bet, having started Sibylline Press. Sibylline is a publishing house focused on the work of older women, a segment historically invisible to publishers. The intervening years between Foghorn and Sibylline have taught Vicki a lot about making and selling books, and she’s using all of it to carve a new niche in the publishing world.
Why take on such a challenge, now, when she could be relaxing? Vicki just laughs and says, “You know, for me, building a business is a hugely creative pursuit, and I just love the heck out of it.”
I lived in San Francisco during the era depicted in Foghorn, though Vicki and I never met. And while it may be true that any place where you’re young lives on in golden splendor in the mind, but for me San Francisco had a special glow. With its hills and mists, its cracked crab and barking sea lions, it was a haven of quirky creativity. Not New York pushy or LA spacey. Funky. I remember seeing The Wizard of Oz at the Castro Theater, in the heart of San Francisco’s vibrant gay district. At the pivotal moment, just before Dorothy clicks her heels three times to go home, a voice called out in the darkened theater: Don’t Do It!
Why would anyone return to black-and-white Kansas when this glittering, technicolor city had everything you could ever need?
Foghorn captures that light. Reading it reminded me of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, full of the pleasure of being young, certain in the inevitability of your dreams, and blessed with endless energy and a very low rent. Glory days, for sure.
Vicki agrees, though at the time she was too busy working to notice.
Foghorn Press started when she was trying to extricate herself from a failing marriage. Joined in business by her brother, together they found a niche developing outdoor guides and sports books on teams like the 49ers, who were riding high after their Super Bowls wins. Costco ordered books by the palletful – selling 40,000 books was the norm. Publishers wooed booksellers with parties galore at the American Booksellers Association conferences. Looking back, it seems like a sparkling era in publishing.
“The magic of what happened with Foghorn was always in my mind turning,” she told me as we talked via Zoom. She dialed in from the RV that she and her husband call home, traveling between northern and southern California, visiting kids.
“Because, you know, when you get older, you get a sense of what it all means. Those were glory days for not just me and my brother, but for the whole Bay Area. I mean, here comes the personal computer, here comes the ability to actually produce your own books. And suddenly, within a couple years, there must have been 50 small presses springing up all through the Bay Area. It was, yeah, lively. So much fun.”
The book introduces us to a number of sharply drawn characters, not the least of whom are Vicki and her family, the Morgans. They have a special esprit de corps, an ironclad belief that you win the day by getting organized, rearranging furniture – “Morganization” they call it – and by holding fast to optimism. We follow along as the Foghorn team outgrows a rental apartment in Bernal Heights, a tough neighborhood at the time, hires employees, and moves into a sleek, newly rehabbed industrial space. We’re taken inside the wrangling with distributors, meet some scammy guys with too-good-to-be-true opportunities, and attend some fantastic parties. Vicki is a vivid and lively storyteller, and she isn’t afraid to show her own foibles, as she takes on more and more in her quest for the next Big Thing, a mission that sometimes gets the better of her and hurts the people she loves.
I ask her how it is, having the story out now.
“I just did the recording for the audiobook," she says, "and I was sort of devastated. I thought, oh my god, this is not the book I thought I wrote. I thought I wrote this light book about the book publishing industry, but it has so much of me in there. I said to my husband, ‘I think I should probably pull it. No one needs to know who I slept with in 1989.’”
Thank goodness she didn’t. It’s a rollicking good read.
Through the Foghorn years and afterward, Vicki was also writing and raising a family. She then went on to run marketing and events for Copperfield’s, a chain of Bay Area bookstores. In typical Vicki fashion, she grew their program to 300 events a year, making them a major stop for authors building an audience.
Through these experiences she got to know the bookselling side of the business, and is now using that insight to help older women writers make a splash.
“One of my partners in Sibylline is Julia Park Tracy,” Vicki says. “She's a fabulous historical fiction author. She was being ghosted by an agent, and she was just kind of over it. My entrepreneurial solution is always ‘oh, we should start a company about that.’”
Sibylline Press is that company.
“We knew a lot of women who weren't getting published and we knew a lot of stories weren't being told,” she says – and I really relate, having started Certain Age out of the same frustration. “We were also simultaneously experiencing that, you know, people-looking-past-you as an old woman kind of thing.”
Three years in, Sibylline Press is gaining recognition for the diversity and quality of its titles. And Vicki is doing The Big Thing yet again, going from 10 books a year to 60, by adding a digital-first imprint.
Once signed, Sibylline authors contribute funds to their marketing programs, which, when combined with Sibylline's makes for a stronger marketing program than most small presses. They also get all the typical pubishing functions, including full editorial support, art direction, book distribution, and something unique, as well. In what Vicki calls the “pre-Olympics,” authors attend a retreat where they learn the publishing business.
“We review their website, their social media. We practice presentations. We do taping and get content for promotions. It’s a chance to get everybody geared up and focused. We make sure the marketing plans are clear and work out the last details. Then we send 'em into the season, fully charged up.”
As someone who received exactly zero support when my novel came out, this sounds like heaven. And of course, because it’s women going through this, much bonding occurs.
"There’s this added energy of our authors," Vicki observes, "an organic part where the women come together and they start championing each other. They are pushing each other's books out. They're supporting each other. I feel like it's such a secret sauce that we've happened on, a way to be successful that’s new.”
As Vicki looks into her future, she says she can imagine still working on Sibylline Press into her 70s. “You can reinvent within the framework of a business,” she says. “It’s one of the things I love about it.”
She’s already envisioning a series of writers craft development opportunities through Sibylline, and I’m not telling tales out of school to say that she and I are cooking up some collaborations between Sibylline and Certain Age. Watch this space!
When I ask how it’s different, starting a business now as opposed to in her younger years, she muses a moment. She comes back to her brother, who helped build Foghorn with her – and the story of their relationship is one of the most touching parts of the book.
“He was a little voice in my head. And over my life, I had to get that voice for myself. Which is, ‘you know, you don't have to follow every, every idea down the road. You don't need to get ensnared by each one.”
Her sense of time is different too.
“Nowadays, if I don't know the answer today, it will be here in a few days if I just wait. And I don't think my younger self knew that. When I need something or the business needs something, if I start moving things in that direction, things line up. Without sounding too airy fairy about it, I think there's a little more help than maybe I realized. We’re not in all of this alone.”
Jean Shields Fleming is founder and editor of Certain Age.
Images:
Vicki DeArmon, Foghorn Cover & Foghorn archive photo courtesy of Vicki DeArmon
San Francisco twilight by Jean Shields Fleming
Sibylline Writers Retreat courtesy of Sibylline Press
So fabulously exciting and timely for this new world as the tower of patriarchy collapses of its own weight. Splendid article