Our Mission

Traditional publishing has always concentrated profit and control with the publisher, not the author. We don’t think that’s the only way it can work.

Riot House Publishing is a small, independent press based in Los Angeles, built around a simple bet: books can still be intellectual, inspiring, and genuinely entertaining, and readers will show up for writers who mean what they say. We look for authors with real conviction about power, institutions, or the world around them, and back that conviction with hands-on editorial collaboration, striking design, and full-scale publicity and distribution. No upfront fees, ever.

We publish a highly curated list of five to six titles a year. That’s not a limit we’re apologizing for. It’s how every author gets the attention a book actually needs. Every title we take on is a partnership, built on purpose as much as profit.

WHAT WE PUBLISH

Genre isn’t the test. Truth to power is.

We publish nonfiction by default: cultural criticism, narrative journalism, memoir, biography, and reported history that interrogates systems and illuminates lived experience. There’s room for the rare novel that makes an argument nonfiction can’t make as viscerally, in the tradition of 1984 or Percival Everett’s James. Romance, mystery, thriller, horror, poetry, and comics aren’t part of the list.

Our authors could plausibly share a shelf with Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, Eve Babitz, Patti Smith, and Naomi Klein, whether the subject is a sitting president or a jazz legend.

CURRENT TITLES

An Autocrat’s Playbook: Trump’s Tariffs and the Road to Economic Chaos — Jerry M. Rosenberg
A century of recession history meets the trade war of today, from a scholar who has chronicled every major economic crisis for more than sixty years.

Workin’, Cookin’, Steamin’, Relaxin’: Decoding Miles Davis — Alan Goldsher
A biography-memoir hybrid tracing five decades of Miles Davis’s reinvention of American music — and the author’s own life spent chasing it.

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That’s the list so far: a legal takedown of tariff policy and a Miles Davis memoir, five months apart. Proof that our shelf isn’t built around subject matter. It’s built around nerve. If your book has that kind of conviction, we want to read it.