Thornapple Press is a Canadian publisher of non-fiction books that discuss relationships, love, sexuality and relational ethics from unique and underrepresented perspectives. This includes books on consensual nonmonogamy, kink, sex work, harm reduction, LGBTQIAA+ identities, families, mental health, disability and related topics.

BCBookLook: How did you come to be a publishing professional? Was it a longtime dream?

Eve Rickert: I actually started out my professional life training to be a scientist. I got a bachelor of arts and sciences with a concentration in biology, worked in cancer research for awhile, started a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology, and ended up getting an interdisciplinary master’s degree in environmental studies. In graduate school, I volunteered as an editor for the journal Environmental Practice, which was based at my university. I moved to Canada (via marriage) after getting my degree, and spun my wheels for awhile trying to figure out how to enter the Canadian job market as a biologist. In the meantime, I started taking freelance science editing jobs and taking courses in SFU’s editing certificate program. I also did two internships, as an editor at Conservation magazine (in Seattle, now Anthropocene), and as a journalist at High Country News (in Paonia, Colorado). Based on that experience and coursework, in 2008 I got a job as an associate publisher at D&M Publishers Inc. I actually got two job offers that week within a day of each other. One was the editing job, and the other was in the herbarium at UBC. The UBC job paid more, and was much closer to what I’d originally trained for. But I’d discovered by then that as much as I loved science, I didn’t want to commit to a single field, and I loved the constant flow of new material and ideas that I encountered as a writer and editor. I decided to commit to publishing. D&M at the time owned Greystone, which publishes popular science, so I took the job for the opportunity to work on science and environment books.

I’ve done a few things since then I’ve been really proud of. In 2010–11, I led the team that developed the exhibits for the then-new Beaty Biodiversity Museum at UBC. After leaving there, I founded my first company, Talk Science to Me Communications Inc., which provides a full suite of publication support services (writing, fact-checking, editing, design, consulting, etc.) to clients primarily working in the natural science and sustainability fields (though as you’ll see below, we do a wide variety of work). In 2013, I co-founded my press, then called Thorntree Press and based in Portland, Oregon, and in 2014 we crowdfunded and published the first edition of More Than Two, which went on to sell over 175,000 copies over 10 years. In 2018, I was hired as the publisher at the Royal BC Museum, where I spent four years modernizing their program and published several important and bestselling books, including Spirits of the Coast, Mushrooms of British Columbia, What Was Said to Me and Pressed Plants. Pressed Plants, coincidentally, was the last book I produced at the museum, and was written by Linda Lipsen, the collections curator at the UBC Herbarium—so that was a neat full-circle moment! (Unfortunately, the museum’s new CEO decided to discontinue the publishing program, which until then had been BC’s oldest continuously operating book publisher, after I left.) I’ve also had lots of moments where I’ve thought “I can’t believe I am publishing something by this person!”

BCBL: What challenges did you face with your first publishing company?

ER: When my first co-author and I crowdfunded the first edition of More Than Two, we started an LLC based in Portland, Oregon, basically just to hold the funds and handle the production costs. We didn’t actually intend to start a publishing company; we expected the book to be a one-off. But just a couple of months after More Than Two came out, two different authors approached us about publishing their books, as well, and my co-author was working on a second book (a memoir). So we held another crowdfunding campaign for those three books, which also succeeded. It continued like that for a couple more years, until it was basically, “Well, I guess we’re publishers now.” My team at Talk Science handled all the editing and production.

My business partner and I split up in 2018, and in 2021 we reached an agreement for me to acquire his shares of the press. At that point, I had stopped publishing new titles while we resolved our legal disputes, so I didn’t publish anything in 2021. I decided to rebrand the press and bring it to Canada, under Talk Science—since it was the same team already, anyway. During the time that I’d been working at the Royal BC Museum, one of my editors, Hazel Boydell (we’d worked together back at D&M) had been handling day-to-day operations, and I promoted her to associate publisher. The rebrand and move was when I really got to think about what I wanted the press to be and do. We’d built a niche for ourselves publishing thoughtful books on sex and relationships—books that brought forward unique perspectives, offer challenging ideas, and that focused on ethics and consent—books for “sensitive overthinkers,” as one of my authors once said to me. We’ve made that our mandate, and have been broadening our list from books focused on nonmonogamy to books on kink, sex work, harm reduction, LGBTQIAA+ identities, families, mental health, disability, addiction and related topics, as well as shifting our focus to Canadian authors.

The move to Canada actually proved to be a major hurdle and a significant expense. I took some big and unexpected tax hits on that, and we struggled with positioning our first season (fall 2022) with new ISBNs and a new brand. But we got through it thanks to the success of a couple of our top sellers. The legal issues with my former business partner and co-author—not just ownership of the press, but copyright to More Than Two—were also lengthy, expensive and draining, dragging on for almost five years.

BCBL: What does Thornapple mean and why did you choose it for the name of your publishing company?

ER: The “thorn tree” in “Thorntree Press” was the hawthorn tree, a reference to Hawthorne Street in Portland, where my business partner and I first met. I wanted the new name to call back to that but be different. Hawthorns are also sometimes called thornapples, and thornapple is also one name given to plants in the genus Datura. Both hawthorn and Datura have medicinal, ritual or magical uses in some cultures. The name “Thornapple” seemed a fitting name to acknowledge the press’s origins while evoking our vision of books that are both healing and transformational.

BCBL: What is your current booklist? Please provide titles and brief descriptions.

ER: We have 27 books in print, and publish about two per season, so I’ll just mention some highlights and group them by theme. The full list is here.