Wyoming Book Publishing Services for the Least-Populous State's Biggest Stories

Wyoming's literary life runs through its libraries and a few long-running statewide groups.

• Wyoming Center for the Book. The state's Library of Congress affiliate moved from the Wyoming State Library, its home since 1995, to Wyoming Humanities in Laramie in 2021. It runs Letters About Literature and picks Wyoming's titles for the National Book Festival.
• Wyoming Writers, Inc. Started in 1974 after a writing workshop, the statewide group holds an annual conference whose faculty includes literary agents and publishers, runs an annual contest and keeps a list of local writer groups.
• Laramie County Library System, Cheyenne. Its Local Author Celebration fills the Cottonwood Room at the Cheyenne Library with local and regional writers of romance, Wyoming history, poetry, memoir and children's books.
• Booklovers Bash. The Laramie County Library Foundation's annual evening began in a library parking lot and now draws sold-out crowds of 450, held in Cheyenne.
• Wind City Books, Casper. A bookstore at 136 E 2nd Street that hosts signings with local authors.
• Wyoming Arts Council. Individual writers can apply. Creative Writing Fellowships go each year to one poet, one creative nonfiction writer and one fiction writer, and two memorial writing awards each pay $1,000 to a Wyoming writer.

Where we fit in: a conference critique or a library author table tells you whether the book works. When it does, we handle the edit, the cover and the store listings.

There are three ways to get a book out. Traditional houses pay for publication and take the rights, so they choose carefully. Hybrid outfits split the bill with you. Self-publishing services charge a fee and leave every right and every royalty with the author.

Among book publishers in Wyoming, High Plains Press near Glendo publishes about four books a year, focused on Old West history, plus one title a year in its "Poetry of the American West" series; poets query with a ten-poem sample. Next door, the South Dakota Historical Society Press also considers nonfiction about Wyoming people and events.

Whoever you talk to, get three answers in writing: who owns the ISBN and the store logins, who collects the royalties, and what the total price will be. Kinetic Digital Publishers is a self-publishing service, so the ISBN, the logins and the royalties are yours.

Each year Wyoming chooses two books for the Great Reads from Great Places program at the National Book Festival. The 2025 picks were Mark E. Miller's A Sometimes Paradise: Reflections on Life in a Wyoming Ranch Family and A Home for Steamboat by Casey Rislov and Zachary Pullen, both written and illustrated by Wyomingites.

Steamboat has his own adult book, too: High Plains Press tells the story of the bucking horse that became the symbol of Wyoming.