Ten years ago, Melville House founders and publishers Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians were “Babes in the tangled wood of modern publishing,” writes WWWord.com in its recent profile of the indie publishing company. “They stumbled in and never left.”

Now in its 10th year, Melville House recently published its 200th title: the acclaimed debut novel The Fallback Plan by Leigh Stein, and remains as eclectic and risk-taking as its first title, the surprise bestselling poetry anthology Poetry After 9/11. If you have an interest in Melville House, great books, and how to be a “successful small publisher in a conglomerate world” (and if you’re reading this blog, you most likely do!) then WWWord’s profile of the company provides the most up to date summation of how Melville House came into existence, survived, and thrived over the tumultuous last decade.

The piece describes the unlikely success of Melville House’s first two books (Poetry After 9/11 and B.R. Myer‘s A Readers‘ Manifesto), the publicity lessons Johnson and Merians learned from the author they still “have nothing but respect and affection for,” Bernard-Henri Lévy and the company’s first bestseller, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, their resolute and unorthodox insistence on being a “no-niche” publishers (for example: recent successes have been the revolutionary and paradigm-shifting Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber, a collection of interviews with the late great Kurt Vonnegut, and the blackly comic Ukrainian crime novels Death and the Penguin and Penguin Lost by Andrey Kurkov), and their commitment to innovation in both digital and print books, as seen in the “online wizardry” of the HybridBooks project.

The story of Melville House, as with many American small business success stories, features maxed-out credit cards, kitchen table offices, no vacations, a steep learning curve (“What’s a P&L?”), and a little luck. (For example, the company nearly became Runagate Books, but, fortunately, the name was taken.) But more than anything, it’s clear the key ingredient is the company’s tireless devotion to that simple sounding but exceedingly difficult task:  “At the core, we publish books we like that we then try to market and publicize,” says Johnson.