Philly Is a Hot New Hub for Publishing Insiders

Literary agent Jennifer Herrera moved to Philadelphia from New York, and has had great success here — including the publication of her new novel. / Photographs by Matthew Slutsky

It’s happy hour at a local brewery and the New York literary agents are huddled, discussing market trends. Someone from book production is ordering a drink, an editor is going over her manuscript wish list, an agent is showing off his client’s most recent bestseller. But these literary types — most of whom made their bones in New York publishing — are not in New York. They’re in Philadelphia, which has, in recent years, become a something of a magnet for the literati who once felt professionally tethered to Manhattan.

Although Philly has a vaunted history of publishing (Bibles and textbooks, particularly), New York has long been the heartbeat of the industry; Philadelphia didn’t even get a homegrown mainstream publisher until 1973, when Running Press Books was founded. Originally focused on prescriptive non-fiction books (the industry term for self-help and how-to), Running Press evolved over the years to have several notable successes: Jen Sincero’s runaway hit You Are a Badass sold over 4 million copies, while RP’s “mini kits” — tiny books paired with toys — sold more than 6 million copies in 2025 alone.

Philly’s second mainstream house, Quirk Books, came along in 2002, and had its own share of “quirky” successes over the years — the outlandish mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies sold over 1.8 million copies, and the unsettling Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and its sequels have sold more than 9 million copies combined.

From the outside, Philly publishing has always seemed like that oddball cousin who’s forever coming up with bizarre ideas. And most of the serious industry people lived, worked and conducted their lives in NYC . But over the past handful of years, a groundswell of writers, editors, and agents have shifted the narrative, turning Philly into a micro-hub for publishing insiders.

Take, for example, Eric Smith, founder of the Philadelphia Bookstore Crawl, and Trellis Literary Management’s Dana Murphy, both of whom have been shouting from the rooftops about Philly for years.

“I always encourage publicists, if you are making a book tour, to send your author to Philly,” Murphy says. “It’s a hyperliterate and literary city.”

Murphy has herself made it her mission to champion Philly voices. She sold Queen Village resident Kelsey McKinney’s non-fiction book You Didn’t Hear This From Me to Hachette, a Big Five house, at auction. (The book went on to become a New York Times bestseller.) She also represents Olivia Muenter — who was a Philly author at the time Murphy approached her. Muenter’s book, Little One, which also sold at auction to an imprint of Hachette, became a USA Today bestseller.

Writer Emma Copley Eisenberg, who released Fat Swim this past summer / Photograph by Kyle Kielinski

Other players on the scene include Emma Copley Eisenberg, who wrote this past summer’s hit Fat Swim, and Joshua Demaree, co-founders of the literary organization Blue Stoop, a load-bearing center for Philly’s literary community. Eisenberg also organized the first bimonthly Philly Publishing Meetup, which draws about 130 Philly-based publishing professionals to local bars to trade notes, build connections, discuss industry changes and, naturally, gossip.

Meantime, New York publishing types are flocking to Philly — which is now home to people from every major American publishing house. Liz Kossnar, senior editor at Little Brown Books for Young Readers, and her husband Charlie Olsen, literary agent at InkWell Management, relocated to Philly in 2020 to escape their tiny NYC apartment. They hadn’t meant to move long-term, but the personal and professional communities they’ve been able to nurture encourage them to stay. “We wouldn’t be able to have there what we have here,” Kossnar says.

There’s also Lexy Bloom, vice president at Alfred A. Knopf. There’s Bailey Thomas, divisional sales director at HarperCollins. There are nearly two dozen literary agents, such as Veronia Goldstein of Dunow, Carlson, & Lerner, Leslie Zampetti (who owns her own agency), and, well, yours truly, a literary agent at the David Black Agency.

I moved to Philly in 2020 and wasn’t planning on making it permanent. As a literary agent, I worried that living so far from New York City would hurt my career. But the truth is that since moving to Philly, I’ve experienced some of my biggest successes: I’ve had my first New York Times bestseller, my first IndieBound bestseller, and I’ve written and published two novels. In fact, most of the publishing insiders I spoke to for this article say their careers have actually reached new heights since they moved here.

Philadelphia is no longer the quirky cousin. While New York may still be the heartbeat of publishing, Philly is where the magic happens.