What could be a more positive sign of a healthy book industry than the launch of a new publishing venture? Crooked Lane Books, a new crime fiction imprint, debuts at BEA with its fall titles. The company’s editorial director, Matt Martz, who learned the ropes at St. Martin’s Press and Minotaur Books, tells Show Daily that everything began when he and Dan Weiss, now chief publishing consultant to Crooked Lane Books, brainstormed a few years ago with John Lippman, Bookspan’s CEO. “We started thinking that there might be some holes in mystery publishing in general, and we had a feeling that there were genres that were underserved. Because of Bookspan’s direct contact with its readership, they were seeing from some surveys that readers were asking for things that they weren’t quite seeing in their submission pile.”

Asked for examples, he says, “Our readers are very interested in having more female sleuths, female detectives, be they professional or amateur. They also love to solve puzzles, so we want to make sure that they have quality-driven reads with that element in it. And right now everybody is talking about suspense—be it psychological, domestic, or romantic—that popped in the research, too.” Crooked Lane Books also has a special relationship with Bookspan. As Weiss, formerly publisher at large at St. Martin’s Press and managing director and publisher of Barnes and Noble’s educational publishing company, says, “We’re an independent publishing company that benefits from some of the book club infrastructure as well as its sales and marketing resources.”

Suggesting that some might think it foolish to start up a new company in this day and age, Weiss laughs and says, “First of all, yes, it’s a little crazy. Second, we think we have a pretty good shot because we have a good model. Our books are reader-focused and data-driven, and we also think that given the decline in the number of bookstores and reviews, our relationships to the book clubs gives us an opportunity to showcase our titles to a large and interested audience.”

Crooked Lane Books is supporting new and midlist authors, but also went after some bestselling writers, including Wendy Corsi Staub, whose first book with Crooked Lane, Nine Lives (with an announced print run of 75,000 copies), out in October, is the publisher’s first title. “I wanted to write a cozy and branch out from what I usually do,” Staub says. “I did a hardcover YA series a few years back based in Lily Dale, a small upstate New York town populated entirely by psychic mediums. People have been writing me ever since asking for more, but I knew I couldn’t continue that series. This new story idea presented itself when a stray pregnant cat landed on my doorstep in June. So I created a heroine who’s just an ordinary mom who is led to Lily Dale by a pregnant stray cat.”

Staub, ever the busy writer, is starting a new Mundy’s Landing series with Morrow in September with Blood Red and notes that while she loves doing suspense with that imprint, it’s nice to also have the opportunity to do a cozy with this new house: “Anything new and fresh is great to be part of because it feels like there’s been so much reshuffling over the past few years—this is real positive news.”

Looking to the future, Weiss notes, “We hope within five years to be an important publisher of another category, possibly romance or science fiction, very much like Berkley or Kensington, who we admire.”

You can meet Martz and Weiss at their booth (838B), and Staub will be signing galleys there on Friday morning at 10 a.m.

This article appeared in the May 27, 2015 edition of PW BEA Show Daily.