In early 2023, a few months before Entangled Publishing was set to release Rebecca Yarros’s novel Fourth Wing, CEO and publisher Liz Pelletier called a company-wide meeting. Pelletier, who cofounded the indie publisher in 2011, had bet big on the book, ordering a 315,000-copy first hardcover print run and making it the inaugural title of Entangled’s newly launched Red Tower imprint. She knew it would be a massive hit, and this would be everyone’s first time working on something of this magnitude. Mistakes would be inevitable, she said, but ultimately edifying—so she gave her staff what she called “permission to fail.”
If the Entangled team at any point failed during the rollout of Fourth Wing, you wouldn’t know it. With an assist from BookTok, where Yarros’s novel swiftly amassed a cult following, Fourth Wing became an overnight sensation, enshrining romantasy and new adult as the hot genres du jour. Since its release in May 2023, Fourth Wing has sold more than 2.7 million copies, per Circana BookScan; its sequel, Iron Flame, published last November, has sold more than 1.8 million. Amazon MGM Studios quickly snapped up the rights to both books for a series adaptation, and, in short order, Pelletier cofounded the production studio Premeditated Productions, licensing Entangled’s backlist and inking a three-year first-look TV and film deal with Amazon MGM.
Though Yarros’s Empyrean series has been Entangled’s biggest blockbuster to date, it’s hardly the first. In the publisher’s first year in business, the inaugural novels in Jennifer Probst’s romance series Marriage to a Billionaire and Jennifer L. Armentrout’s YA paranormal fantasy series Lux made a splash with readers. And in 2020, Tracy Wolff’s YA vampire series Crave, published by the Entangled Teen imprint, broke out, with the first three volumes selling 400,000 copies in less than a year, and all six volumes selling more than 3.5 million copies to date. Meanwhile, Entangled has amassed a backlist of more than 2,000 titles, publishing roughly 50 books per year across its three primary imprints—Red Tower, Entangled Teen, and Amara—as well as another 15–20 digital-only titles.
Readers first
Pelletier, who lives in Sonoma, Calif., came to publishing from the world of tech, where she spent decades as a software engineer and “troubleshooter for hire” specializing in systems analysis and business management. A lifelong romance reader, she decided to try her hand at writing a novel, only to discover that she much preferred editing other people’s books.
In 2010, she cofounded the online writing community Savvy Authors. After a year of talking with writers, she identified what she saw as an “opportunity to bridge the gap in the marketplace between traditional publishing and self-publishing.” Enlisting Stacy Cantor Abrams, then an editor at Bloomsbury and currently Entangled’s VP of operations, Pelletier launched Entangled from her living room in the hope of championing authors who might not find a home at a commercial publisher or literary press but weren’t able to shoulder the responsibilities of self-publishing or pay the fees of hybrid publishing.
The company has come a long way from its early days, when it focused on e-books and published some 30 titles per month. Entangled has since shifted its emphasis to print—its first runs range from 30,000 to a whopping 850,000, as in the case of Mai Corland’s 2024 romantasy Five Broken Blades. Over the past dozen years, Entangled has grown quickly and garnered a reputation for upending conventional industry wisdom, which Pelletier chalks up to her own inexperience. “When I came into this industry, I had no real understanding of the traditional way of doing things,” she says. “So I didn’t know enough about publishing to know what we couldn’t do.”
In practice, that nontraditional approach takes many forms. Most recently, Entangled’s Amara imprint began acquiring print rights to self-published romance e-books, with plans to publish 50 such titles annually. And from the beginning, the publisher has used shorter lead times between acquisition and publication, test-marketed every book before its release (and delayed the ones that were not up to snuff), and adjusted marketing copy, cover designs, and ad campaigns based on reader feedback.
“If you put the reader first, you’ll always succeed,” Pelletier says. “We’ve built our business on being responsive to what readers want.”
This year, readers’ demands were unmistakable, with romance, romantasy, and new adult titles dominating book sales. Yarros’s Iron Flame and Fourth Wing were the #8 and #9 bestselling books of 2024, respectively, per Circana Bookscan, accompanied in the top 10 by two titles from Sarah J. Maas’s new adult romantasy series A Court of Thorns and Roses and Colleen Hoover’s new adult romance It Ends with Us. Pelletier says Gen-Z readers are driving the market for these genres. Not only do they identify with the novels’ young protagonists and enjoy the escapist bent of the stories and settings but they can quickly and widely proselytize their favorite books via BookTok and Bookstagram, which Pelletier says have been a “major engine for sales.”
Patricia Doherty, national accounts manager at Macmillan, which has distributed Entangled since 2013, credits part of the publisher’s meteoric rise among younger readers to its ability to “harness social media, especially TikTok and Instagram,” in order to “connect directly with the reading audience.” One way it has done this is by tailoring books’ packaging to the visual language of social media through special deluxe editions, which Doherty says have “changed the landscape of publishing.”
Since pivoting to print, Entangled has taken advantage of genre readers’ tendency to treat books as “decor, objects of art, as well as a way to signal what communities you belong to,” Pelletier says. The first printing of Fourth Wing, for example, featured black sprayed edges with stenciled dragons—an unconventional and hugely successful move that many publishers rushed to imitate. A number of subsequent Entangled titles have gotten similar treatments, which helps build buzz around forthcoming books and make first run copies more covetable.
Out of the box
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Entangled, which has 30 full-time employees plus part-time staff, has also taken a different approach to building its company culture, with flexible hours, high wages, and low turnover—three things publishing jobs are not exactly known for. The publisher has been completely remote since its inception—a full decade before the pandemic made working from home commonplace—and allows employees to set their own schedules and boundaries. Staffers are also encouraged to explore different departments (the company’s finance director once worked in publicity), and are given tuition reimbursements and free educational opportunities.
“The majority of us have been here forever,” says associate publisher Jessica Turner. “We all have such deep respect for one another that it really comes in handy when it’s crunch time and everyone bands together to bring a project across the finish line, or gives us the confidence to speak our opinion about something that isn’t even a project on our slate.”
Talking with Pelletier’s colleagues, certain words and phrases recurred in describing her skill set: an ability to “pivot,” a capacity for “innovation,” reliably “out-of-the-box” thinking (“Liz encourages us to believe that the box doesn’t exist,” says Entangled associate publisher Justine Bylo). But ultimately, Pelletier’s composite portrait was defined by what colleagues see as a remarkable penchant for trend spotting. Entangled publicity director Lizzy Mason praised Pelletier’s “almost prescient ability to know what readers will want next,” and author Hannah Nicole Maehrer lauded Pelletier’s “eye for what’s next.”
At Macmillan, the same sentiment prevailed. CEO Jon Yaged called Pelletier a “quintessential entrepreneur” with “the ability to spot a trend before most others even start looking.” Veronica Gonzalez, senior director of client services, agreed, and commended Pelletier’s “intuitive understanding of what readers want—often before they even know it themselves.”
Now, coming off a year of record sales, Pelletier is once again looking into the future. Of course, she’ll be busy developing Entangled IP through Premeditated Productions, which is currently at work with Legendary Pictures on an adaptation of Maehrer’s Assistant to the Villain, the 2023 romantasy novel inspired by the author’s viral TikTok series.
But Pelletier still has her eye on the book world. “There are parts of the market that are ripe for positive disruption, like young adult and what used to be called category romance, where I see us playing a new role in the next year,” she says, teasing plans to be announced in January. She is also eager to move into other new adult subgenres beyond romantasy, including contemporary, science fiction, dystopian narratives, and thrillers, which she thinks are rapidly picking up steam. And when Pelletier “predicts success, it’s wise to listen,” says Liz Tzetzo, VP of client services at Macmillan.
Indeed, corporate publishing could learn a thing or two from Entangled, which remains light on its feet even as its ranks and revenues grow. Next to the Big Five, the youngest of which is 100 years old, the team at Entangled are “still the new kids on the block,” Pelletier says. In fact, during last year’s pre–Fourth Wing pep talk, she encouraged staffers to lean into their greeness.
“I told them, ‘Let’s skin our knees and show the adults how to have fun in publishing,’ ” Pelletier says. “And that sense of fun and adventure is what drives all of us.”
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