A Bobcat Doesn't Ask Permission
It isn’t a lion. There’s no pride, hierarchy or cat politics. It’s small, solitary, and clever — surviving on wit rather than size, entirely uninterested in making a statement. You’ll be lucky if you ever see one.
That felt like the right name for a press.
How Bobcat Press started
It began as a colophon.
I’d written a book, and a book needs a publisher. My accomplished author friends all recommended to self-publish, but I wanted something more professional looking, so I registered an imprint, put a small bobcat on the copyright page, and thought that was the end of it.
Then a writer I know asked whether her book could carry the same mark. Then another.
That’s the whole origin story. Bobcat Press exists because writers kept asking for a place to belong that didn’t require anyone’s blessing — and it turned out I’d already built one without meaning to.
What We Believe
A book doesn’t need permission to exist. Gatekeepers serve their own economics, not the work. If the book is good, it’s good — whether or not someone in New York agrees.
The author keeps everything. Copyright, royalties, control. We’re the publisher of record, not the owner. That isn’t generosity; it’s just how we think it should be.
Small is not a lesser version of big. A press that publishes a handful of books it believes in isn’t failing to be a big press. It’s doing something else for its own reasons.
Legitimacy is cheap to give and expensive to lack. An imprint, an ISBN, a colophon, a catalog. Small things that let a book be taken seriously. We hand them over and get out of the way.
Our Authors
Every book under the Bobcat mark belongs entirely to the person who wrote it. We just gave it a place to stand.
Who's Behind It?
I’m Chris Barclay. I’ve spent most of my adult life in Asia — thirty-eight years of it — building businesss in China and a private members’ club in Chiang Mai, and writing in the gaps between. I published The Forgetting Game in 2025, a memoir about a Lawa shaman in the hills of northern Thailand and what he inspired in me. Beyond Measure follows: a book about joy, and what the habit of optimizing everything costs us. I’ve been writing on my blog Unbounded Life since 2008.
Bobcat Press is based in Seattle. It is not a large operation. We like that.