"It is better to live in a RUGGED LAND and rule than to cultivate rich plains and be subject to others."
--Herodotus

Rugged Land publishes story-driven narrative nonfiction and fiction. A streamlined, focused, and proactive company, we produce only a select number of titles in order to put the most editorial and marketing effort into each one (no more than twenty titles per year total).

Rugged Land identifies the most compelling stories for a clearly defined audience, commissions and edits the work until it is among the finest in its genre, and then concentrates its energies on marketing and publicizing each title to its target readership.

In the past three years Rugged Land has published twenty-seven hardcovers and nine trade paperbacks (eight national bestsellers). Two Rugged Land books have been acquired by studios for feature films, one book has been bought by ESPN for a major television movie, and one book is in development at CBS for a sitcom.

Rugged Land books have been featured on The Today Show, Larry King Live, The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, The O'Reilly Factor, Fox and Friends, Imus in the Morning, The View, Weekend Today, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the Discovery Channel, MSNBC News, and America Online.

Rugged Land books have also been covered on the front page of The New York Times and the front page of The International Herald Tribune; in USA Today, The New York Times Book Review, and The Los Angeles Times; in all of the Hearst Corporation Newspapers (seven million daily readership); and in The New York Post, The New York Observer, The New York Sun, Daily Variety, People, Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, Golfer, and Golf Magazine, in addition to every trade publishing magazine (Publisher's Weekly, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal).

PUBLISHER

With over fifteen years of publishing experience, Shawn Coyne oversees all publishing at Rugged Land. Coyne’s bestselling authors at Rugged Land include Brett Favre, Catherine Crier, and Bill Murray. Previously, Coyne worked at Doubleday, St. Martin’s Press, and Dell Publishing.

I saw Sydney Pollack being interviewed on TV a couple years ago, and he said something very interesting. He said that it’s been his experience in the movie business that there are any number of collaborators who can tell you what’s wrong with a script, but damn few who can tell you how to make it right. Shawn Coyne has been the champion for my work from the opening bell. He bought Gates of Fire when no one else would touch it, when no one knew who the hell I was, when books like that were the last thing anybody wanted. He made it a bestseller. A couple of years later, when Tides of War was sprawling out of control, Shawn jumped on a plane with nineteen pages of notes and came out to work with me in California; we stayed up for three days (and about five hundred cups of coffee). Shawn not only identified what was wrong, he knew how to fix it. And he didn’t beat me up about it or ram it down my throat; by the time we were done, I thought I had figured it out all by myself. That’s an editor. That’s also fun. I’ve learned one thing in this racket and it’s this: when all is said and done, it isn’t just the work, it’s the people—and the fun you had working with them. I’m still working with Shawn, and that says it all.
-- Steven Pressfield, best-selling author of The Virtues of War, The War of Art, and The Legend of Bagger Vance