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Reference · Organization

Stoney Creek Publishing Group

Stoney Creek Publishing Group is an independent book publisher founded in 2020 by the journalist and author Loren C. Steffy.12 It publishes fiction and nonfiction with a concentration on Texas subjects and Texas writers, and it belongs to the Texas Book Consortium, a group of university and small presses whose books are warehoused, sold and distributed by Texas A&M University Press from College Station.12

Founding and purpose

According to its own account, Steffy founded the company to publish stories that larger publishing conglomerates had passed over, with a staff of editors, designers and marketers committed to producing books faster and with fewer obstacles than traditional publishing allows.1 The description of the press carried on the Texas A&M University Press site states the original aim more narrowly, as narrative nonfiction and biography, particularly on business topics.2

It reports two consecutive silver awards in the Ben Franklin Awards of the Independent Book Publishers Association, the first for The Last Trial of T. Boone Pickens as best new nonfiction and the second for The Big Empty as best new fiction.1 Later recognitions it lists include a 2025 first place in the true crime category of the BookFest Awards for Christena Stephens’s Bound in Silence, a 2025 Pencraft Award for Paul McGrath’s novel Left, and three Communicators Awards for its podcasts.1

Catalog

The publisher names its genres as historical fiction, biography, business, science fiction and romance, and describes its specialty as Texas stories written by Texas authors for Texas readers.1 A separate imprint, Hill Country Press, publishes historical fiction distributed only to online retailers.1

Regional history forms a steady part of the list. The Old Alcalde, by John A. Adams Jr., is a biography of Oran Milo Roberts, the jurist, secessionist and governor, following him from an Alabama boyhood to the convention that took Texas out of the Union.3 Voices of Camptown, by Charles Swenson, Tina B. Henderson and Robert R. Bubb, reconstructs a freedom colony in Washington County from its cemetery, tracing the churches, schools and businesses its residents built after emancipation; it appeared on June 10, 2025.4 Recent nonfiction has included Deluge Before Dawn, Thomas R. Fox’s account of the Guadalupe River flood in Kerr County on July 4, 2025, and Play Like He Would, Heath Hamrick’s history of a high school football team in Bremond after the death of a player in 1999.5 The same list carries thrillers, a poetry collection by Donald Mace Williams and a science fiction series by Paul McGrath.5

The Texas Book Consortium

Texas A&M University Press, founded in 1974, provides warehousing, order fulfillment and accounting for the Texas Book Consortium.26 Each consortium press acquires and publishes its own books, which the university press then houses and sells from its facility in College Station.2 The members it lists are the University of North Texas Press, TRP (the university press of Sam Houston State University), State House Press at The Texas Center of Schreiner University, Stephen F. Austin State University Press, Winedale Publishing and Stoney Creek Publishing Group.6 Their inventory is kept in the John H. Lindsey Building on the Texas A&M campus alongside the university press’s own books.6

Stoney Creek describes the arrangement from its side: the consortium distributes its books online and to bookstores across the United States and abroad.1 The university press publishes thirty to fifty new titles of its own each year, with Texas history, art and culture first among its subject fields.6

Richard Coke: Texan

Stoney Creek published Richard Coke: Texan, Rosser Newton’s biography of the governor and senator treated in this site’s entry on Richard Coke, on November 4, 2024.7 The publisher and its consortium membership are named in the preamble of Senate Resolution 520, which the Texas Senate adopted in May 2025.8 The book is described with the author’s other titles on the books page, and notices of it are gathered under press and recognition.

Several of the press’s history titles have met the program of the Texas State Historical Association. The publisher quotes a review of Voices of Camptown from the association’s journal, the Southwestern Historical Quarterly.4 At the association’s 2026 annual meeting, Adams presented a paper on Oran Roberts in a session on three nineteenth century governors.9

References

  1. Stoney Creek Publishing Group, About ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8

  2. Texas A&M University Press, Stoney Creek Publishing Group, Texas Book Consortium ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  3. Stoney Creek Publishing Group, The Old Alcalde ↩

  4. Stoney Creek Publishing Group, Voices of Camptown ↩ ↩2

  5. Stoney Creek Publishing Group, Home page and current list ↩ ↩2

  6. Texas A&M University Press, About the Press ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  7. Stoney Creek Publishing Group, Richard Coke: Texan ↩

  8. Texas Legislature Online, 89(R) SR 520, enrolled version ↩

  9. Texas State Historical Association Annual Meeting, The Lives and Forgotten Times of Governors Coke, Throckmorton and Roberts ↩