Project Person // Profile #3

Meet Peyton Roberts // Project Person #3

What project are you currently working on? I currently find myself living out a childhood dream to publish books. The vision for Anchor Line Press is to publish meaningful, original stories that connect readers to love, family, faith and shared human experiences.

What did it take to get started? Starting a publishing company was fairly straightforward. I chose a name, social media handles, and web address. I formed an LLC, got an EIN, opened a business checking account, applied for a local business license, and purchased ISBNs. The true investment came when preparing the first manuscript for publishing with professional editing, formatting, and cover art, and implementing the marketing/advertising plan to share the title with readers.

What’s your most impressive or favorite stat? In its first six weeks, My Dearest Bea received earned media coverage from five traditional news outlets, including local TV, regional newspaper, and three national military publications. It was also an Amazon #1 new release in three categories.

What’s something that never would have happened for you without this project? Simple as it sounds, without starting Anchor Line Press, I wouldn't know what it's like to be on the publishing side of book production, to guide the necessary behind-the-scenes tasks that make a story ready for readers.

What keeps you up at night? Thinking about where to focus my creative time, whether on writing, publishing, or marketing. This busy and full (and wonderful!) life season means focusing on one creative effort at a time.

What are some of your other projects? When my husband retires from the Navy next summer, our family plans to embark on a yearlong cross-country road trip. I plan to blog our travels as we decompress from two decades of active-duty service, sharing stories and lessons from our 24-year military relationship that began in 2001, right before 9/11 changed everything.

I also may or may not be chipping away at the next novel and brainstorming the sequel to Beneath the Seams.

When Peyton Roberts was five, her mother published a book.

“I grew up thinking that’s just what people did. They wrote books,” she told me.

So Peyton started writing books, too. Throughout her childhood, she wrote volumes of them, even including some early fan fiction (see: Gus, based on Cinderella’s favorite mouse). She created her own publishing press, as well: Peyton’s Publishing Productions, where she would create a final product with a cover and dedication page, all in her best cursive.

But her book-writing dried up as she got older and her thinking changed. “Other people wrote books,” she began to believe.

She married her husband shortly after he graduated from the Naval Academy, and the military became the driver in their lives, affecting where they lived and what job opportunities she pursued.

When their second child was born and her husband deployed for a sixth time, she craved a creative outlet. And so she started writing a novel, an idea that had been brewing since the couple was stationed overseas in Guam. She dedicated nap times to writing, each day aiming to crank out 500 words before the baby woke up.

I remember the first time she casually mentioned writing a novel to me, as I was firmly in the “other people write books” camp. (This moment, along with the time she told me that no one is born a novelist, are what I credit to the start of my own novel-writing journey!)

After four years of imagining her characters, Peyton spent two years writing BENEATH THE SEAMS, a social impact novel about the human cost of fast fashion. Inspired by the 2012 factory fire in Dhaka, Bangladesh alongside Peyton’s own journey learning about the crisis, the novel shares a fictional tale inspired by real events.

I can honestly say that reading the book—an enjoyable piece of fiction, not some ranty social media post or expose—forever changed the way I shop for clothes.

She published through an established small press and sold over 1,000 copies in the first week.

Like her mother, she became a published author.

After the book was published, she started writing articles—many for military websites—and after getting a few fun bylines under her belt (The New York Times, for instance!), she turned her attention to another story idea that had been in the works for years, this one even more personal.

Peyton’s family had found a box of her grandparents’ letters, written in the early years of their marriage when her grandfather, known by his grandchildren as Shoopa, was deployed on the USS Midway just after marrying her grandmother, Bea.

Peyton was incredibly close to her grandparents, but until she read these letters, she hadn’t realized they were married during her grandfather’s military service.

Her grandmother, like Peyton, was a Navy spouse.

The letters were rich with shared emotion and experiences, even with 60 years between her grandparents’ time as newlyweds and her own.

The car and house maintenance that fell to Bea while Shoopa was away. The frustrations of starting a new life in a new duty station with her husband gone. The grief of losing a family member while Shoopa was on deployment and unable to be with family.

Peyton had experienced each of these herself, and there was something so grounding to read Bea’s relatable real-time thoughts.

Even the return address proved eerily similar. Shoopa mailed his letters to Bea at an address in Norfolk, Virginia—just a few miles from where Peyton and her family were now stationed.

Peyton originally shared the letters with family but knew many others would love to read them—especially Shoopa’s students, many of whom stayed in contact with him until he died.

So she decided to do what she had done countless times before as a child.

She decided to publish a book.

But she didn’t want to sign over the rights to this story by working with a publisher. These were her family’s letters, after all. So she decided to start her own small press, a grown-up version of Peyton’s Publishing Productions.

She named it Anchor Line Press, paying homage to the anchor line—the often overlooked piece of rope or chain connecting a ship to its grounding force. Peyton noticed we all seemed to find something that held us steady, something we returned to—be it God or love or values or family. And meaningful stories, in her experience, were often that connecting line between those forces and the lives we lived.

In order to publish the book of letters under her press, she needed to buy two ISBN numbers—one for paperback print and one for digital. But ISBNs were only sold in quantities of 1, 10, or 100.

So she bought 100, in faith that there would be many more books published under Anchor Line Press one day.

She released MY DEAREST BEA on May 1, 2024, and it became the #1 new release in three categories on Amazon, including Literary Letters.

Peyton screenshot the Amazon ranking with a smile, wishing her grandfather could see this. Following his time in the Navy, Shoopa was a band director and literature teacher for more than 50 years. Would he ever have imagined his letters would have outranked Tolkien and Hemingway?!

With all of her writing, Peyton’s done well securing press on her own, including a piece printed in The Sunday Times, shared by the Modern Love podcast. Numerous military websites and magazines have shared her story as well, and during launch week of My Dearest Bea, her local NBC affiliate came to her home and filmed a three-minute profile of Peyton as a writer and Navy spouse.

She accredits intentional, personal reach-out to all of this press. She researched reporters and their usual interests, and she reached out with a hook she thought they might find interesting—the clear, concise, and compelling who/what/where/when/why.

Thoughtful, individual reach-out also proved helpful when securing a foreword to MY DEAREST BEA. Through a connection with another writer, Peyton was introduced to the historian of the USS Midway. Meeting with him in person one day aboard the ship, she asked him if he would be willing to write the foreword to the book—and she was incredibly moved when he said yes.

“Peyton has not merely transcribed her grandfather’s letters", Historian Karl Zingheim writes in the foreword, “she has researched the backstories of the situations described herein and has provided a fine encapsulation of Bill and Bea’s marriage…”

(The book was also recently added to the USS Midway’s gift shop!)

Grown-up Peyton can now confidently claim the titles of writer and novelist, but she’s been particularly intrigued by the new title of entrepreneur. With Anchor Line Press, she started an LLC, got a business license, and opened a bank account. She’s loved owning the badge of Small Business Owner and has enjoyed the camaraderie with other business owners, like the bakery owner—another Navy spouse—who hosted her book launch party.

She’s not sure what’s next for Anchor Line Press, but as her husband is just months away from his Navy retirement, she has plenty of ideas. Could she now share some of her own military spouse stories? Or what about an anthology of essays from other military spouses who may not have the benefit of a publishing press in their back pockets?

There are a number of significant milestones as a writer: finishing a first draft, completing the zillionth and final draft of manuscript, securing a contract of some kind, getting the first copy in your hand, seeing your first copy in someone else’s hand, receiving your first review from someone you don’t know…

But Peyton has now reached a new milestone: a writer of books, plural.

And she has 98 ISBNs to go.

-Callie

Next week, I’ll share a primer (and a few hard-earned lessons) all about the logistics of starting your own LLC. Stay tuned!