About
The House
Solid Base House publishes practical business thinking for founders, operators, and independent professionals: books built on solid ground, meant to be read, marked up, and put to work.
What we publish
Short books by people who did the work.
We look for writing by practitioners: people whose business depends on the advice they give, and who wrote it down for their own customers or students before anyone thought of it as a book. That writing tends to be blunt, specific, and free of the hedging that fills most business shelves.
Where the original is not in English, we translate it ourselves and edit for clarity only. The author’s voice, examples, and opinions stay as they were written. We would rather publish a book you argue with than one you agree with and forget.
Our first series is The Insider’s Playbook. Its opening title is Rich People Don’t Explain by Tu Weixin, a Shenzhen marketer whose daily writing for her paying students became the fifty-one chapters of the book.
How a title is made
Read, translate, edit, typeset. In that order.
- Read everything first. We do not commission books. We find writing that already has readers and ask whether it deserves more of them.
- Translate by hand. A machine draft is a starting point at best. The rhythm, the jokes and the insults are the book; they are translated by a person and checked against the original line by line.
- Edit for clarity only. We cut repetition and fix what a reader outside the original market cannot follow. We do not soften opinions or add ours.
- Typeset to be used. Our editions are A4 PDFs with generous margins, real chapter structure and page numbers, made to be read on a tablet or printed and written on.
The mark
Strata.
Two seams of limestone over a bronze base. Solid ground is built up slowly, in layers, and it holds whatever you put on it. That is the kind of business thinking we want to publish, and the kind of book we want to make.
People
Publisher
Solid Base House is an independent imprint. Its publisher is Ludovic Chan, who also runs the consultancy that applies the same thinking to clients’ businesses. The House is based in Vancouver.
For rights, permissions, translation, and press enquiries, write to [email protected] or use the contact page.