Denver-based indie publisher Unbridled Books has announced that its July release, the debut novel Song of the Crow by Layne Maheu, will have a marketing budget of $50,000. In New York, figures like that might get disbursed with some frequency, but it’s a first for Unbridled—and, in fact, for the press’s two co-founders, Greg Michalson and Fred Ramey, who have also worked together at MacMurray & Beck and BlueHen/Putnam. “We’ve never offered up a book like this before,” Ramey explains in a press release. “Song of the Crow is a book that should appeal to a wide span of readers. We want to give it every chance to do so.”
The laudatory comparisons have been flowing as freely as the money; on the publisher’s website, the book is described as “recalling both the magical imagination of Richard Adams’s Watership Down and the spiritual richness of Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent,” while a quote from Arundel Books owner Phil Bevis refers to the novel as “a cross between the Magical Realism of Garcia Marquez and Ted Hughes in prose.”