The Publisher Who Bet That Michigan Was Big Enough

The odd thing about a regional publisher is that its adjective sounds apologetic. Regional. A smaller map, a smaller market, a smaller ambition. Bill Haney appears to have read the word differently. For him, Michigan was not a boundary around a story. It was a method for finding one.

Haney had already spent a career learning how public reputations get assembled. He edited at The Michigan Daily, worked in corporate communications and advertising, helped run a public-relations business, and moved between Detroit and Manhattan. He also built a publishing company called Momentum Books. Then, in 2002, he created MBBooks inside his consulting company, MB Communications. It was a compact second act: fewer books, a tighter filter, and an editor with decades of names in his telephone book.

That history explains what MB Communications actually does better than the usual industry labels. It is part communications shop, part independent press and part machine for turning proximity into nonfiction. The books orbit Michigan lives, Michigan institutions and the Great Lakes imagination. The customer is the reader who suspects the local version of a national story may be the more revealing one.

The product was access

Consider What They Were Thinking: Reflections on Michigan Difference-Makers, released in 2014 by MBBooks and Seattle Book Company. Its subjects included novelist Elmore Leonard, broadcaster Ernie Harwell, filmmaker Sue Marx, civil-liberties figure Milo Radulovich, activist physician Jack Kevorkian, former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, basketball executive Joe Dumars and Corvette engineer Ed Cole. This could easily have become a parade of civic statues. Haney's premise was that the statues were the problem.

He told Michigan Public that much of what had already been written about prominent people felt superficial and repetitive. He believed there was more to them. That observation changed the assignment: do not summarize the public record; go looking for the private hinge. The familiar name attracts the reader, but the unfamiliar motive earns the page.

“They may have this persona and this public image, but at the end of the day, they're really just people.”Bill Haney, speaking with Michigan Public

That is also the company's competitive position. A university press can bring scholarly authority. A national trade house can bring distribution and an advance. An author-services firm can bring production capacity. MB Communications brought accumulated context: who mattered, who knew whom, where the official account had gone smooth from too much repetition. In a business crowded with manuscripts, the filter itself became the asset.

A small press learns to borrow scale

Small publishing is a stack of expensive decisions disguised as a cultural pursuit. Editing, design, printing, inventory, publicity and distribution all arrive before the reader does. MBBooks' public record does not disclose print runs, margins or author contracts. It does show a practical response: collaborate. What They Were Thinking was a joint venture with Seattle Book Company in Dexter, Michigan. The $27.95 hardcover was sold through selected bookstores, direct ordering and major digital platforms. Some proceeds went to Reading Works, a Detroit literacy organization.

The economics are modest by design. A hardcover sale, a bookstore event, an interview on public radio, a library copy, a later appearance in the used-book market - each is small. Together they form the long tail of a regional title. In 2021, Michigan's Braille and Talking Book Library listed a locally recorded edition of What They Were Thinking. Eight years after publication, CBS Detroit featured Haney discussing Paper Boats: Reflections on a Life in Letters, a coffee-table book built from stories and correspondence with people including Harwell, Marx and Kevorkian. The books keep circulating because the place keeps recognizing itself in them.

The first failure is usually the obvious story

There is no public postmortem describing a failed MB Communications product, and inventing one would misunderstand the lesson. The failure Haney identified came earlier, in the existing coverage. Famous people had been flattened into their reputations. Elmore Leonard was the cool crime novelist. Ernie Harwell was the beloved announcer. Kevorkian was the zealot. Those labels are efficient, and efficiency is precisely what drains them of surprise.

The countermeasure was not a new publishing technology. It was the patient interview and the earned confidence that lets a subject become less official. Haney found that many public figures were warmer, stranger or funnier than their personas. Harwell was the exception: in Haney's telling, there was no hidden version. “There was just one Ernie Harwell.” Even the absence of contradiction became a finding.

The catalog widened from profiles to memoir and communal history. From Big Beaver to the Big Apple, published by MB Communications in 2008, followed the people who shaped Haney from his childhood in the village that became Troy to a communications life in New York and beyond. One Cup at a Time, a 246-page hardcover edited by Haney in 2016, concerned a Monday-morning group of older men who gathered to solve the world's problems. Paper Boats turned decades of letters into an archive of encounters. Different formats, same instinct: the relationship is where the material lives.

Four things worth stealing

This model has conditions. It works when the publisher has genuine access, editorial taste and a community dense enough to recognize the cast. It is weaker when a subject needs national marketing spend, rapid mass distribution or a specialist technical apparatus. It also resists cloning: copying the format without the relationships produces local trivia, not intimacy.

MB Communications occupies a small patch of the media market, somewhere between a boutique press and an experienced editor's private workshop. Its output is not voluminous. Its public business data is sparse. But the company demonstrates a durable independent-media proposition: do not begin by asking how many people a story can reach. Begin by asking what you can know that a larger competitor cannot.

For Haney, the answer was Michigan - not the outline on the map, but the network underneath it. The broadcasters, engineers, writers, filmmakers, politicians, neighbors and coffee drinkers. The people everyone had heard of, and the part of them almost nobody had.