Vice Admiral Barry Costello told me why he’d called me: two other vice admirals had told him to.

He’d had a poor experience with another publisher. So he asked two friends who had published books about their own service. They vouched for me. He later wrote all of that down, by name, in a recommendation.

That is how most of our work arrives. Not from search or advertising — from someone who put his own standing behind an introduction.

I went back through the past nearly eighteen years of it recently and found the pattern was denser than I’d realized. Eleven flag and general officers across four services. Three authors who graduated from West Point in the same class. One client on his eighth book with us. Another on his sixth.

The full list is on our (my company, Adducent) site under About — Who We Publish. Names, ranks, and what each of them did before they wrote a book.

A referral in this community isn’t a favor. It costs the person making it something, because if the work is poor, that lands on them too. Which makes it the only quality-control system I’ve ever fully trusted. Nobody sends a friend or colleague to a publisher who let them down.