OUR STORY
TOFNA PRESS did not begin with the idea of starting a publishing company.
It began with a life spent moving between languages, cultures, professions, and worlds—and with a growing conviction that some voices, ideas, and stories deserve a wider path to readers.
The idea of creating a publishing house had been with us for years. But it remained an idea until experience began to give it shape.
In 2009, The Ambit Technique became our first experience of publishing. The journey began with an independent publisher that presented itself as an opportunity but ultimately proved to be a vanity operation. It was an early lesson in how difficult the road from manuscript to reader can be.
There were other lessons to follow.
Rejections are part of every writer's life. But after experiencing them repeatedly, another question began to emerge: What happens when a work is judged through only one set of lenses?
Literary agents and established publishers possess resources, expertise, networks, and market knowledge that an emerging press cannot easily match. Their role is indispensable to the publishing world. Yet every system has its limits. Sometimes a work may be unfamiliar rather than weak; culturally different rather than inaccessible; difficult to categorize rather than without value.
Sometimes, perhaps, what is needed is simply another lens.
That realization became central to the idea of TOFNA.
More recently, after translating two of our own books into Arabic and submitting them to Arabic publishers, we encountered rejection again—and, in one case, a long wait for an answer. It prompted a deceptively simple question:
If a publisher accepts the book, what will the publisher actually add?
Perhaps the answer would be distribution. Perhaps access to book fairs. Perhaps a network of readers. All of these have value. But the experience also made clear that there could be another way: to build a publishing house ourselves, one capable of taking responsibility for the entire journey from manuscript to reader.
And so the idea that had lingered for years became TOFNA PRESS.
DIFFERENT LENS
TOFNA is not being created to challenge established publishers, nor to claim that one model of publishing is better than another.
It exists to contribute something different.
Our aim is to open doors for cultural and intellectual works that may lie beyond prevailing expectations—works that might be overlooked because they come from unfamiliar places, cross cultural boundaries, resist easy categories, or simply require a different way of seeing.
This includes original fiction and nonfiction, memoir and history, culture and education, translation and works of enduring value.
It includes bringing works from English and other languages to Arabic readers, and bringing Arabic works to readers beyond the Arabic-speaking world.
It may include forgotten works that deserve to be rediscovered, public-domain classics that deserve a new life, and older works whose language can be carefully brought closer to contemporary readers without sacrificing their substance or character.
The question we want to keep asking is simple:
Does this work matter?
Not every work that matters will become a bestseller. Not every good book will find a large market. And that is one of the challenges TOFNA recognizes from the beginning.
Established publishers have resources and networks that give them enormous reach. A new independent press does not. Publishing a book is one thing; making readers aware of it is another.
That challenge cannot be wished away.
Our task, therefore, is not merely to publish books we believe in, but to find ways for those books to be seen, discovered, discussed, and read.
Technology has opened possibilities that were once unavailable to small publishers: print-on-demand, ebooks, audiobooks, and international distribution can allow a book to travel without requiring the physical infrastructure of a traditional publishing house.
But distribution alone is not enough.
A book needs a reason to be noticed.
TOFNA intends to build that reason through thoughtful selection, careful presentation, translation, editorial attention, and the gradual creation of a community of readers who are willing to look beyond the familiar.
WHAT WE HOPE TO BUILD
At its heart, TOFNA is an attempt to create a culture of mutual understanding.
We believe literature and ideas can do something that arguments often cannot. They can invite us into another person's experience. They can make the unfamiliar recognizable and the familiar newly strange. They can encourage us to open our minds and hearts and to put on new lenses through which we see another part of the world.
That does not mean publishing without standards.
TOFNA will not seek works whose purpose is to promote hatred, immorality, or divisiveness. Intellectual openness does not require abandoning judgment. On the contrary, a publishing house must know what it stands for as well as what it is willing to publish.
Our ambition is broad: to build a house that can eventually publish anything of genuine merit, regardless of where the work originates or which language it speaks.
A story from one culture may find meaning in another.
An idea born in one language may deserve to travel into another.
A forgotten voice may still have something important to say.
And a book written today may eventually travel much farther than its author imagined.
We want TOFNA to become a platform through which such works can gain momentum—to find readers, cross borders, become bestsellers, and perhaps one day move beyond the page into other forms, including film.
That is an ambition for the future. For now, the work begins one book at a time.
THE NAME
The name TOFNA comes from one language.
The Press looks toward the whole world.
That is not a contradiction. It is the point.
Human heritage is not the possession of one nation, one culture, or one language. It is the accumulated inheritance of humanity: its words, stories, ideas, memories, symbols, discoveries, and imagination.
TOFNA was chosen from that heritage.
Its meaning is arrow.
An arrow moves.
So do words.
A book begins somewhere—in a mind, a language, a culture, a particular moment in history—and then it travels. It crosses distances that its author may never cross. It can outlive its creator and reach readers not yet born.
That is the spirit behind the TOFNA symbol: an arrow joined with the body of a pen, rising from an open book.
The arrow of the word.
The Press is new.
The journey behind it is not.
And the journey ahead is only beginning.
TOFNA PRESS
Books that matter.
Words in motion.