Stories that help young readers find their light.
Lordsburg Press publishes fiction for readers ages 8 to 14 — books built around real-world leadership principles, delivered the way kids actually learn: through characters they recognize, problems that feel real, and stories that never stop to lecture.
The Beacon Keepers: First Light
Leo Morales counts his steps to his locker every morning — thirty-seven, exactly. He likes order. What he doesn’t like is the folded note that falls out of his locker one afternoon, summoning him and two classmates he barely knows to a back-alley shop called Ziggy’s Skate & Drone. Time to find your light, the note says.
What Leo, Jada, and Max find there isn’t a prank. It’s a question. And the answer they work out together — scrawled on a sticky note, almost by accident — will turn three kids who don’t quite fit into something their school didn’t know it needed.
First Light is the opening book of The Beacon Keepers, a middle-grade series about what it takes to build something real: a team, a friendship, a place where everyone belongs. No exceptions.
What we publish
Lordsburg Press publishes middle-grade fiction that treats leadership, integrity, and belonging as part of the story — not a message glued on top. Our books draw on ideas from the people who have thought most carefully about how teams work, how trust is built, and how good leaders are made. But those ideas are always lived by the characters, never explained to the reader.
We started this press because most books written to “teach” kids about character end up sounding like the adults who wrote them. A middle-schooler figuring out who to trust, how to lead without bossing, how to keep a promise when it costs something — that is a story. Just characters the reader can walk beside, making the kinds of choices the reader is quietly wrestling with in their own life.