Why are your books free? So people can read them. Removing financial barriers broadens and diversifies a book’s potential readership.

Does ‘free’ mean poor quality? Not at all. Making books available as free downloads (i.e. diamond open access) has been the go-to model in medical publishing for decades because scientists want a global readership to engage with their ideas. We’ve brought this model to trade publishing where removing financial barriers to quality fiction is just as important.

Why are you non-profit? Relying on sales to survive doesn’t appeal to us. We’ve created a new space, outside the influence of market forces, where we can publish who and what we want to publish.

Why do you only publish digitally? Our model only works as a digital press. Printing introduces substantial costs, risk, logistical issues and administrative work. It’s very difficult to make printed books available for free.

Printing also harms our planet through deforestation, manufacturing, shipping and waste. We’re a climate-sensitive press that aims to publish with little to no impact on our environment. Our ePubs can be read on most electronic devices, and we strongly encourage readers to buy second-hand devices rather than new ones. We know digital publishing isn’t entirely free of its own flaws, but we think it solves more problems than it causes.

Do you pay royalties? We wish we could because we appreciate the huge amounts of effort and creativity that writing a book involves. However, as a non-profit press that makes books available to readers for free, we operate with no income streams whatsoever. We understand why this model might deter some authors. There are many different publishing models and authors should find the one that suits them.

What’s your AI policy? We don’t actively use AI in any of our operations or processes. Beyond the AI features built into the publishing software and web design tools we use, we’re 100% invested in humans to do what we do. We expect the same from our authors and won’t consider publishing any work created or assisted by AI.