We Love Our Readers

Good stories.

The bleak and bitter truth is that most published stories just aren’t that good. As the science fiction grandmaster George Orwell once wrote (in Confessions of a Book Reviewer),

“Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are. In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be ‘This book is worthless.’”

The electronic publishing era has made it far worse. We pride ourselves on standing against the tide. We don’t promise you’ll like everything you read from us, but we do promise to be a good gamble with your hard-earned money. We provide plot summaries, excerpts, and everything else you need to make sure you’re buying something based on the quality of the tale—not the quality of the back-cover blurb.

Professional editing

We employ independent professional editors, including Hugo nominees, to go through our works with a red pen and cluck at us whenever we fall into the passive voice or torture a metaphor. It’s a little expensive but you, the reader, deserve professionally edited stories.

Did you notice that our “Good stories.” subheading ended with a period, but our “Professional editing” subheading didn’t?

Our editors did.

Full disclosure of AI-generated content.

Not one word of our stories will ever be written via artificial intelligence. Period. We are at present using generative ‘AI’ as a part of our process for some of our cover illustrations, but we're seeking to diminish that, too. The problem is not (any longer) that we lack the money to do it, it’s that we lack relationships with talented artists in the science fiction and fantasy genres. If you’re an artist looking for new clients, please consider reaching out to us!

(Note that we said ‘illustration’ there, not ‘art’. It is our opinion that art requires intention, which a generative AI engine does not and cannot have. Generative ‘AI’ is not intelligence. Don't be taken in by the hype. An artist using a generative tool has intention, but most true artists consider generative ‘AI’ a threat to their livelihoods. Sean already declined one “fully voiced” audiobook proposal after finding out that "fully voiced" meant "by AI", and would have taken paying work away from actual human voice actors.)

No vendor lock-in.

We love Amazon. They’re not perfect but on balance they’re sort of fantastic. We would like them even more if they made it easier to move your digital library to a competitor’s ecosystem. (The same can be said of virtually any ebook vendor, of course: we pick on Amazon because they’re the giant in the playground, not because they’re unique.)

Fenian House may list on Amazon, but our native publishing format is the industry standard EPUB 3.3 electronic book standard. If you want to escape proprietary formats that lock you into a vendor, reach out to us. We’re happy to help set you free.

No DRM.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies are ostensibly used to preserve the rights of authors to control how end-users enjoy our work. In reality they tend to be used by corporations to preserve their revenue streams at the expense of the reader’s enjoyment. These are two quite different things. Reasonable people may debate the propriety of the first, but to the second we must draw the line. We will never use DRM ourselves, nor allow any vendor to apply DRM to our books.

Humanity.

We’ve had the good fortune to see large swaths of humanity in our lifetimes and enjoyed the thrill of being immersed in different cultures. We are utterly convinced there are heroes and villains in all societies, and what makes them heroic or villainous isn’t where they come from but the choices they make. We tell stories involving different cultures, legal systems, traditions, sexualities, and more: not because we have woolly-headed notions about “cultural sensitivities,” but because a good story is a good story no matter where in humanity one finds it.

As soon as we find a great hook for a blind synesthete who can only communicate via theremin performances, we will write it, we will publish it, and you will happily part with your money for it.

Because, after all—great story.

Open standards.

All of our ebook offerings use standard and interoperable technologies. The sole exception is in fonts, where we may from time to time use commercial offerings. If we do, we will always have recommended freely-available fallbacks. (Please note that if you choose to acquire our books from Amazon, you’ll receive it in Amazon’s proprietary format, which does not permit us to specify fonts.)

Honest updates.

Many years ago Robert read two books in a trilogy. He found the author so incredible that he proceeded to gift them to Sean, safe in the knowledge the author said the final book was written and would be published later that year. More than a decade later the third book still hasn’t been released, and we are both deeply disappointed by that.

When we say a story is in development, it’s being written and no publication date is guaranteed. When we say it’s written, that means the content is complete (modulo last minute typo fixes) and it’s being prepared for publication, still with no release date. When we announce an upcoming release, that means assembly is complete and we’ve circulated ARCs (Advance Reader Copies) with our beta readers for final checks.

Accessibility.

We invite our disabled readers to be able to fully participate in the joy of our stories. We can’t promise that our ebooks work well with every assistive technology, but we do promise that they work with the screen magnifiers and screen readers we have on-hand for testing. Further, one of the editors we work with is legally blind. If we make a hash of things for our readers with poor vision, he’ll give us an earful.

Compassion.

You, dear reader, are a human being (we’re pretty sure, but in the slight chance it is otherwise, we don't discriminate). So are we. Whatever our differences, we are siblings by our mortality, our pain, and our vulnerability to the whims of fate.

If your life doesn’t allow you the discretionary income to spend on books, reach out to us. We’ll help you find a lending library with our stories, refer you to an author-approved outlet where you can get tales for free, or if those are impossible, we’ll just send you a copy with our deepest wishes that you enjoy it.

Each author at Fenian House has dealt with periods of poverty and infirmity in which we were dependent on the kindnesses of strangers. Books were wonderful friends to us in those dark times. If you’re in such straits, know that we’re on your side and we hope our books can help.