ABOUT THE PRESS
About Raconteur Press
Texas-based, veteran-founded, and radically transparent about how the sausage gets made.
Raconteur Press is a Texas-based independent publisher founded in 2022 by Ian McMurtrie, a military veteran who built the Press outside the traditional publishing establishment. In the tradition of the pulp magazines of the early science fiction era, we publish entertaining novels, anthologies and boys’ adventure books — something new every month. Every book is unapologetically designed to entertain: not to instruct, not to lecture, not to correct anyone’s thinking. The story is the point.
What we stand for
We publish fun pulp adventure tales with worthy protagonists attempting to achieve a noble outcome through honorable means. That doesn’t exclude pathos, and we accept that sometimes the good guy doesn’t win — but we reject nihilism and hopelessness in story. If you finish one of our books feeling worse about people than when you started, we got something wrong.
What makes us different
Raconteur operates on a philosophy of radical transparency: publishing sample contracts publicly and sharing our operational playbook openly with the indie publishing community, rather than treating that information as a competitive advantage to hoard. A rising tide lifts every boat in this business, including ours.
RADICAL TRANSPARENCY
Our contract terms, in public
Most presses don’t publish their deal terms. We do, because “trust us” isn’t a business model. For anthology contributors:
An equal share
Authors receive an equal percentage share of the proceeds, alongside the Press, our editors and administration. We don’t take 80% off the top and split the remaining 20% among every author.
Ten stories, capped
Anthologies are capped at ten stories, specifically so that an equal share stays meaningful. A share of a twenty-way split is a rounding error, and we won’t pretend otherwise.
Rights revert in a year
We hold rights for one year after publication of a short story. After that, rights revert to the author — and we keep paying royalties for as long as the anthology keeps selling.
If you’re an author considering a submission, read the full terms on our Submissions page before you send anything.
STATEMENT ON AI
Where AI fits in
Raconteur uses AI in illustration, marketing and sales optimization — openly, not quietly. The honest way to say it: AI tools have let us publish more authors, not fewer. A cover artist’s typical process here is a hybrid one, AI-assisted for the foundational work and then hand-edited to the final result. As one of our team put it, discussing a recent cover:
…it’s not an entirely AI only cover, she uses AI to begin and do all the foundational work, then manipulates and tweaks it electronically herself. There are two rounds of ‘art,’ that of dictating the foundation and then that of hand editing… I am not in support of actual electronic theft of art, which has been happening since the first picture was posted online, but I am confident this cover, these covers from Raconteur Press, are not that.
Jason Fleming, Lead Editor
What we publish
Two lines on this site: genre fiction anthologies — short-story collections built around a shared theme, like Space Cowboys, Malta, Wyrd West and Moggies in Space — and full-length novels across science fiction, fantasy and adjacent genres. Something new goes out every month. A separate Boys’ Adventure line is handled under its own imprint.
Questions we haven’t answered here?
There is a real person on the other end of the form, and they answer.