For editors and authors

Our catalog is organized around questions, not subjects. We welcome proposals in these areas:

• power, chokepoints, and routes to market;
• science outside the institution, and bodily sovereignty;
• longevity, aging, and the extension of human capacity;
• cooperation, decentralization, and emergent order;
• organizations, authority, and the design of work;
• machines, minds, and human projection;
• discovery and its consequences;
• practice, the body, and measured wellbeing;
• knowledge, expertise, and judgment;
• anomalies, and how science handles them;
• contemplative and esoteric traditions;
• sexuality and sexual health;
• the history and ethics of self-experimentation; and
• money, cryptography, and decentralized finance.

We do not publish partisan or primarily political books.

We select the project and carry the risk. We fund and handle design, production, ISBNs, distribution, the catalog, the press kit, and review copies. Every title gets a permanent page here, every author gets a page, and every release goes to our list. You do not need a website of your own.

Serious work. For an Unruly Edition, that means a substantial foreword, annotations, and an afterword, not a reprint with a short preface. For an original book, it means an argument worth disagreeing with. Agreement is not a condition of publication. We publish works we dispute.

Before we commit, we assess a sample of your work. The assessment has three parts: a structured audit of the reasoning, a descriptive profile of the writing, and an editorial letter from the publisher. It is free, it is never a condition of being published, and it is never sold.

Editors of Unruly Editions receive the large majority of a title's net proceeds after a small production recoupment. Authors of original books receive 90 percent of net proceeds once production and a modest publishing fee have been recovered, all of it from sales and none of it from the author. Full terms come with any invitation or accepted proposal.

Unruly Chain is selective about what it publishes.

Until publication, we retain absolute discretion over whether a work will carry the Unruly Chain imprint. Authors retain authority over what appears under their names. We publish only when those judgments meet.

Publication changes the relationship permanently.

Once an edition is published by Unruly Chain, that edition becomes part of the historical record. We will not erase it.

We will not withdraw a published work because its author becomes controversial. We will not withdraw it because Unruly Chain becomes controversial. We will not withdraw it because political, commercial, institutional, legal, reputational, or personal pressure makes its continued existence inconvenient.

We will not erase it because the author later changes his or her mind.

We will not erase it because we later change ours.

Publication is a one-way door.

Unruly Chain will permanently record each published edition on a blockchain and appropriate decentralized technologies intended to preserve both the work and the integrity of its publication record. The published edition remains what it was on the day we released it.

That does not prohibit thought from developing. Errors may be corrected. Authors may reconsider their conclusions. New editions may supersede old ones. Responses, annotations, corrections, and repudiations may be published.

But the earlier edition remains.

The record of human thought should show that development rather than rewrite it.

This commitment does not give Unruly Chain perpetual ownership of an author's work or perpetual control over future editions. Commercial publishing rights remain governed by the publishing agreement and applicable law. When another authorized edition is available for sale, the permanent Unruly Chain title page may link wherever the rights holder directs.

Unruly Chain nevertheless retains the right to manufacture and sell the edition it published for as long as it lawfully possesses that right.

The permanence covenant applies to the edition itself, not to ownership of the author's future.

This commitment cuts both ways. Contributors must understand before publication that publication under the Unruly Chain imprint is intended to be irreversible. Neither publisher nor contributor may later demand that history be rewritten because an honestly published work has become embarrassing, unpopular, unfashionable, costly, or dangerous to defend.

No institution gives a human being permission to think. Thought precedes institutions. Speech is the expression of that thought.

Unruly Chain exists in part to preserve that record.

We do not promise to publish you.
If we publish you, we will not erase you.

Publication under the Unruly Chain imprint is intended to be permanent. Withdrawal after publication is not part of the publishing model.

Send a short note describing:

• the work;
• why it deserves a new edition or publication;
• who it is for; and
• how you would frame it.

Include a sample if you have one. Write to contact@unrulychain.com.