LeMay Publishing

The Founding

LeMay Publishing was established in Massachusetts with a single conviction: that the act of publication belongs to the author, not to the gatekeepers who have appointed themselves its custodians. The traditional publishing apparatus — with its labyrinthine agent system, its opaque editorial process, and its royalty structures that leave the creator with the smallest share of the value they generated — is not a system that serves the writer. It is a system that serves itself.

We built something different. LeMay Publishing is a full-service publishing house that accepts direct submissions from authors, performs rigorous editorial enhancement, and produces finished publications in three formats: digital, audio, and physical. The author retains copyright. The author earns fifty percent of net revenue. The author deals with us directly — no agents, no intermediaries, no extraction.

Stars Are Made, Not Born

Stars are made, not born. This is the founding conviction of LeMay Publishing, and it governs every decision this house makes. The traditional publishing industry built its prestige upon exclusivity — upon the notion that scarcity is a virtue. LeMay Publishing was founded on a different premise: that the best editorial investment, applied to work of genuine ambition, produces commercially dominant authors.

LeMay Publishing believes in the Pursuit of Happiness. We believe in the American Dream — not as a slogan printed on merchandise, but as a structural commitment embedded in the way this institution operates. We believe that you deserve the opportunity to chase your dream. And we believe that through that pursuit, through the act of writing and the courage of submitting your work to the world, you create your own happiness — not happiness granted by a gatekeeper's approval, but happiness earned by your own effort, your own craft, your own determination to be heard.

Give us your best, and we will do the rest. That is the promise. Your best effort, met by our full editorial and production capability, published in three formats, distributed worldwide, with fifty percent of every dollar returned to you. Because you wrote something, you believed in it, and you brought it to a publishing house that invests in its authors.

This is not your publishing deal. This is your American Story.

The Editorial Process

Every manuscript accepted by LeMay Publishing undergoes rigorous editorial enhancement by our editorial team. We take the author's best work and transform it into its most commercially powerful form — addressing structure, prose quality, and market readiness.

The result is not a different work. It is the same work — the author's ideas, their voice, their story — elevated to its commercial peak. The author receives the Enhanced Edition alongside their original submission and a Market Performance Forecast. The author decides whether to proceed.

Native Origination, Not Translation

LeMay Publishing does not translate. We originate. Every publication in our catalog exists natively in twenty-seven language groups — conceived, structured, and written with the cultural conventions, literary traditions, and native idioms of each market. A LeMay publication in Hindi is a Hindi book. A LeMay publication in Arabic is an Arabic book. We rejected the premise that international publishing requires translation because translation produces secondhand literature. We produce first-party literature in every language we serve.

The Agent Prohibition

LeMay Publishing does not accept agent-represented submissions. This is not a matter of policy convenience. It is a matter of ethical conviction.

The literary agent extracts fifteen percent of an author's earnings in perpetuity for a service that we render directly: connecting the author with a publisher, negotiating terms, and shepherding the manuscript through editorial review. These are services we perform ourselves, at our own expense, as part of our publishing operation. There is nothing for an agent to do here — and therefore nothing for an agent to take.

We will not validate the agent system by participating in it. Authors submit to us directly, negotiate with us directly, and receive their full royalty without deduction. Self-representation is not merely permitted at LeMay Publishing. It is mandated.

The Royalty Structure

Authors published by LeMay Publishing earn fifty percent of net revenue from all sales across all formats and all language editions. This rate is not negotiable — because it does not need to be. It is substantially higher than what any traditional publisher offers, and it reflects the operational efficiency that allows us to return more to the creator of the work.

Royalties are calculated monthly, reported transparently, and paid within thirty days of the close of each calendar month. Authors have full visibility into their sales data, by publication, by format, by source, by language.

Leadership

Travis L. Guckert — Founder & Publisher

Travis L. Guckert founded LeMay Publishing with the conviction that publishing could be restructured to serve the author first — not as a marketing claim, but as an operational reality. Under his direction, LeMay Publishing has developed an editorial process, a production pipeline, and a royalty structure that together constitute the most author-favorable publishing arrangement available from any publisher of comparable scope.