ABOUT BUNKMATE BOOKS

WHAT WE PRODUCE

We're a publisher of LGBTQ+ books - primarily gay, and primarily romance and erotica. Our books range from wholesome-but-sexy romance through to hardcore, kinky erotica. Our books focus on gay men (or more accurately, men who are attracted to men, even if they don't identify as gay).

 

WHO AND WHAT WE ARE

Bunkmate Books is what's known as an 'imprint' or trade name. We're not a traditional press, and we're not what's sometimes referred to as a 'vanity press' that will publish your book for a fee. That means we don't accept queries from authors looking to get their book published.

Bunkmate Books is essentially just a brand to publish the work of a small number of authors - and by 'authors' that can include different pen names for the same writer, writing across different genres.

Bunkmate Books was established in 2022 and is based in Aotearoa | New Zealand.

 

WHAT WE STAND FOR

We're sex positive, kink positive, and happy to challenge traditional heteronormative morality when it comes to sex and relationships. 

We care about the environment, and we try to ensure the climate impact of our production is fully offset and carbon neutral (this is a work in progress). We care about the rights of workers in the publishing industry, including supporting union organising in companies like Amazon and Google that distribute our books.

Our stories and cover art isn't made from generative AI. We may use some kinds of AI for some purposes (for example, we use Podcastle's AI features to remove background noise as part of our audiobook production process), but our approach is to avoid using generative AI, or AI in ways that steal other people's creative work and/or take jobs away from writers, artists and other professionals.

WHY YOU SHOULD BUY FROM US

Obviously you can buy your books from wherever you want, and there are definitely lots of options - most of our books are available from most of the major book retailers.

But we'd love it if you'd buy direct from Bunkmate Books, the publisher. It's good for us and for you. That's because:

  • Bunkmate Books is completely owned by the authors it publishes, which means other companies aren't taking a cut. For comparison, if you buy a book from Amazon they'll take around 30% of the book's price as their cut. But when you buy from us, we get the full amount minus any payment processing fees.
  • When you buy from us you're actually buying a book that you'll own permanently. You receive a file to download, and that file is yours. Obviously copyright laws still apply and you can't just go making more copies to sell yourself. But your copy is yours and no one can take it away, unlike services such as Amazon that are actually just selling you a 'licence' to read the book that they can take away from you at any moment (see below for more info about that under our DRM policy).
  • Most of the major retailers are ethically dubious in various ways. From union-bashing to anti-competitive monopoly behaviour to environmental degradation to aggressive censorshop. Of course no company is perfect, there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, and it's not possible to go cold-turkey on every company with a bad reputation. But in this case you've got a choice, so why not stick it to those companies in a very small way by choosing to buy from someone else?
  • Last of all, a Shopify website is pretty damn expensive! But it was basically the only option that was going to work for us in terms of allowing adult content while also being a choice we're ethically comfortable with. So the more you buy direct from the site, the more the site pays for itself.

But of course, you don't need to feel guilty if you need or just prefer to go with a different retailer. We just appreciate you buying our books!

 

ADULT CONTENT POLICY

Our books may contain adult themes and/or sexually explicit material. Not every book necessarily will, but most do, so you should assume that any of our books you choose to read will. Because of this our website is for people aged 18+ and you will be asked both when you visit specific pages and at the checkout to confirm that you are 18 or over and consent to viewing sexually explicit and/or adult content.

 

DRM POLICY

DRM stands for Digital Rights Management and it means the technology that manages your access to the digital content you buy. It's often used as a way of preventing piracy and protecting intellectual property, but it's also a way for platforms to effectively lock ebooks to only work on specific devices, brands of devices, through specific software.

As a general principle we don't support DRM, because it effectively means you don't own the books you bought. It means platforms can do things like restrict what devices you use, and stop you from downloading your books onto your choice of devices. It even means platforms can take away your rights to read the books you've bought. 

Books you buy from the Bunkmate Books online store don't have DRM enabled. Where we have the choice, books we sell on other platforms don't have DRM enabled. On some platforms (like Amazon) we don't have a choice though, which means books purchased through retailers may be DRM protected.

That doesn't mean we support piracy though. In an ideal world we could give away ebooks for free - after all, an ebook doesn't cost anything to produce individually so why should you need to pay? Unfortunately it doesn't work like that. We charge for our books because our writers need to make a living. Generally speaking, writing books pays less per hour than the lowest paid jobs. So every time we get paid for a book a writer can get closer to being able to write for a living and pay the bills from their book sales. If you pirate a book, or distribute it for free, you're depriving writers of income that would enable them to spend more time writing the books you want to read.

So, by not putting DRM on our books we're trusting our customers. We're respecting your right to be able to keep the books you bought and read them when, where and how you want to. But we're asking you to respect our intellectual property by ensuring that if people want to read our books they pay a fair price to the author who wrote them.

 

WHOLESALE

We are happy to work with book retailers to arrange wholesale sales of our books. Contact us if you'd like to know more.

OTHER POLICIES

We also have a Privacy Policy, Shipping Policy, Refund Policy and general website Terms and Conditions.