Books for readers who ask the second question.

The catalog runs along five lines. Investigations takes claims that circulate faster than their evidence—secret societies, contested archaeology, mythological creatures—and separates what the record supports from what got attached to it later. Civilizations works through the ancient and medieval world a people at a time: Rome, Byzantium, the crusader states, Greece, Japan, the Americas.

Institutional Failure builds investigations out of filings, transcripts, depositions, and the public record. Counterfactual & Speculative traces collapse scenarios through their real mechanisms and follows historical turning points down the roads they didn't take. Retold renders ancient texts as continuous narrative for readers who want the story without a critical apparatus in the way.

What connects them is a method rather than a subject. Every book is a synthesis: the scholarship on a question, consolidated and made readable, for people who want more than a summary and less than a dissertation. The academic literature on most of these topics is excellent and almost entirely inaccessible to general readers. That gap is what this imprint exists to close.

1. Research, verified before drafting

   Each volume begins with a research document assembled from the scholarly literature and checked against primary sources where they exist. Nothing gets drafted from memory. That document is the only factual authority the manuscript is allowed to draw on.

2. A brief that fixes the shape

   Chapter plan, content allocation, and the argument each chapter has to carry—settled before a word of prose. It's what keeps a book from wandering, and what makes it possible to tell when a chapter is finished rather than merely long.

3. Drafting against a fixed house style

   Chicago Manual of Style, US English, one consistent voice across the whole catalog. The style rules are written down and enforced rather than felt out book by book.

4. Citation verification

   Every source reference is checked against the research document before the manuscript moves forward. Secondary sources are cited by chapter rather than page number, because page numbers break across editions and a chapter reference stays verifiable in whatever copy a reader has.

5. Line editing, then layout

   A full line-by-line pass for grammar, sense, and readability before anything reaches typesetting. Production tooling drafts; a person decides what stays.

A word on tooling: these books are produced with AI assistance, and saying so is part of the point. The systems described above exist because volume without verification produces confident-sounding nonsense. Every one of those steps is a check on the drafting, not a shortcut around it.

James D. Sutton writes nonfiction across history, archaeology, mythology, and institutional failure, published through Erratic Publishing. His fiction appears under RedBrick Publishing, drawing on more than forty years of worldbuilding.

He is an IT veteran, a homesteader, and a father, and much of the nonfiction reflects a long-running interest in how stories, myths, and claims change shape as they pass through time—which is, more or less, the question every book in the catalog is asking.

Review copies, rights enquiries, corrections, and anything else: contact@erraticpublishing.com.

Corrections are welcome and taken seriously. If a book gets something wrong, say so and it gets fixed in the next revision.