Privacy policy
Last updated 23 September 2026
This site is run by L.E. Hume Publishing LLC, a limited liability company organised in the State of Wyoming, USA (filing ID 2026-002050138), whose registered office is 30 N Gould St, Ste R, Sheridan, WY 82801. The company publishes under the pen name L.E. Hume and is the data controller for anything you send us here. Questions, or any request below: privacy@lehume.com.
The short version: this site collects as little as it can. There are no accounts, no adverts on the site itself, and nothing is ever sold.
What we collect, and why
- Your email address, if you join the letters list. Used to send you chapter one and occasional news about the book. Lawful basis: your consent, given by confirming the double opt-in email. You can withdraw it at any time with the unsubscribe link in every email.
- Anything you write to us at post@ or press@lehume.com — kept only as long as needed to deal with it. Lawful basis: our legitimate interest in answering correspondence.
- Anonymous page statistics. Cloudflare Web Analytics counts page views without cookies and without building any profile of you.
We do not ask for your name, your postal address, or payment details. This site sells nothing.
Confirmations we record
Nothing on this website is explicit — the gate is on the emails. Chapter one is never sent immediately. After you confirm your subscription you receive a welcome email, then the content note, then a few days later the author's note, and only after that the chapter itself as a PDF or EPUB. Every one of those emails carries a prominent "This is not for me" link that stops the sequence for good.
Along the way we record three confirmations against your email address, with the date and time each was given, so we can show you were told what the book contains before we sent you any of it:
- "I have read the content note and wish to continue"
- "I have read the author's note and wish to continue"
- "I am 18 years or older"
We record the confirmation itself, not your date of birth — we never ask your age, only that you affirm it. Lawful basis: our legal obligation and legitimate interest in not supplying adult material to minors. These records are kept for as long as we hold your address, and are deleted with it.
Saying no, permanently
Every email we send you carries a "This is not for me" link. Press it and your address goes on a permanent list of addresses we will never email again, and the sequence stops at once. The signup form on this site has the same button. On its own it simply takes you away from the site, and we record nothing, because you have given us nothing. If you type your address into the form before pressing it, that address goes on the same never-email list. We keep only the address itself, and use it for nothing else.
Who else sees it
- Cloudflare hosts the site and provides analytics; it processes server logs including your IP address for security and delivery.
- Our email provider — [provider to be confirmed] — stores the letters list and sends the emails.
- Our mailbox provider handles email sent to the addresses above.
These providers act on our instructions only. The company and several of its providers are based in the United States, so if you are in the UK or EEA your data is transferred there; those transfers are covered by the EU Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK Addendum, or by the EU–US and UK–US Data Privacy Framework, as applicable.
How long we keep it
Your email address stays on the list until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete it, and is then removed. Correspondence is kept for up to two years. Analytics are aggregate and hold nothing that identifies you.
One consequence worth understanding: a never-email record only works because we still hold your address to check against. If you are on the never-email list and you ask us to erase your address entirely, we will — but we then have no record of your wish, and we can no longer promise you will never be emailed again. If you ever sign up in future, or someone enters your address, nothing will stop it. If you would rather stay unreachable, leave the record in place; it is the only thing we keep, and we use it for nothing else.
Your rights
If you are in the UK or EEA, you have the right to access your data, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to its use, and receive a copy in portable form. If you are in California or another US state with a privacy law, you have comparable rights of access and deletion, and the right to opt out of sale or sharing of personal information — we do neither.
Email privacy@lehume.com and we will act within one month. If you are unhappy with the outcome, you can complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk, or to your national data protection authority in the EEA.
Children
This site is for adults. It is not directed at anyone under 18 and we do not knowingly collect information from under-18s. If you believe a child has signed up, tell us and we will delete the record.
Changes
If this policy changes materially we will update the date above and, where it affects the letters list, say so by email.
Terms of use
This site is operated by L.E. Hume Publishing LLC, Sheridan, Wyoming, USA. By using lehume.com you accept these terms. If you do not, please leave the site.
This site is for adults
The Price of Surrender is explicit adult fiction. By continuing past this page and by requesting chapter one, you confirm you are 18 or over — or the age of majority where you live, whichever is higher.
Please read the content note and the author's note before you read any of the book. They are on the site precisely so you can make an informed choice. If either the content note or the author's note upsets or disturbs you, do not download, request, or otherwise read the book. That is not a formality — it is the author's sincere advice.
Fiction
Everything published here is fiction. Characters, institutions, and events are invented, and any resemblance to real people or organisations is coincidental. Nothing on this site is advice — legal, medical, psychological, or otherwise — and the book depicts practices that are not instructions.
The site itself
We try to keep the site accurate and available, but we make no guarantee of either. Publication dates and other details may change. To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for loss arising from use of this site; nothing here limits liability for death, personal injury caused by negligence, or fraud.
Do not attempt to disrupt the site, scrape it at scale, or use it to train machine-learning models without written permission. Links to other sites are not endorsements.
Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Wyoming, USA, and the state and federal courts sitting in Wyoming have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer in the UK, the EEA, or elsewhere, you keep the protections and the local courts your own country's mandatory law gives you.
Copyright and permissions
All text, design, and images on this site, and the whole of The Price of Surrender, are © 2026 L.E. Hume Publishing LLC, writing as L.E. Hume. All rights reserved. The moral right of the author has been asserted.
You may quote short passages for review, criticism, journalism, or academic comment with clear attribution to L.E. Hume and a link to this site. Anything beyond that — reproduction, adaptation, translation, audio recording, redistribution of the free chapter, or use of any part of this work for training artificial-intelligence systems — requires written permission.
Review copies, extract permissions, and interview requests: press@lehume.com. Everything else: post@lehume.com.
If you find this work reproduced without permission, please tell us at post@lehume.com.