Where have Sidekick Books been, and what’s next?

Oh, hi there! Good to see you. How’ve you been? Yeah, not bad thanks. Getting along.

Oh, sorry. WHERE have we been for the last year? It’s a good question. Thanks to the pandemic, Jon and K have been in London, Durham, Derbyshire, Buckinghamshire – all over the shop really.

This has meant an unofficial Sidekick Books hiatus throughout 2020 and halfway through 2021. Like a lot of small presses we’ve looked at the pandemic situation with a furrowed brow, and held off making concrete plans for future projects until now.

Confused red robot

This last year has been testing for everyone, but it’s also been a time of discovery. During the pandemic, both Jon and K got assessed for ADHD, and both had the diagnosis confirmed. 2020 was apparently a record year for ADHD diagnosis, and this makes sense – once you’ve had a lot of social engines switched off and you’re left with your thoughts, you often spot things that have been masked by the hectic day-to-day. If you’re curious about late-diagnosis ADHD, K writes about her experience on her personal blog.

What this means is, now we know a little bit more about why we find certain aspects of publishing and, y’know, general moving through the world, especially difficult. That’s information we can work with to make Sidekick Books even better.

One-Off Indie Poetry Press Festival logo

Getting back into the poetry publishing groove, Sidekick Books recently joined in the fun at the online One-Off Indie Poetry Press (OOIPP) festival from 19-25 July 2021. Organised by Jake Wild Hall of Bad Betty Press, this week-long Zoom festival celebrated UK indie poetry publishing at its finest.

There were stacks of excellent readings – many folk really playing with the Zoom format as a new tool for creative performance. Our Sidekick champions were Ian McLachlan (Confronting the Danger of Art, Bad Kid Catullus), Rowyda Amin (We Go Wandering at Night and Are Consumed By Fire, No, Robot, No!), JT Welsch, (Hell Creek Anthology) and Chelsea Cargill (Aquanauts).

Presses featured were: Bad Betty Press, Out-Spoken Press, Stewed Rhubarb Press, Broken Sleep Books, Guillemot Books, The Emma Press, flipped eye publishing, Lifeboat Press, Burning Eye Books, Hesterglock Press, HVTN Press (Haverthorn Press), Hajar Press, Verve Poetry Press and Hercules Editions.

So what’s next?

New books and calls for submissions!

In the grand Sidekick tradition, we’re planning several gorgeous, playful themed collaborative books for release in 2022. Some will be pocket rockets and some will be big old beasts. There will be hidden messages, miniature games, love, hate and inventions aplenty.

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, or sign up to our mailing list for new submissions calls.

Inpress logo

Finally, huge thanks to our amazing sales and marketing agents Inpress, who have worked tirelessly throughout the pandemic to keep promoting and selling our books, testing out new technologies to help indie publishers, negotiating with various stakeholders and keeping our spirits high. They’ve also shown the patience of saints when dealing with our pre-diagnosis communications. We’re incredibly grateful for their tenacity, skills and support, and excited to work more closely with them from now on.

That’s us up to date for now. Thanks, as ever, for your support in these strange times. Onward to new adventures!

No, Robot, No! Deadline extended

Busy month? Didn’t quite pull together your proposal in time? We’ve decided to extend the submissions call for No, Robot, No! to Monday 26th March. (We will also be putting back the final deadline for successful proposals accordingly). Consult the full briefing here, and read about our thinking behind the submissions procedure here.

A new approach to submissions

The submissions call for Sidekick’s next title, No, Robot, No!, breaks with the tradition of asking writers to send in completed individual pieces. Instead, we’re looking for proposals – an idea of what you would do with 3-5 pages, your own little slice of the book. Here are a few words on our thinking behind this.

From its inception, the idea behind Sidekick was to publish collaborative books. ‘Collaborative books’ is almost a tautology – a book is nearly always a collaborative effort between artists, editors and designers, to say nothing of those people thanked on the acknowledgements page for their varying degrees of influence and judgement. But in terms of poetry – as well as other leading genres – the writer is generally credited (and marketed) as sole author. The single author collection is by far the dominant form in poetry publishing, and this makes the poetry ‘industry’ extremely reliant on the celebrity and saleability of individuals.

(As a side note, the fact that publicity leans so heavily on author identity is one cause of the lack of diversity at the top layer – since it’s easier to pass off older white men as having the authority required of the ‘eminent poet’ archetype. It’s true that recently, there has been a shift toward celebrating alternative perspectives and experiences, particularly those of women and minority groups, but the emphasis on identity is unchanged, and this carries with it the danger of reducing non-white-male authors to cyphers.)

Beyond the single author collection, the second most dominant form in poetry publishing is probably the ‘survey’ anthology – in effect, an instrument of categorisation and organisation. Then there are celebratory or occasional anthologies, and therapeutic or self-help anthologies. With the exception of Bloodaxe’s Staying Alive and its sequels, books in the latter two brackets are critically ignored, regarded as purely commercial exercises.

So the somewhat ambitious remit behind Sidekick was to try to find or forge a new form of mainstream poetry book, one that emphasised the collaborative aspect of book creation and avoided emphasis on the figure of the poet. What if poetry was the mode, rather than the genre? What if, instead of all poetry being confined to the Poetry section of a bookshop or online marketplace, it was found in all the other sections – one of the ways in which any topic might be explored, or any genre realised?

To this end, we’ve published mainly themed, multi-author compendiums of newly solicited writing, mixing poetry with prose, illustration and graphic arts, questing for the right balance between charming and unruly, orderly and idiosyncratic. We tried to make our Birdbook series a kind of catalogue or ornithopaedia as much as a poetry collection, and we tried to involve as many different poets as possible across the various projects – driven in part by the notion that more poets can reach a wider audience if they aren’t fighting over the same few pulpits. (Or crowns? Pistols? Whichever metaphor suits).

One disadvantage of this approach is that a poet who has written one or two poems for one of our books isn’t likely to feel very well represented, or like they’ve had much influence on the overall shape or feel of the book. It also makes compiling and editing particularly fiendish – imagine trying to make a complete jigsaw out of dozens of pieces from different jigsaw sets, but without being able to choose exactly which pieces.

So we came up with a new plan: offer poets (and other experimental writers) a little patch of land. Book-land. Space for a sequence, or micro-pamphlet, or something substantial. Ask them to describe to us what they would do with it, based on a broad idea of the theme of the book. Then select a number of those ideas to commission in full and put together the skeleton of the book from there. The process is intended to be less top-down, more generative, with the work of individuals given a little more space to breathe. It should also streamline the production process, since we can start on the layout before the final components arrive.

Undoubtedly, there will be downsides to this approach as well, and difficulties we haven’t foreseen. But we thought it was worth experimenting with. As with other aspects of our unconventional approach to publishing, the results should be, at the very least, rather interesting.

Submissions

Submissions Call: Ten Poets Prowl the Seas in Search of Plunder and Ten Poets Spend the Night in a Vampire’s Castle

DEADLINE: 18 MAY 2025

The next two books in our hit 10 Poets series, set for a late summer and spooky November release respectively, take us to the realms of buoyant buccaneers and cloaked counts. We’re looking for previously unpublished poems – on the longer side – in which the poet takes on the role of roving pirate or vampire’s guest!

What kind of poems are the editors looking for?

We want writing that responds to the prompt embedded in the title – or, more accurately, writing which enacts what is proposed by the title! While this should, of course, have the general character of a poem or poem-adjacent text, it does not have to be a straightforward lyric piece. It could be a prose poem, vignette, short lyric essay – in fact, we encourage you to think in terms of longer, looser forms, of up to 500 words. This follows the trend established over our previous anthology series, which mixed and combined poetry with elements of essay, guidebook, puzzle, flash fiction and so on.

The titles in this series allude to broad themes from popular culture, and our intention is to subvert the usual stereotypes about what poets write about. But they’re a starting point – while each piece of work should technically fit within the remit, the series showcases how far a good writer can run with (and/or swerve from) a simple concept, while also investing it with unexpected depth. Feel free to submit what is in essence an advertisement for your own style and set of preoccupations.

It might be a good idea to look at previous books in the series for a clearer notion of the kind of work we favour, and also to get a feel for the dimensions and layout of the books. Pages are 130x185mm with a 16mm margin, and poems are typeset in Libre Baskerville 9pt. We try to give individual pieces space to breathe and space them out over a few pages.

Is there any payment?

At the moment we aren’t funded by the Arts Council or any other arts charity funding, and as we otherwise tend to operate on a break-even basis, we aren’t in a position to pay contributor fees this time. If your poem is selected for inclusion, however, you will receive contributor copies of the book and a discount code for all Sidekick titles.

I’ve already been in a 10 Poets book. Can I submit again?

For now, we’d like to have it so each book in the series contains a unique set of poets. This way the series will eventually, with a fair wind, grow to be a window onto the work of a significant number of contemporary writers.

I’m worried my poem is going to be too similar to other submissions!

It may be wise to take the road less travelled (even if that does lead you to a forbidding black castle with a strange owner). We aim for variety over the course of each short book, so while we will cover, or at least touch on, some of the more obvious set-ups and associations, we’re especially looking for poems that take the prompt in unexpected directions.

For Ten Poets Prowl the Seas in Search of Plunder, allusions to famous pirates like Anne Bonny or Blackbeard are likely to be popular, so we would advise digging deeper in your research. The title’s references to ‘plunder’ and ‘prowling the seas’ do not need to be taken strictly literally, of course. Other modern media, such as the TV series Our Flag Means Death, finds ways of queering or reinventing the old tropes, and we think poetry could go even further.

For Ten Poets Spend the Night in a Vampire’s Castle, there are a plethora of cliches to interrogate, subvert or avoid completely. The vampire is already a much-reinvented archetype, and has come to represent various aspects of humanity and our day-to-day experiences that are grimly (or seductively) familiar. The tone could be serious, of course – but then again, you might like to play with some of the sillier interpretations of the original stories.

Crucially, we do need to know about your night in the castle! Even if you never actually meet the master of the house, there’s plenty that could be said about his abode, or where its corridors and hidden staircases lead you.

While we encourage you to be inventive and experimental, and while we are keen to accommodate different styles, please do remember the dimensions of these books (see above), that they’re printed in black and white and typeset in a fairly consistent way.

Will there be other submissions calls like this one, for books on other themes?

Yes! We enjoy putting the books together and want to create a big collectible series, but they’re a lot of work and the market for slim anthologies is tough! Tell your friends these books exist!

How do I submit?

Send one piece only as an attachment to contact@sidekickbooks.com, with the subject line ‘Ten Poets Submission: Plunder’ or ‘Ten Poets Submission: Vampire’. No need to include a bio at this stage – just a short covering note. The deadline is 23.59 on 18 May 2025.

General Submissions FAQs

Do you publish solo poetry collections?

No, we don’t. Sidekick specialises in collaborative and mixed-media work, with strong themes and blurred genre boundaries. Have a look at our other books to get an idea of what we do.

How about if I just send it anyway?

Please don’t! As a team of two people (working jobs alongside running the press), we don’t have time to reply to unsolicited collections sent to us.

There are many incredible presses who publish single-author collections. You can find a good starter list on the National Poetry Library’s website.

When is your next submissions call?

We release new calls via our newsletter (see bottom of this page) and through our social media accounts on Instagram, Threads and Bluesky.

We look forward to seeing your work!

Tag: submissions