{"id":2928,"date":"2018-03-09T11:02:10","date_gmt":"2018-03-09T11:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sidekickbooks.com\/booklab\/?p=2928"},"modified":"2018-03-09T11:32:48","modified_gmt":"2018-03-09T11:32:48","slug":"new-approach-submissions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sidekickbooks.com\/booklab\/2018\/03\/new-approach-submissions.html\/","title":{"rendered":"A new approach to submissions"},"content":{"rendered":"The submissions call<\/a> for Sidekick\u2019s next title, No, Robot, No!<\/em>, breaks with the tradition of asking writers to send in completed individual pieces. Instead, we\u2019re looking for proposals \u2013 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.<\/span>\r\n\r\nFrom its inception, the idea behind Sidekick was to publish collaborative books. \u2018Collaborative books\u2019 is almost a tautology \u2013 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 \u2013 as well as other leading genres \u2013 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 \u2018industry\u2019 extremely reliant on the celebrity and saleability of individuals.\r\n\r\n(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 \u2013 since it\u2019s easier to pass off older white men as having the authority required of the \u2018eminent poet\u2019 archetype. It\u2019s 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.)\r\n\r\nBeyond the single author collection, the second most dominant form in poetry publishing is probably the \u2018survey\u2019 anthology \u2013 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\u2019s Staying Alive<\/em> and its sequels, books in the latter two brackets are critically ignored, regarded as purely commercial exercises.\r\n\r\nSo 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<\/em>, 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 \u2013 one of the ways in which any topic might be explored, or any genre realised?\r\n\r\nTo this end, we\u2019ve 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<\/em> 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 \u2013 driven in part by the notion that more poets can reach a wider audience if they aren\u2019t fighting over the same few pulpits. (Or crowns? Pistols? Whichever metaphor suits).\r\n\r\nOne disadvantage of this approach is that a poet who has written one or two poems for one of our books isn\u2019t likely to feel very well represented, or like they\u2019ve had much influence on the overall shape or feel of the book. It also makes compiling and editing particularly fiendish \u2013 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.\r\n\r\nSo 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.\r\n\r\nUndoubtedly, there will be downsides to this approach as well, and difficulties we haven\u2019t 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.","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The submissions call for Sidekick\u2019s next title, No, Robot, No!, breaks with the tradition of asking writers to send in completed individual pieces. Instead, we\u2019re looking for proposals \u2013 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 … Continue reading “A new approach to submissions”<\/span><\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2931,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[799,800,28],"class_list":["post-2928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-books","tag-editorial","tag-submissions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sidekickbooks.com\/booklab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sidekickbooks.com\/booklab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sidekickbooks.com\/booklab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sidekickbooks.com\/booklab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sidekickbooks.com\/booklab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2928"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sidekickbooks.com\/booklab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2949,"href":"https:\/\/sidekickbooks.com\/booklab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2928\/revisions\/2949"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sidekickbooks.com\/booklab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sidekickbooks.com\/booklab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sidekickbooks.com\/booklab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sidekickbooks.com\/booklab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}