Submissions

Chapbooks

A chap-what? A what-book? What chapbook?

The chapbook is about ideas. New things not yet hard-bound.

We define chapbooks as 8-12 pages – perhaps 12 poems, 2 or 3 short stories, a series of flash fictions. We require your chapbook to have an overarching title, and to be emailed to as a Word doc. attachment. The email should be entitled, 'Chapbook submission: [your name]'. Send to poetry@silkwormsink.com or fiction@silkwormsink.com respectively.

You don't necessarily have to have a publication history the size of the Magna Carta to work with us, but we have absolutely no interest in publishing anything that isn't new, thoughtful, exciting, enjoyable and crafted. Age, gender and country of origin have no sway on our editorial decisions.

If you are thinking about submitting to Silkworms Ink, our best advice is to have a browse of our existing titles. You will find that our authors are stylistically and conceptually diverse, but what unites all of them is a commitment to their craft.

Poetry

Why do I want to publish my poetry as an eBook? For centuries poetry has flitted between the page and the stage (via the occasional council-funded installation). Silkworms Ink offers poets a shot at a far greater audience than the apologetically small poetry-shelf in a bookshop or the upstairs room in your local pub ever got anyone. Through our own live events and our website, we also have a firm commitment to breaking down barriers between our writers and their readers.

If you would like to work with us, then simply send roughly 10 poems in a Word document with your name, contact details and a brief biographical note to poetry@silkwormsink.com. Please bear in mind that our editorial team is dedicated but small, and the sheer volume of submissions we receive means that we will greatly appreciate, and require, your patience for our reply.

Fiction

So we're looking for fiction to publish on this 'ere site. Ideally, said fiction should be quite absurdly brilliant, rejuvenating the genre with its very first sentence (nay, its very first word), so unique that your last literary agent died shrieking trying to summarise it in fifty words or fewer, and largely grammatically correct.

Email fiction@silkwormsink.com with your submission attached as a Word document; if we fall in love with what you've written, or we think it has a place on the site, we'll get back to you about it. If we can't find a place for it, we'll probably get back to you anyway, to offer helpful criticism or, more likely, cruel, abusive mockery.

We accept flash fiction, short stories, longer pieces, and even novels. Length doesn't bother us; neither does genre. What we're looking for, if we may summarise it briefly, is 'good' (you can see we're wordsmiths ourselves). Good fiction is what we want.

Non-Fiction

At Silkworms Ink we are acutely aware that a lot of imagination goes into facts. Whether you are a literary critic, a social commentator, a Richard Steele-style mini-essay-writer or you're simply dying to show the world samples of your thesis on feline psychology, we want to hear from you.

Email submissions@silkwormsink.com with your manuscript attached as a Word document along with a brief (no more than 200 words) outline of your submission.

Plays

It is the plight of the playwright that, once the final curtains have gone down on the closing night of, say, your brilliant one-man surrealist reimagining of the economic downturn, all those wonderful words get lost to the ages. We know how rare it is for theatrical scripts to get the attention they deserve, and we want to help!

If you'd like to publish your play online, email submissions@silkwormsink.com. Attach your manuscript as a Word document and entitle the email 'Play submission: [Title], [Author]'.

Music

Silkworms' music writing hinges, without exception, on two questions: what happens when we read music – read it like a book? And: what happens when we read with music. We're interested in musical-literary intersections. And that's basically it. Them's the guidelines.

We will eagerly accept, and consider, submissions of any type that believe themselves to be in some way exploring a relationship between music and literature, any relationship, any relationship at all. Our Music As Reading Mixtapes, Sleevenotation and Musical Boox are merely suggestions of how this massive sort-of-subject might be approached, but we're just as interested in poetry, visual art, mus-lit collisions, mus-lit juxtapositions, whole goddam books, so long as we can make sense of your angle. If you have half an idea, tell us, we'll talk it over. If you have a whole idea, show us, and we'll think about how to make it happen. Cross-disciplinary is the key adjective here: finding a new sense in something via something else. Or pointing out a musician or writer who's already done precisely that, and going on and on about how unambiguously rad that makes them. All communication should come via music@silkwormsink.com, by the by.

Events

Could we silent disco to your poetry whilst listening to a mixtape?
Could we cut up your poems and stick lines in inappropriate places on famous paintings?
Could we commission a live-artist to interpret your writing in a site-specific performance?

So there are two basic models of poetry reading:
i) The over-eager, dimly-lit, open-mic approach.
ii) The self-important, (self-consciously self-effacing), warm-white-wine in a gallery approach.

Obviously there are exceptions, there are oddities, and there are times when the above are acceptable. What the Silkworms Live Events programme wants to achieve however, is a cross-disciplinary approach to exploring and sharing words. Our dictate covers music, poetry, fiction, plays etc: in Live Events these can be brought together in any combination, and if you fancy it, throw in some murals and body-paint (only if it is entirely gratuitous). Live Events is the point of engagement with the audience; it's out of the garret and into the maelstrom.

These are not 'workshops'.
These are not 'writing-toolkit experiments'
These are Methods of Engagement with the Audience You Wrote for.

If you'd like a candle-lit reading in a library in a back-street Victorian novel, then we can probably arrange that too. But the overheads on the Risk Assessment may be large.

Two Ways of Going About this are:
- Setting up a partnership with us. Silkworms would act as the Event Organiser to your event; taking an at-point-of-contract negotiable fee. We would also negotiate the T's&C's dependent on the client, the product, and the audience.
- Using Silkworms to forum and 'freelist' your upcoming word-engagement events.

Please get in touch with Rowan at events@silkwormsink.com

You can submit your ideas in an email, but feel free to send YouTube links, examples of visual work etc.