Submission Window Open

(and a potted history of BB)

Writers.

We’re now open for submissions to our Substack platform. Please read the entirety of the guidelines and our history below before committing anything to screen or paper though ‘cos we’re Northern and pernickety!

Have a good weekend and we look forward to hearing from you.

Submission Guidelines

Before submitting we strongly recommend you read some of our previously published work if you can. We’re looking for what we call ‘Council Estate Fiction’ that means stories about the people who grow up on free school meals and hand-me-down clothes, the people who frequent the dingy pubs and cheap backstreet booze shops, the people who do the shit jobs at minimum wage who didn’t get to ‘stay at home’ during the pandemic. In short, we want stuff about Britain’s underclass.

Think Alan Sillitoe, think Irvine Welsh, think Kevin Sampson, think Ken Loach…think council estate!

We’re working class and we believe in paying writers…BUT (there’s always a but isn’t there!)…we’re not currently in a position to do that. So for the time being those we select for publication to our Substack site will be offered three months free access to the paid part of our site. Going forward, as subscriptions increase, we’ll reflect that in the fees we pay for work. If that’s no good to you then we absolutely understand – we don’t want to work for free either – and we’ll hopefully see you when our position changes.

If you’re still interested then read on :-

Deal Breakers

All submissions should be previously unpublished.

If you’re submitting the same work elsewhere then that’s fine but please let us know if it has been accepted somewhere else.

We’re only really after Fiction. Our guideline word count for stories is between 1000 and 8000 words

Submissions should be in one .doc or .docx attachment and in a normal (Calibri / TNR / Garamond etc) font, double-spaced and a minimum of size 12.

Please note that we cannot offer feedback on unsuccessful submissions.

The subject line of your email should include: Story Name _ Word Count_Your Name

Give us a 100 word bio of yourself including any site or blog of yours you wish to be linked to

By submitting you are giving us the right to publish your work on our site and an option further down the line to publish in a paperback compilation for a further fee (this will be negotiable at the time and fully dependent on how solvent we are!)

Email work to info@bykerbooks.com

Submissions that do not follow these (pretty easy) guidelines will not be read

Desirable

If you’re subscribed to our Substack site (it’s free – why wouldn’t you be…) you will very probably be looked upon more favourably

If you can wax lyrical to us in your email about anything we’ve previously published (meaning you bought it 😉) then you will very probably be looked upon more favourably

If you follow us on Twitter / are in our Facebook group/ both then you will very probably be looked upon more favourably

If you do the above and share our posts/tweets and generally support us then there is no very about it – you WILL be looked upon more favourably 😊

Finally, if you weren’t aware of us before our little hiatus then here’s a potted history from the boss:-

I started Byker Books back in 2008 with a vague notion of publishing the working-class lads and lasses who weren't taken seriously by the big publishers or agents. The people who didn't have degrees in 'creative writing' but had crap jobs that sapped their souls instead, the people who didn't have a 'journey' to bore people to death with but did have an idea for a bloody good story that other people from the estates would enjoy, the people who didn't get glowing reports at their great schools but instead had to battle their siblings for the one pen in the house to write anything down before doing their paper round in the rain. 

That's who Byker Books was for.

People like me.

It was never about the sales or the money, it was never about slavishly trying to perfect SEO on a glorified search engine named after a river in Brazil (work it out) and it was never, ever about shafting the writers for profit - Byker Books was different to the others. During it's lifespan my tiny independent press published over one hundred previously unknown authors through the 'Radgepacket' collections (some of whom went on to get book deals elsewhere) put out twelve paperbacks and published a number of others via electronic means. One of my proudest moments was, when having a pint with one of our authors he compared the BB set up to Factory Records.

At the time it was a much needed initiative for the kind of writer that I've detailed above but the advent of mass-market self-publishing of e-books pretty much negated any need for that so I stopped.

We hope that gives you a flavour of how we roll but just in case you’re still not sure then we can be summed up quite succinctly.

We do what we want because we’re Byker Books.

And we’re back!