It’s time to open the window …

We are delighted to be giving you advance notice that we are opening a submissions window in July and August this year, to enable us to select single-author chapbook-length poetry collections for publication in 2025.

We aim to announce a short-list of potential authors by October, working with each of them individually to help them hone and refine their submissions, so that we can confirm our 2025 programme by the end of the year.

What we are looking for…

We are most drawn to thematically-linked sequences of poems: works that riff on a core conceit, event or narrative voice. Cohesion is important to us, as is consistency of register and attention to form.

However, we don’t want to be too rigid, as much of our favourite poetry is shape-shifting and studded with chameleonic surprises, even within a single poem.

We are happy to consider any mix of shorter and longer poems within the collection.

We want to be surprised (even shocked) by the way your words and poems work with - and against - each other.

What you will be asked to submit...

So far, Dithering Chaps has published chapbooks of around forty A5 pages. However, we are happy to consider shorter (or indeed longer) collections, too.

You should have your chapbook-length anthology ready for submission. Initially, though, we will be asking you to send us a 10-page sample, along with a 200-word treatment, setting out your aims for the work as a whole. We will then select the short-list of poets for potential publication.

Short-listed poets will be invited to send us their full manuscript and we will work with each of you individually, giving editorial feedback and the chance to further hone and refine the collection, before making our final choice of poets for publication in 2025.

Reading fees

We will be asking you to pay a submission fee (aka reading fee) of £10 when you send us your ten pages and wanted to be upfront about the reasons why we have to make this charge ...

We are a non-profit publisher and receive no external funding. We offer our own time and expertise free of charge for the work we do at every stage of the process leading to publication. However, there are naturally costs associated with publishing our chapbooks, principally: printing, cover design and hosting our website. The income we receive from reading fees, along with sales, simply allows us the chance to break even.

Please be assured that all income we receive goes directly to covering our publication costs: we hope it may be some consolation, if you are unsuccessful this time, to know that your payments are helping another writer achieve their dreams.

A bit of advice - get those submissions in early! The early poet catches the editor’s eye. Experience tells us that poets who send their work to us early in the submission period increase their chances of success. This is all down to the magic of re-reading and ‘sinking-in time’. You would be surprised, perhaps, how often a collection that left us a little luke-warm on a first reading, suddenly pops off the page on a second, or third read-through. It’s so powerful when you re-encounter a text and start to feel it becoming an old favourite.

And in other news …

Meanwhile, Dithering Chaps has a busy 2024 publication schedule to deliver!

We’re having a power-lunch in June with Louise Walker, the latest poet to join the Dithering Chaps family. Her collection is taking shape nicely and we’ll be looking at design options over a glass (or two) of Chardonnay. Look out for launch news in late Summer.

David has been busy this month reading further submissions from the forty winners of the Bournemouth Writing Festival’s ‘Lines in the Sand’ competition - this time to produce a short-list from which the winner-of-winners will be chosen, by Gena, for an individual chapbook collection, to be published later this year.

Gena has been updating the website, including getting the Submissions Window tab ready to go live in about a month’s time, as well as working on Louise’s excellent collection of poetry. We can’t wait to share that with you!

Meanwhile, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to get a collection of poetry ready, select your ten pages and start working on your treatment.

The countdown to the opening of our submissions window begins …