It has been a while, unfortunately, since Eibonvale Press was open to public submissions. This is not a condition that I particularly like, since I always valued being open to new authors. However, sheer busyness means that I have to keep careful control of the press to avoid getting swamped – and in the end exhaustion from trying to do too much led to me taking a break entirely. Now however, I am releasing a call for works specifically for a new line of chapbooks that I am starting. I am looking for individual works or micro-collections of up to 10,000 words or so. You can see the full details and download the guidelines here:
http://www.eibonvalepress.co.uk/infoforwriters.htm
I am specifically keen to find some new faces here, especially the under-represented, which the press rather needs! Indeed, I am hoping that about two thirds of these will be people who have not been published by Eibonvale before.
I am seeing this line of chapbooks as visually rather different to the existing Eibonvale books, with covers based more on simple line-art rather than complex collages. The recent special offer chapbook by Brendan Connell is a simple example of what I have in mind, as is the kind of art that I have used before in the interior of certain books. For example, here and here.
I hope to do these chapbooks in both hardcover and paperback, both of which will be quite economically priced volumes. Tiny hardcovers are very much a possibility with my printers and they are not something I have experimented with until now. Hardcovers are still my favourite binding, and they do sell – sometimes even outselling the paperback edition – so there is really no reason why I should not make them here. Hopefully the hardcovers would be a nice collectable matching set!
I am really quite excited about this. Hopefully these chapbooks will be a lively thread running through Eibonvale Press for a while yet.
A few months ago, I embarked on a series of revisions of existing eibonvale titles – mostly with the aim of fixing some of the earlier cover art, which was starting to feel a little green, and also to address some specific issues that had been bugging me. One of these was Allen Ashley’s collection Once and Future Cities. In the image above, you can see the before and after of this project. As you can see, the primary goals were 1) to switch over from gloss to a matte cover, and 2) to get rid of the clumsey and overwhelming grey and replace it with something warmer and more uniform. The new book is much more in keeping with Eibonvale’s more recent titles, I think.
