Inkandescent

Justin David and Nathan Evans from publishing house Inkandescent are dedicated to LGBTQ+ and less-mainstream literature. Alex Klineberg presses Justin for more info...

There are many gifted writers out there, but unless you submit a work of genre fiction that’s likely to be stocked by Tesco, getting published ranges from difficult to impossible.

Indie publishers like Inkandescent take chances in a risk-averse industry. They offer a great service to the arts, giving a platform to writers who are unlikely to be offered contracts by the major publishing houses.

What inspired you to start Inkandescent?

There was no grand plan. My partner, Nathan Evans, is a director of film and theatre, and a poet. I’m a writer of fiction and a photographer. We’d both grown quite jaded about the art and publishing worlds. Nathan was about to direct his first feature film when the funding fell through. I’d had rejections up to the back teeth. Book shops were full of classics, celebrity biographies, prize-winners and paperbacks. Mainstream publishing seemed to have become all about quantity and not quality. Shift as much stock as possible and forget the duty of care towards the public.

In 2015 we’d had enough. It was time for a creative and spiritual cleanse. We wanted to make one piece of work that didn’t require the permission of a gatekeeper. No agents or publishers or producers. No bowing and scraping. We won an Arts Council grant to make a book of our own – Threads, a poetry and photography collaboration. This was cathartic and joyful and didn’t abide by any of the rules of sales and marketing.

After an extremely steep learning curve, we didn’t want all that knowledge to go to waste. We decided to publish more books and build a platform to champion the under-represented ideas, subjects and voices of others. Inkandescent was born.

JUSTIN DAVID

Your tagline is ‘By outsiders for outsiders’. Would you say mainstream publishers are too risk averse?

They certainly were when we started out. We just didn’t make the kind of work that publishers and producers could make megabucks from. We were too queer, too working-class, not working-class enough. It seemed that you had to be both an Oxbridge graduate and the daughter or son of somebody before you could get over the drawbridge. The 2020 independent report Rethinking Diversity in Publishing from University of London, Spread the Word and The Bookseller, focused on how cultural production has been disadvantaging people of colour but it confirmed many of our wider suspicions. Not only were mainstream publishers risk averse, they have also been lazy. Basically, it was easy for them to publish the mates they went to school with and not bother looking further afield.

I’m thrilled to see things changing. Of the big corporates, Penguin is making all the right noises with its initiative to find underrepresented voices. And Picador has been making some bold choices in publishing writers like Garth Greenwell. However, it remains to be seen whether these trends will stick or if they are just paying lip service to demands for diversity and inclusion. Though, we’re here now and we’re not going away.

Your latest and biggest publication is called Mainstream. What can we expect?

It will be published next summer in partnership with Unbound. It’s an anthology of stories from the edges, bringing together 30 authors from the margins to occupy centre-page, half established names like Paul McVeigh, Neil Bartlett, Keith Jarret, Juliet Jacques, Kerry Hudson and Philip Ridley, and half emerging writers who came to us through an open call. Expect stories of provocation, transgression and tenderness from some of the most cutting-edge voices in literary publishing.

Tell us about some of the other books you’ve published.

Our focus has been on marginalised voices. After Threads, our first books included Autofellatio, a memoir from singer/songwriter (and childhood friend of Morrissey) James Maker; Bartholomew Bennett’s The Pale Ones, a début novella and weird tale of the unexpected; Polly Wiseman’s Femme Fatale, which imagines a meeting in a hotel room between Andy Warhol muse Nico and that artist’s would-be assassin Valerie Solanas; and more recently my own novella The Pharmacist, a tale of queer chemsex and gentrification. Our most recent acquisition is Address Book, a collection of interconnected short stories by former Costa shortlistee, Neil Bartlett. We are over the moon to be working with queer literary royalty.

Is indie publishing a difficult market to be competing in?

The competition for indies remains the machine that’s set up for the big mainstream publishers. Many indies start off like us, running a business from the kitchen table – no marketing budget, no team, your distribution set-up is the Post Office and you do everything in-house; there’s no capital to pay book cover designers, editors and proofreaders. It’s very difficult to make ourselves heard above the booming voices of the publishing establishment.

However, within the arena of indie publishing there is a sense that we’re all in it together. There’s room for all of us and I’ve found the other indies very supportive. There’s a lot of good-will and collaboration going on. And while 2020 has been a complete bastard for everyone, business for indies has continued online, via Zoom, over Twitter. Lots of new relationships have been forged and new ways of working have been established. It’s been a very exciting time for us. We’ve recently been taken on by Inpress, the small-press sales force-cumdistributor. This coincides with our growing list of authors, some stonking reviews (including one recently in the Times Literary Supplement) and our new monthly poetry soirée, BOLD, at Above the Stag in Vauxhall.

How can people support Inkandescent?

Check out our books. We are nothing without new readers. Join our mailing list – www. inkandescent.co.uk/sign-up – so that we can keep you abreast of the work we are doing. Watch our little film about Mainstream and support us by pledging for a book: www.unbound.com/books/mainstream

Follow us on our socials:

Twitter @InkandescentUK/ Insta @inkandescentuk / Facebook @InkandescentPublishing / www.inkandescent.co.uk