A Chat with Acid Bath Publishing | Big Green Experts

We chat with Paul Whelan of Acid Bath Publishing to get insights on their publishing process and their new call for submissions.

Tell us about Acid Bath's origin story and your role within that. How did you get into publishing and find your ethos?

I started out by trying to become a writer but I didn’t have the discipline for it. I was taking a course in Creative Writing at York St John University which gave me the opportunity to work on the editorial team for the student anthology, Beyond the Walls 2018, published by Valley Press. I found the whole experience to be unbelievably rewarding. Working in a team of ten, I didn’t have as much creative control over the project as I’d have liked but it was still an excellent introduction to small press publishing.
Since then, I have completed my degree and spent some time working on Forge Zine, particularly putting out calls for submissions and pestering all the writers I know to submit. I learned a lot about using social media and after a while it started to feel more natural. Meanwhile, I was developing the concept for Acid Bath Publishing but I had no idea where to begin. In fact, the founding of Greenteeth Press was hugely influential. I didn’t understand the basics of publishing but Greenteeth’s example showed me that the hard work can pay off.
I had vague plans in the works but nothing really started moving until the pandemic arrived. I was working in a supermarket at the time and the impact of the crisis only increased my working hours. I didn’t decide to start ABP because I had more time on my hands. Really, it was a response to the dissatisfaction, the disgusting unsafe working conditions, and the sudden shift in everyone’s priorities. The way I see it, the world is full of all these ambitious writers dedicating their lives to their art and everywhere, for every one of them, there is the awful expectation that they waste their energy filling the pockets of billionaires.
I was just so sickened by what I saw and afraid of losing my job. I’d worked with people who’d been there for years, who’d served them loyally through the pandemic, who’d made one slight mistake and been fired over it. Every day I worried would be my off day, that I’d make a mistake and get the sack. I decided that it would be worthwhile to find some alternative, however small, and assert some level of independence that could provide the fulfilment I was looking for.
So I started ABP, taking inspiration from the small presses that came before it. I had enormous respect for many of them but I couldn’t find enough that published the kind of writing I wanted to read. Our ethos is summed up by our tagline: Corrosive fiction and poetry. “Corrosive” suggests many things— but to us, it is writing that strikes hard, that gets to the basics.

How did your experience as a writer help you put together Acid Bath Publishing?

I frequently used Submittable back in the day. I got quite good at sending poems and stories out on a regular basis and the rejections didn’t discourage me. Getting my work published just wasn’t my priority for very long. I instead wanted to focus on amplifying other, more dedicated writers. I think I have the advantage of recognising when a piece of writing has had a lot of care put into it. I try to be open to all kinds of writing and not discount something because it doesn’t immediately seem a right fit.

Tell us about your latest call for submissions and the inspiration behind it.

Our second anthology, The Worst Best Years, is all about university life. We want stories and poems that reveal the absolute fundamentals of the student experience. It seems like everyone I know who has gone to university has some ridiculous story from it they love to tell. Whether you look back on uni with fondness or disgust, we want to hear about it. The concept was originally going to be used for our first publication but the situation with COVID-19 made the themes of Wage Slaves more socially relevant in 2020. My hope is that The Worst Best Years will provide some much-needed levity although some of the submissions we’ve received so far have been quite dark. At this stage, I don’t know what the overall feel of the book will be but that should all become clear within the next month. Submissions close on 15th April so don’t wait too long to submit.

There is more and more emphasis placed on publishing in the North of England - where do you think Acid Bath sits in this?

Of course, ABP was started in Sheffield so I think you could certainly call us a Northern publisher. However, since releasing Wage Slaves, I’ve moved to London for university and so ABP has moved with me. I’d make the joke that I’ve sold out on the North but that’s not really true. At the moment, we are considering a couple of standalone works which are heavily focused on Yorkshire, Sheffield and York in particular. The question is what makes a small press Northern? Is it some vague notion of a Northern spirit or just literally being based in the North? Ultimately, I don’t think small scale publishers need to be tied to a location anymore, with so many of them accepting international submissions and distributing their products worldwide. However, if they want to identify with a certain location, there isn’t anything wrong with that. Whether the work is done from a terraced house in Sheffield or a flat in West London, I think the process is fundamentally the same. I’d say the biggest difference is that I now read submissions on a train to work instead of on a bus.

How do you manage your workload? Has the pandemic affected the way you work?

Since we only started months into the pandemic, I don’t really have much to compare it to. With Wage Slaves, the bulk of the work came at the end of the project when submissions were flooding in. It’s very much going the same way with The Worst Best Years. The hardest part is being productive in the time I’m not at my stupid, waste-of-life job.

Do you think the pandemic has affected the way people read, write and spend their time on other creative pursuits?

I think it depends on the person. I know people who it has helped creatively and others it has stunted. I was reading a bit less during the first lockdown, mainly because the libraries were closed. The main difference was that I started taking more of an interest in small press titles rather than established classics. As for writing, two of our contributors, Pramod Subbaraman and Mark Grainger, are poets who haven’t been writing for long but during the pandemic both have gained a significant following for their poetry.

How do you think working with ABP differs from working with a big, conglomerate publisher? 

I have never worked for a major publishing house so I will have to work on assumptions. My view of conglomerate publishers is that they are driven primarily by business interests over any real passion for the work they put out. That’s all well and good — people have to make a living — but I don’t see much benefit in giant corporations swallowing up the achievements of independent publishers after they have put in the legwork. What I try to do with ABP is design our books based on individuals’ interests, on intuition, and the collaboration of the online writing community. Rather than having a purely transactional relationship with our contributors, I try to make things more personal and casual while still taking a professional attitude to the production of our books. ABP can’t offer any monetary reward or the widest reach for your writing but we work with writers on the understanding that we have a mutual interest in seeing their work in print and making it readily available to people all over the world. I think the small press offers more of a community feel than larger publishers. It is extremely satisfying to build relationships with people I’ve never met whose writing I want to publish. It has been immensely fulfilling to discover these talented writers, collaborate with them, and follow their careers as afterwards.

You can find out more about Acid Bath Publishing and submissions on their website.