Sign in Subscribe

Hawberk Press: What, Why and How

What is Hawberk Press?

Launching in 2026, Hawberk Press is a digital-first, independent publisher run by Jordan Acosta and Michael Dodd, focusing on strange, dark fiction that isn't easily classified into neat genres. We’re definitely SFF and Horror-leaning, but we're not looking for straight-up SFF or straight-up Horror - hence the 'strange, dark' bit. 

Why have we started Hawberk Press?

We believe that books are cultural artefacts, not commodities. That publishing is at its best when it emphasises craft at every stage. That readers want to be delighted by interesting new ideas rather than endless trends. That in order to survive, any publisher needs to build strong, direct, and long-term relationships with both readers and authors.

Simply put, we plan to do publishing the way we think it ought to be done, and publish great books at a fair price.

How will Hawberk Press work?

We have a clear sense of what we want Hawberk to be, and to help get this across we've put together some guiding principles to how we're going to run things.

  • Publishing done differently: harking back to an earlier era of fewer books, less focus on genres or categories, and more risk-taking.
  • Fiction that deliberately crosses genre boundaries: strange, dark, even unsettling stories, but not simply SFF or Horror. A similar model to how early Gothic/Weird fiction introduced audiences to a mix of what these days we'd call Literary fiction and Genre fiction (albeit leaning less towards the 'Literary' and more towards accessible, even pulp-y fiction).
  • Taking risks: stories which traditional publishers might find hard to sell, but which we think readers are crying out for at the moment.
  • The Hawberk family: a small number of authors writing connected stories on an ongoing basis, rather than a large number of authors only producing one or two stories.
  • Being author-friendly: offering fair, easy to understand contracts and good payment rates, supporting authors across the full lifecycle of their work, and building long-term author/publisher relationships.
  • Digital first: everything published digitally, with physical editions produced where it's feasible.
  • Starting small: focusing initially on short stories, to introduce Hawberk Press and give readers a broad sense of what to expect, before gradually building up to longer-form releases over time. 
  • Joined-up storytelling: stories which stand on their own, but will become the starting points for ongoing worlds/settings that can be built and developed over time. Stories which share subtle connections but don’t require the reader to read through them in sequence (rather than traditional sequential series). Think: Discworld, The Culture, Golden Age detective stories like Poirot and Miss Marple, P. Djèlí Clark's Dead Djinn stories, Aliette de Bodard's Xuya universe.
  • Humans only: art should be created by humans, for humans. We don't use AI (including in the creation of artwork or marketing content), and we won't upload or approve the upload of your work to AI.

2026/27 releases

For our initial launch we’re commissioning two main projects:

  • The King in Yellow anthology (2027): a collection of new short stories inspired by Robert W. Chambers' 1895 cult classic.
  • Quarterly mini-anthologies (2027): short anthologies featuring three or four stories each, plus internal artwork, serialised stories, editorials, etc. (think The Yellow Book, The Paris Review, or SFF/Horror magazines, but simplified in a compact book format).

These will be supported by a narrative podcast called The Pallid Mask, launching late 2026. Produced by Alternative Stories, this features audio drama adaptations of Robert W. Chambers' The Repairer of Reputations and two original King in Yellow-inspired stories.

Details

If you're interested in writing for us, we'd love to know if you want to write:

  • Stories inspired by the King in Yellow.
  • Original stories, starting to build out a world/setting.
  • Both.

We have an author contract ready for you to read and review - please contact us to ask to see this. In the meantime, some of the key points of what we're looking for and offering are:

  • Word count: we’re looking for stories between 3.5k and 7k words as an initial guide, but we’re happy to be flexible.
  • Payment: we will be paying a minimum of £0.05 GBP per word.
  • Rights: we will not ask for rights outside the scope of the specific project(s) we're working on. For example, we won't ask for film or TV rights, as we're not in a position to make use of them; we won't ask for perpetual exclusivity, as ultimately your writing belongs to you.