Splice is a small press I founded in 2017 to publish adventurous, unconventional literary fiction. In the beginning, its print operations comprised two interlinked ventures: a series of short story collections by individual authors and an anthology that brought together new work from each of these authors — hence “Splice.” These activities were also initially accompanied by an online review of literary fiction and non-fiction by other small presses across the UK and around the world.
Since then, Splice has evolved in several ways, sometimes by design — or at least by force of curiosity and a desire to experiment — and sometimes in response to circumstances. Covid lockdowns put the online review on an indefinite hiatus (but never say never again!) and both Brexit and the Trump tariffs have presented challenges in getting books into the hands of readers outside the UK. If you’re interested in the ups and downs of small press publishing, I sometimes write about these on Substack. Equally, though, there have been many highlights, especially following the decision to publish novels and collections of essays. Splice has now had books longlisted or shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Edge Hill Prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and many other accolades, and titles in the Splice back catalogue have been reviewed in The Washington Post, Le Monde, the Sydney Review of Books, and elsewhere.
The best place to become acquainted with Splice, its authors, its activities, and its aesthetics, is at the Splice website: ThisIsSplice.co.uk.
The raison d’être of Splice
Eighteen months after I founded Splice, the first novel I published, Nicholas John Turner’s Hang Him When He Is Not There, was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize. This caught the eye of the book blogger Jackie Law, who asked me to outline my vision for Splice in an interview she ran on her website, Never Imitate, in 2018.
Mission Statement
Jackie asked me to explain what I wanted to achieve by establishing Splice, and to describe how the various components of Splice work together in service of my aim.
Click here for my response.
I set up Splice in 2017 with just one idea in mind: I wanted to create a system for supporting the production of formally unconventional literature.
By “formally unconventional literature,” I mean books of any type (short stories, novels, essays, memoirs, etc.) that somehow push the boundaries of style and structure, whether subtly or in revolutionary ways, adopting and defending their own terms of formal “success.” I didn’t grow up in an especially literary household, and in fact literature didn’t begin to speak to me until I was in my twenties and out of university, so the notion of literature as some sort of refined pleasure, or something with cultural cachet, is absolutely anathema to me; it doesn’t jibe with my gut feeling. I value irreverence, iconoclasm, edginess, messiness, stylistic abandon, wilful disregard and even disparagement of literary politesse. If a work of literature plays by the rules stylistically and structurally, I’m flat-out not interested. I don’t care how provocative its subject matter might be; a book’s “success,” for me, is entirely a question of its aesthetics and their deviation from the centre of the literary landscape.
By “system,” I mean a series of interlocking mechanisms that could offer support to these sorts of books at different stages on their journey from the mind of a writer to the hands of readers.
By “supporting the production” of these books, I mean I want to support the authors who write them—but this is a very complex, multifaceted activity, and it’s worth looking at some of the nuances.
The Origins of Splice
If you’d like to find out more about the origins of Splice, its back catalogue, its editorial vision, and its financial structures, I discussed all those things and more in a wide-ranging interview with Ben Lindner on his podcast, Beyond the Zero, in 2022.
Editorial Advice
Ben asked me for the advice I’d give aspiring authors who are considering submitting their work to Splice. The answer I gave in 2022 still holds true and is also the advice I give to myself as a writer, when I am submitting my own work elsewhere.
Click here for my response.
I think I would say to writers:
(A) Don’t submit anything unless you know that what you’re submitting is something that you have given everything you’ve got in you. Absolutely everything you’ve got in you [has to go] into that one book. If it doesn’t have that, don’t bother.
(B) You know, in your heart of hearts, when you are lying awake in bed at night—you know whether that book has everything that you’ve got in you, everything that you are capable of. So if you submit it hoping that you can pull the wool over someone’s eyes, or if you submit it with the view [held by] a lot of people I’ve received things from — which is that it’s not the best thing in the world, but it’s good enough, and it’s as good as a lot of other stuff [they’ve] seen out there — that doesn’t work. You know, in your heart of hearts, when you are making that kind of bad faith case for yourself.
For a press like Splice and a lot of small presses in the UK, we’re not interested in marketability. We’re not interested in where something sits in relation to other books in the market. We’re not always interested in having a product that we can sell. What we’re interested in is a piece of work that is innovative and true to itself on its own terms. That takes a lot of labour to produce, a lot of intellectual and creative labour, because [as a writer] you have to get yourself out of the market mindset and come up with something that escapes the prefabricated modes of thought and creativity that the market gives us. You know whether you’ve done that when you are submitting something—and if you’re unsure, if you can’t say in, full faith, “Yes, this is a work that is unique and is authentically the best thing that I can possibly produce at this stage as a writer,” if you can’t fully [commit to] that statement when you’re pressing the submit button: don’t submit. Go back to [the work] and keep going until you can say that.
Daniel Davis Wood 