Dead Ink Books / Cinder House Publishing Ltd.

Link: Dead Ink Books

Nice looking website. Their covers are decent. They've been around since 2011.

Immediate red flag: there are only two staff members listed, with no biographical material - which means they could have little to no substantive experience in the publishing trade. Publishing Director Nathan Connolly has a Reedsy listing as an editor-for-hire, where his publishing CV seems to be limited to Dead Ink and a literary journal he founded. Operations Manager Amelia Collingwood also has a Reedsy listing for proofreading; Dead Ink appears to be her sole publishing experience.

Other weirdnesses: I find it odd that one of their 2019 releases is not listed as published by Dead Ink at all, but by Cinder House, whoever that is (the website I found through Google had a security warning on it, so I didn't visit; its Twitter account hasn't been active for several years, but it's full of Dead Ink posts. Maybe it was a failed imprint..?). Another 2019 release was first published in 2017, also by Dead ink, and both editions are available on the Amazon UK website. Not sure why that is.

They only appear to put out a few books per year. There are a number of crowdfunding packages offered on the website and apparently they did their first Kickstarter campaign this year. Their business model appears to be more of a not-for-profit than a trade publisher.

So overall: I believe this is a micro literary press, run by two people with some editorial experience (but no trade publishing experience) who are running the press while holding down outside jobs. This is probably why they haven't responded to your emails. My guess is that without people handling marketing, promotion and distribution, they're limited to the the usual online markets (Amazon, et al) and likely have little, if any, brick-and-mortar presence - which in turn, translates to low sales.

They don't appear to offer much more than you could do for yourself via self-publishing, but if this labor-of-love business model appeals to you, then by all means pursue them.

The Saboteur Awards can be entered by anyone - self-published or no. The Guardian First Book Awards were discontinued as of 2016. I think the Not the Booker Prize may be the Guardian's replacement (there was some uproar about the judging of the 2019 contest). The Not the Booker Prize entrants must meet the same criteria as the regular Man Booker Prize (i.e. written in English, published by a UK or Ireland-based publishing company), but both the Saboteur and Not the Booker prizes are nominated by the general public and voted for by the general public - meaning they're popularity contests (and so could potentially result in a Boaty McBoatface outcome). And neither award carries any substantive prize: Not the Book winners get a mug; Saboteur winners get a bottle of gin.