Manuscript Submission

Rhemalda Publishing is currently accepting manuscripts for juvenile and adult fiction.

All writers should submit their projects in the following manner:

• One page author biography, including writing history and professional background.
• Concise synopsis of the manuscript (not to exceed five pages).
• Manuscript excerpt (15 to 20 percent of the manuscript) in electronic format.
• Manuscript word count.
• Describe the intended audience of the book.
• Email all of the above information in attachment form to Rhemalda Publishing Manuscript Submission at manuscript_submission@rhemalda.com or use the form at the bottom of this page.
• The author’s name and book title must be clearly stated in the subject line of the email query and the first line in the email text.

We do not require that writers contacting us have a literary agent representing them.

We discourage phone inquiries and do not accept in-person drop-offs.

All submissions will be reviewed and responded to as soon as possible.

Phone calls on the status of manuscripts submitted will not be accepted. However, if you have not received a response regarding your submission with 90 days, a polite message of inquiry is acceptable.

Summer 2011 Opus Article regarding manuscript submissions.

The longer I am in the publishing industry, the more I realize that everyone has a story. When I am asked what I do for a living and I say I own a publishing company, most people say one of four things:

1. Wow, I have always wanted to write a book.
2. I am so glad we met. I have written a book and would love for you to take a look at it.
3. I know a guy/gal who has written a book. I should give them your card.
4. I have no idea what that even means, but it sounds cool.

As I speak with these people and see the many submissions come in, I occasionally wonder if people do their research. Do authors spend comparable time preparing their manuscript as they do writing it? Or do they just throw it out there in the hopes that someone will accept it and do all the editing and formatting for them?

As every author well knows, the writing journey can take months, even years. But, the love of writing, the love of your story, and the hope of getting published keeps you dedicated. So why not put in a little extra effort to help your manuscript go much, much farther.
As an author, one of your biggest challenges is knowing when your manuscript is just right, when it is ready to send to that favorite agent or publisher. Here are a few things to do before you submit that will help you know that you are ready.

What should you do before submitting a manuscript?

Write, rewrite, rewrite. Edit, re-edit, re-edit.

Self-editing your story until it is as perfect as you can make it is the most important step before submitting your manuscript to an agent or publisher. But just rewriting and re-editing is not enough.

No matter how perfect you think your story is, it can be better. Make sure you join a local or online writing and critique group  for your story genre. Having varied perspectives will be advantageous to you. At the very least, you should get some beta readers and make sure some of them are not related to you or your best friend.

Once the critiques come back to you, make sure you consider each and every comment, no matter how much you hate the idea as you revise your story. Remember that comments from your critics need to be analyzed. If all of your critics tell you that a section of your young adult story is age-inappropriate, listen to them. If one critic tells you that he/she doesn’t like your protagonist’s name, use your own discretion.

Once you have rewritten and re-edited the story, resend the manuscript to your critique group a second time. If, once they send it back to you all the problem areas have been resolved, then you can move on. If the critiques come back with more comments, start the process of rewriting and re-editing again. Then resubmit to them until it comes back clean.

Once the critique group has completed its comments, begin the process of self-editing. Yes, this is after all the writing, rewriting, editing and re-editing. Here’s where I like to pull out Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and omit the needless words, put statements in positive form, avoid successions of loose sentences and remember, the number of the subject determines the number of the verb.

Once you think (yes, I said think) you are done, it is time to print your manuscript and check it again. You will be surprised at how many more errors and different types of errors you will find when reading the story on paper.

Just when you think you cannot possibly find another error in your manuscript, go over it again.

Now that you have gone over the manuscript more times than you can imagine, it is time to hire a professional. I bet you are wondering why you need to have your manuscript edited by a professional after going to so much trouble of having it critiqued and you working on it endlessly. The answer is simple: An author and a critique group are no match for the expert eyes of a professional editor. Did you and your critique group catch all the punctuation errors? How about knowing when or if it is permissible to use quotation marks outside of dialogue? Do you know about the “Find” function on your word-processing program to check for overused words, such as “was” and “very”? What about ellipsis dots and em dashes? What about the overuse of adjectives and adverbs? This is just the tip of the iceberg. Isn’t it understandable why it’s important to take that extra step, and yes, expense, to have your manuscript edited?

There are many people out there who say they can edit, but it is your responsibility to make sure that you hire the right one. Make sure the editor you hire has experience editing the genre of your story. If you’re undecided, ask the professional writers you know if they recommend  hiring an editor. You can also ask if they could recommend a qualified and affordable editor.

The powers that be–editors, agents, reviewers, and publishers–all know the difference between a professionally edited manuscript and one that is not. The number of authors seeking publishers and/or agents is staggering. Yet the number of publishers and agents is limited. Give your manuscript every advantage possible. It can be the deciding factor in whether your manuscript makes it to the editor’s to-read pile or the trash pile.

I’m finally ready, what next?

Winning publishers over can be a difficult task. The surest way to get your manuscript rejected is to submit a tatty, improperly laid out manuscript. To be honest, it will most likely be banished to that frozen, wind-swept hinterland where wailing and gnashing of teeth are the order of the day. I refer, of course, to the Very Bottom of the Slush Pile. Here’s how to improve your chances.

If you have browsed agents’ and publisher’s websites to find manuscript submission guidelines, you have likely come across the demand that you use “standard manuscript format”.

An agent or publisher may reject a non-standard manuscript out of hand, yet isn’t it frustrating that no one tells you what “standard manuscript format” actually means.

Generally speaking, the term indicates that you should format your document with the following guidelines in mind:

1. Type your document, don’t write it.
2. Use a single, clear font, 12 point size. The best to use is Courier or Courier New. The rationale for Courier dates back to the days when editors did an eyeball “guesstimate” of line lengths to determine exactly how much space a piece would fill on the printed page. Courier is a “fixed-space” font, meaning that each letter takes up exactly the same amount of space. This made it easier to estimate how an article would appear when typeset.
3. Use black text on a white background.
4. If you are printing out your submission (rather than submitting it electronically), use good-quality plain white paper and print on only one side of each sheet.
5. Include your name and contact information at the top left of the first page with copyright year underneath it. It is not necessary at this point to actually copyright the book–you are simply stating you are aware of your rights. Put an accurate word count at the top right. Put the title half-way down the page, centered, with “by Your Name” underneath. Start the story beneath that.
6. If you write under a pseudonym, put that beneath the title but your real name in the top left of the first page.
7. Put your name, story title (in italics) and the page number as a right-justified header on every subsequent page, in the format Name/Title/Page Number. Generally, you can use a key word from your title and not repeat the whole thing on each page. Do not manually type the page number on each page–your program should be able to automatically insert the page numbers for you. Again, go to the Help button for instructions on how to insert the page number (as well as a Header) if necessary.
8. Left-justify your paragraphs. Right margins should be ragged.
9. Ensure there is at least a 1-inch (2-centimeter) margin all the way around your text. This is to allow annotation to be written onto a printed copy.
10. Use double-spacing for all your text. If you don’t know how to double space, go to Help in your word processing program, or get help from a live person. Whatever you do, don’t decide to double space by hitting the Return key at the end of each line.
11. Don’t insert extra lines between your paragraphs.
12. Indent the first line of each paragraph by about 1/2 an inch (1 centimeter). If you do not know how to use first line indent in the paragraph rules, go to Help in your word processing program, or get help from a live person. Whatever you do, don’t use the Tab key or heaven forbid the Space Bar key at the beginning of every paragraph.
13. If you want to indicate a blank line, place a blank line, then a line with the # character in the middle of it, then another blank line.
14. Don’t use unusual formatting. To emphasize a piece of text you should underline it. You may use Bold for your part and chapter titles, and subtitles, but other than that, do not use fancy fonts.
15. Make sure you use correct punctuation and spacing. If you’re not sure about something, get a copy of the most recent edition of The Chicago Manual of Style and it will answer all your dilemmas about whether periods go inside or outside quotation marks (they used to go outside, but now they go inside) and whether to write out numbers over ten or only over one hundred (one hundred is correct). In addition, make sure you only have one space after a period, semicolon, exclamation point, etc. If your manuscript already has two spaces in it, don’t worry. You don’t have to go through the entire book to remove each individual space. Use the “Find and Replace” option. In the Find field, type in a period and then two blank spaces (. ), under Replace type in a period and one blank space (. ) and then select “Replace All” and voila! You now have just one space after your periods. Repeat the process for question marks, colons, etc. and in just a minute or two, your punctuation spacing will be perfect.
16. Don’t include acknowledgments; that comes later once you’ve been accepted.
17. Put the word “End” at the end of story text, centered on its own line.
18. If you are submitting on paper, don’t staple your pages together. Package them up well so that they won’t get damaged and send them off.
19. Enclose a brief (that is to say – brief) cover letter.

A properly formatted manuscript will not guarantee you a published book, but it will show that you are professional, which might get you past the gatekeepers of a publishing company so your words are actually read and considered for publication.

Finally here’s one piece of advice that many lesser writers than yourself fail to follow: get a hold of your prospective publisher’s submission guidelines and follow them to the letter. Their requirements may differ from those above, so treat them with respect. Remember, editors and publishers are gods and we wouldn’t want to fall foul of their caprices would we? Thunderbolts might ensue?

When mailing your submission consider using address labels. They look more professional than hand-written addresses.

Now that most writers use printers rather than typewriters, most of us consider our manuscripts “disposable”–we don’t expect the editor to send them back. (And no one expects editors to scribble suggestions and comments on our work anymore!) So it’s no longer necessary to include a return envelope that will hold your entire manuscript, or enough postage to return that manuscript. Instead, include a business-size, stamped, self-addressed envelope (SASE) for the editor to use to respond to your submission. (Do send a return envelope with postage if you want photos or artwork returned.)

Electronic Submissions
As you might imagine, electronic submissions break nearly all the rules listed above. If you are sending a submission as an  email attachment, you can still format your manuscript as you would for print; however, if you are including your manuscript in the text of your  email, you’ll need to follow very different format guidelines.

In  email, obviously, you don’t have to worry about paper quality or ink. Here are some of the things you do have to worry about:

1. Don’t attempt to double-space text. Most  email programs automatically convert a double-spaced document into single-spacing; absolutely don’t try to change it back. This will only create format problems at the other end.
2. Double-space between paragraphs. You can still indent, but some  email programs “lose” the tabs, so a double-space may be the only way to indicate a new paragraph.
3. Use a readable  email font. When in doubt, send yourself an  email; if the font looks tiny, increase the size or change fonts.
4. Avoid formatting, such as bold, underlining or italics. As a general rule,  email programs do not translate these well, resulting in odd symbols. Indicate underlining or italics by placing an underscore character next to the word being _underlined_. Indicate bold with asterisks on either side of the *word* you want to emphasize.
5. Turn off “smart” (curly) quotes in your word processing program, if you are going to transfer that document to  email. This includes curly apostrophes. These do not translate well in  email, resulting in a manuscript that is littered with weird symbols. Do not use a keyboard-generated em dash; use “ — “ to indicate a dash instead. Do not use symbols at all if you can help it; you never know what an accent mark will turn into at the receiving end.
6. Include your contact information (name, address, etc.) and word count at the very beginning of the  email, before the title.
7. Do not use HTML or send material that has previously been formatted in HTML. Remove all HTML codes. Turn off any option in your program that is likely to convert your submission to HTML.
8. As a general rule, do not send your submission as an attachment unless you have received permission to do so.
9. To be safe, convert your word-processed document to a text format before pasting it into your  email. This can eliminate many format problems. (Use plain text, not Rich Text Format.)
10. When in doubt,  email the piece to yourself first to make sure nothing went wrong.

By following all of these editing and formatting guidelines, you will increase your chances of publication.

We hope that this article is helpful to you and look forward to reading you perfectly formatted submissions in the future.

Manuscript Submission Layout Sample