Love Pages

How to Make Us or ANY Publisher Love You

Don't take unnecessary time. Your publisher is probably working on five to ten other books at once and has much more work to do than you can easily imagine. Many small publishers work 12 to 16 hours a day. Be patient. Be thoughtful. Do NOT send them spam, or chain letters for good luck. Check the website information before e-mailing questions. The answer may already be there on a FAQ page.

Make SURE your book is finished before seeking publication. DO NOT REWRITE WHILE WE ARE WORKING ON IT. Check the finished copy carefully for common mistakes. Remember eyes do not get glued to stuff or slide up and down their bed-partner's bodies. Run spell check one last time. If you are British, but applying to an American publisher, run spell check in American English. Make sure the chapters are numbered consecutively AND THAT NONE ARE MISSING. Do the housekeeping. To the publisher, a sloppy file equals a sloppy writer and does not bode well for a future working relationship.

FOLLOW DIRECTIONS. If it says only to send a query, send only the query. And don't send it as an attachment! Wait until you are invited to send sample chapters. If a publisher doesn’t do children’s books, for instance, you are wasting your time, and theirs, by sending them your whole children’s book, even if it IS only 600 words. If you send a query about a children’s book, and the publisher doesn't DO children's books, the publisher will say NO right away and that will save YOU time and TIME IS MONEY.

Check the website first for guidelines and FOLLOW THEM. If the guidelines give style tips, take time to modify your file to suit that publisher’s style guidelines, before you send it. Style can vary from house to house and by using the publisher’s style, you save your publisher time and MONEY. For instance we ask for for writers never to use ALL CAPS, because all caps disappear in manuscripts sent to some of our distributors.

For instance if the publisher says not to put anything in All Caps, then don't put ANYTHING in all caps, with the exception of common initialisms like TV or FBI. We have a distributor whose software requires that there be no caps. If the writer puts in all caps--then we have to spend time finding them and taking them all out and retyping the information in regular text OR all that information may DISAPPEAR from the final files sold on that website. So if you want your book to say CHAPTER ONE, don't put it in all caps.

If you don't know the rules of grammar, or the difference between a pear and a pair of scissors, hire an editor to fix your mistakes before submitting. If you have Hired and PAID an editor DO NOT rewrite the book afterwards and put all those grammar mistakes back into it, because you liked it the way you said it the first time. If the way you said it was correct, the editor wouldn't have changed anything.

If you are invited to send a synopsis and sample chapters. Put the synopsis first. And tell the whole story. Don’t worry about giving the ending away. They aren’t going to tell anyone. The first thing the publisher wants to know is if you have a good story. If not, he or she will read no further. If the synopsis isn’t in the front, the publisher will not read the first chapter and decide your book is too good to put down. He or she will toss it in the “return” pile, sigh, and pick up the next script in an endless stream.

If you are invited to send a synopsis and sample chapters, mark the package “Requested Material” on the outside of the package, or the subject line of the email, so the publisher will know they have asked to see it.

Put first things first when you write a query. The first thing is WHAT it is you have to sell. A novel? A young adult book? A mystery. The next thing is the length. And the third thing is audience appeal. The second paragraph should tell just enough to make them interested in the content. Think flap copy. The last paragraph should be a summary of your writing background. The whole query should be ONE page and should be contained in the e-mail if you send it electronically, NOT as an attachment! Don’t make them WORK in order to read what you send them.

As far as your publisher is concerned, there are only two rules of writing:

1. Never CONFUSE the reader.

2. Never make WORK for your editor.

Don’t “dress up” your manuscript with fancy fonts or special lay-outs. Laying the book out is the publisher’s job. Using fancy fonts, and tables may work well for business presentations, but they only give publishers, who have professional typesetting programs, headaches. For one thing, if you use a font that the receiving computer may not have available, it can cause all that material to DISAPPEAR. The only two fonts you can depend on EVERY computer having is Courier and Times New Roman.

Don’t send electronic attachments unless someone has asked for them. Don’t send them in formats other than the format requested. If you don’t know how to format the file correctly, chances are the information is on the publisher’s website.

Do NOT send queries from an email address with a spam blocker on it. Publishers will not gladly take the extra time to “sign up” so they may qualify to send you an email letter in response to your query. Signing UP usually produces buckets of unsolicited spam from whoever you are paying to keep YOU from getting any. EVERYone who "signs up" in order to contact you will get their e-mail address sold to the spammers. So usually, they will not answer even if the work isn’t of interest to them. Even if they want to say yes, and ask you to send the package, they are already annoyed.

If the publisher sends you a Galley for corrections, please remember THIS IS NOT THE TIME TO REWRITE YOUR BOOK. The time for changing your mind about how you said something is BEFORE you send it to anyone. List only TYPOS and things that absolutely have to be changed. Making changes at the Galley stage,is very tedious and time-consuming no matter WHO your publisher is.

Don't offer to fix the manuscript yourself. The publisher does not WANT you to make those changes. Publishers who ask for an electronic file almost always use YOUR FILE TO SET THE TYPE. If they have changed something, it's because they WANT it changed. If you find a typo, they probably missed it when going through your file. Publishers almost never pay proof readers any more. And no one should trust spell check too far.

For one thing they have already paid someone to lay-out the book and many changes mean that the book will have to be laid-out all over again. For another—every publishing house has its own style sheet. Some say AM and PM, some want a.m. And p.m. With periods and without caps. Strange as it may seem the publisher will have reasons why they want it done their way. USUALLY, the reason will be because it saves them time or work.

Or like the fact that we ask people not to use ALL CAPS, even though it's TEMPTING to use them for emphasis, or if a character is deaf, because ANYTHING TYPED IN ALL CAPS will DISAPPEAR without a trace in some distributor's files.

Follow the instructions exactly on how to prepare your corrections list and don't make any unnecessarily changes. Each publisher will have his or her own reasons for setting up their guidelines as they have and whatever they ask you to do, their guidelines are set up to save them work.

FOLLOW THEM.