My Submission Preferences

When submitting to another editor or a publisher, follow their guidelines.

When you’ve hired me to edit your manuscript, or when your manuscript is being submitted to me or edited by me for Dragon Moon Press, the less formatting work I have to do, the better.

My personal preferences (which bear a striking resemblance to the Dragon Moon guidelines) are as follows:

File format: Electronic submission.

I prefer to receive the full manuscript as an e-mail attachment in a Microsoft Word .doc compatible format.

Please give your attached file a distinguishing name (your title with your last name is a safe choice; “my_manuscript” is not).

Please don’t separate chapters into individual files or give me a chunk of the book at a time. It’s better for continuity of your novel if I can search through the entire manuscript at once.

Style:

I prefer manuscripts to be double spaced between lines, with one space after a period. No right justification, please. It messes with the spacing.

I prefer italics to underlines. I prefer real em dashes without leading or trailing spaces (see the search bar on the right to find my post on how to create an em dash).

I like minimal formatting (no single character ellipses or spaces between periods in ellipses, no curly or “smart” quotes, and no fancy characters as section breaks).

Font-wise, I prefer Times New Roman. I accept Courier New, but I really dislike working in it. If you give something to me in Courier, I’ll probably change it to TNR for myself.

Your title page should include the title, your name and contact information. Please include your name, title and page number in a single line on the header on each page. (Name / Title / #)

As we near a final pass, I will ask you for an acknowledgments page, a back cover blurb and an “about the author” bio, and edit/incorporate them at that time.

Tagged as: submission guidelines