Our average book is 200 pages long. During the developmental editing process, we will tell you how many manuscript pages you need to write to reach your desired book length. This will depend on the computer setup you are using.

Don’t worry about copyrighting your manuscript. You are automatically covered by copyright law as soon as you touch pen to paper. Not until a book is actually printed and offered for sale can we apply for a formal copyright certificate.

Procedure for the Average Book

These are the stages the average book travels through on its way to publication. Remember to let us know if you plan to be traveling or otherwise unavailable for any of these stages.

• You submit a proposal (see “Submitting a Proposal”)
• We submit a proposal to our Marketing department for evaluation. Key people from all departments make the final decision on whether or not to publish the book.
• You and your acquisitions editor fine-tune an annotated table of contents that serves as the basic blueprint for your forthcoming book.
• You and your acquisitions editor choose a final manuscript deadline and three specific batch dates on which to submit for review two consecutive chapters each (i.e., chapter 1 and chapter 2, chapter 3 and chapter 4, chapter 5 and chapter 6).
• We send a contract. You sign and return it.
• We send you an author questionnaire. You fill it out and send it back.
• Your acquisitions editor and an experienced developmental editor evaluate each batch of chapters for organization, content, and clarity.
• Valuable feedback, suggestions, and comments are outlined and sent to you, including useful suggestions regarding clarity, tone, style, structure, etc.
• After the first six chapters have been reviewed, you write the remaining chapters, utilizing earlier feedback to produce an effective, clear, and helpful book.
• You complete the manuscript according to the schedule established and send the manuscript to us, including the table of contents, any acknowledgements or dedications, all chapters and appendices, the bibliography or references, all illustrations or other graphic elements, and proof of permission to reprint material if necessary.
• We edit the manuscript and return it to you for approval or revision. You will be in contact with a copyeditor for approximately 6 weeks as the book is edited. Please plan to be readily available to the copyeditor during this time.
• You return the final manuscript, and we typeset it and send you page proofs.
• You approve the page proofs and return them to us; we make final changes and send the book to the printer with cover and illustrations.
• The printer sends us proofs and we approve them.
• The printer prints the books and ships them to us.

Once we have a completed manuscript in hand, the book will be edited, printed, and in your hands in about nine months. We tend to work longer than most publishers on the revising and editing stages, since we are very particular about the quality of the books we publish.

Send Us a Disk or Electronic File

Your entire manuscript (including the bibliography) should be typed and double-spaced—never single-spaced. Use one-inch margins and number the pages consecutively. The manuscript can be sent via e-mail. We prefer IBM PC compatible files in Microsoft Word format, but we can translate almost any word processing format. If there are any illustrations, we need them in both hard copy (printed format) and electronic format if possible.