Tuesday 21 September 2010

While I’m on the subject 21st September 2010.

While we’re on the subject of what not to do on a submission, let’s talk about title pages.

As a publisher – what am I going to be interested in on the title page of your manuscript? Your title, your pen name, and probably the word count. The later isn’t absolutely necessary if I’ve insisted on it being in the e-mail the manuscript is attached too – but others prefer it this way. So it doesn’t really bother me.

I can probably accept your contact details on the top but there are several things I don’t want to see.

One is your taste in decoration. Sure – there are some very nice colour schemes for title page graphics out there, and I’m sure they may even help you to “see” your own work, but I don’t want to see them. Seriously, I don’t, and for two reasons.

Firstly – they won’t match our “corporate colour scheme” (a particular two shades of blue) and I might not even agree with your “dodgy” taste in any case – remember putting me off your manuscript in any way is a bad thing!

Secondly, they distract me from what I want to do, which is to read the thing. In fact we’ve accepted manuscripts for publication without a title page – we don’t require one but accept others do.

The next page of your submission is critical too. We (and I know others differ) ask for your bio, your synopsis and genre for the book to form the body of the e-mail. Why then, would we want to read through them again as pages 2 to whatever of the manuscript? Okay, so you’re sending it to three hundred people (which is frowned on by probably 298 of them) and you want to send the same thing to all of them.

I can understand that, but I can’t accept something that is going to cost me time to scroll past to find the story, heaven forbid, I can’t find the start of the actual book because it starts halfway down page 4 of the synopsis.

Don’t get me started by the complex attempt at a copyright statement on page 5 either. There are two things wrong with this. Every publisher uses their own, usually legally checked, copyright statement so we WON’T use yours however much you kick and scream.

Secondly, it’s a trust issue. You’ve sent us your manuscript – usually we haven’t asked you for it. It represents a big slice of your creative life and it’s important to you. WE KNOW! We only contract the publishing rights – the copyright remains the author’s at all times. I’d be very concerned about a publisher that wants more than this. If you don’t trust us to honour that – what in four hells are you doing submitting it to us in the first place? Not only that, you insulted me, and my company. Not exactly a brownie point winner – is it?

If you must put a copyright on it, then just put the copyright symbol next to your name and leave it at that. I can respect that; you don’t know me (probably) after all, but no more than that.

Any more negative brownie points and it’s a reject slip. Simple really.

No comments:

Post a Comment