SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

WE NEVER CONSIDER PAPER SUBMISSIONS

ALL INQUIRIES SHOULD BE VIA E_MAIL!

We consider all genres except books for small children. Only books for Ages 12 and up, please. We are actively seeking romance, mystery, and non-fiction.

WE DO NOT CONSIDER UNSOLICITED MANUSCRIPTS.

BUT we will be happy to look at a query letter at any time. That is just to cut down on inappropriate submissions. We are always open to good work.

Write us a query letter and tell us about your project.

A QUERY LETTER should be about three paragraphs long:

PARA 1: Tell the title, genre, number of words, and a little about the story or content.

PARA 2: Tell why it will be interesting to readers and who would buy the book.

PARA 3: Tell a little about yourself and your writing experience

Have you published in the past but now your book is out of print?

We can be a home to the homeless. If you have previously published work that you'd like to see back in print, AND If you have a PDF or .rtf file of your book, we'd be happy to consider picking it up for publication again.

Click here to download a .pdf copy of our e_book contract.

We Have Expanded into Print

We plan to move more of our titles into print throughout the next year. They are trade paperbacks printed on acid-free paper, with full color covers, and are, in every way, the same as a hardback book, but with soft covers. Print books will be published under our Cambridge Books, imprint, a division of Write Words, Inc.

We have entered into a printing relationship with Booksurge.com that lists our titles not only in their own catalog, but at Amazon.com, Target.com and many other distributor sites.

This is a big step for us and we are excited about it.

If you want us or any other publisher to love you-- Click on the “Love Page.”

Style Tips and GUIDELINES for ebooksonthe.net

The publishers at ebooksonthe.net aim to produce books that are consistent in style and usage, just as paper publishing houses utilize a house style for their printed products. So before you submit your manuscript for review, please check it for the following:

PLEASE, YOU WILL MAKE OUR TYPESETTER'S LIFE A LOT EASIER IF YOU DO NOT TRY TO FORMAT YOUR MANUSCRIPT, OR ILLUSTRATE IT, OR USE ALL CAPS AND FANCY FONTS IN IT

This advice will help you avoid breaking rule two below.

THE RULES

There are only two rules that apply:

Never confuse your reader.

Never make work for your editor.

But there are GUIDELINES and here they are.

* Manuscripts should be sent as attachment files in .rtf format. Rich Text Format is a commonly utilized format that converts easily from one text processing system to another.

Whatever word processing program you use—Word, Word Perfect, Ami_Pro, etc. most will permit you to change the format of your file to rich text, by using the "Save as" command under the File menu. It is NOT enough just to change the name of the file. The "SAVE AS" option MUST come into play.

HINT: The right file will be easier to find if you rename it with RTF in there somewhere.

* Please mark your scene breaks with three asterisks, not white space alone; white space is often lost during conversion to html and other book formatting software, so if you use a double line break with nothing in it, your carefully planned scene breaks will ALL disappear into one solid block of text.

* Manuscripts should be single spaced, without any extra lines between paragraphs.

PLEASE USE A RETURN ONLY AT THE END OF A PARAGRAPH

Because the typesetting program will easily replace your indents. Do not use a bunch of space bands at the beginning of a paragraph to indicate a paragraph indent. In fact no indent is fine.

Book manuscripts should be all in ONE long file—not an individual file for each chapter—and they should be formatted with no headers or footers in Times New Roman 12 point type, or Courier.

HINT: If you have a lot of formatting, fancy fonts, curly quotes, and so forth, you can put your file into Courier, where they are not available, to get rid of them.

If you have illustrations, number them before the names in order of appearance, put them in separate .jpg files, and clearly mark the line of text they should be near, by typing in the manuscript [Insert 1.Sunset.jpg here]. Then send us a separate list of captions for each numbered illustration.

* Pause indicators and how we would like them formatted: Hyphens_use the hyphen key.

Dashes—You type an em dash by holding down the key and typing 0151 on the numeric keypad if you are using Times New Roman. If you don't want to do this, or are using the Courier Font, use three hyphens, with no space on either side. Dashes are brief pauses used in dialogue mostly to indicate an interruption or a change of thought. They are rarely used in narrative, where a comma will do the job for you.

Ellipses [. . .]—typed as three dots with spaces between, but not at the ends. In TNR these are created by holding the key down and typing on the keypad 0133. There are three dots in an ellipsis, not five, not seven and certainly not nine! An ellipse pause is long enough to count to three. NEVER use more dots for longer pauses.

When you use ellipses to indicate a pause and they come at the end of a sentence or in a place where other punctuation might be appropriate, the three ellipses dots should be followed by the appropriate punctuation, a period, comma, or even a question mark.

Remember, do not be redundant. If it is stated in the narration that there was a pause in conversation, there is no need to use an ellipsis. Ellipses can, and do, slow the PACE of your story.

Watch hyphenation. Be a minimalist, and make sure each and every one of your hyphenations is necessary. Check the dictionary to see if a word is a compound word. Be lighthearted not light-hearted.

On the other hand a hyphen IS needed if there are two modifiers and one modifies the other. For instance you might make your character good-looking. You can have a “good” character, but not a “looking” character, so the hyphen is needed to tie the two words together so they both modify your character.

* We prefer to see narrative written in the past tense. Most narrative is written in past tense, dialogue in present tense, and flashback in past perfect tense. If your whole book is in present tense and if that was a conscious choice and if you feel STRONGLY about it, we can discuss it. And if the entire book, written in the present tense, is well_done, we won't mind at all. But we would still prefer to see the narrative in past tense because, to speak frankly, often entire books written in the present tense don't do themselves any favors and readers may too easily be confused between narrative and dialogue.

* Thoughts are typeset in plain text when a thought tag (David thought) is used. Do not place quotation marks around thoughts, though this was done often in the past, it is not done now.

First person, direct thoughts, without a tag, are set in Italic type, which is available in most word processors. If you cannot use italic type, underline the copy to indicate it is to be set italic. But if the Italics are there, USE THEM. They will be then be preserved in Rich Text and should reappear within your manuscript without a problem.

The Caps and Fonts Guidelines

Please DO NOT type anything in all caps, in your manuscript. No, not even the title. If we see it, we will fix it, but we do not always see everything and ANYTHING typed in all caps, will DISAPPEAR WITHOUT A TRACE, when the file is converted to some E-Book formats. We sell many books to owners of those brands of e-books. Help us make sure all of your book will be available to those readers. Bad enough when things like CHAPTER ONE, etc. disappear from the manuscript, but it's even worse when someone SHOUTS THE ANSWER, AT THE DENOUEMENT, and the whole solution to the mystery is gone.

Please do not use fancy fonts in your manuscript. If you choose a font that doesn't happen also to be present in the receiving computer that test , too, will disappear.

Names are capitalized. Pronouns are NOT. If Mom is used as a name it gets a cap. If you talk about your mom, the “your” makes it a pronoun. The following sentence is correct because the “my” before mom makes it a pronoun.

My mom said Dad would be late tonight.

Okay, it looks funny, but it’s right all the same.

Same rule applies for other kinds of formal address. Captain Tyler Morris, of the Maryland State Police. –is correct But so is – Morris was our captain, when I was a state trooper.

We were all taught to “BE consistant.” But typesetting rules are different from what we were taught in English Composition, okay.

The Numbers Guidelines: We use the rules from the Chicago Manual of Style, with some adaptation. Numbers are spelled out to 99, and numerals are used for numbers of 100 or above.

Sounds simple, but some things can be tricky. Time for instance. It is 10 a.m., but ten o'clock. It is never 10:00 a.m. (avoid using extra zeros, as they confuse the eye), but it is 10:15 a.m. If there's no a.m., then it's ten in the morning, or whatever

And measurements, especially measurements with hyphenations, deviate from the rule. A child may be two years old, but if it's hypenated he becomes a 2_year_old. A 36_foot boat came into play in a recent manuscript.

Money can be tricky as well. It is never $2,000.000.00, but $2 million dollars. (Yes the dollars is usually spelled out, too, even though the dollar sign is present. There were 10,000 men on the battlefield, should be ten thousand, even though it's more than 100, because of the zeros, but if it's 10,313 men, then the numbers are used.

The Galley Process

Some e_book publishers do no editorial work at all, take the manuscript just as you send it and post the book, warts and all. This has gotten e_book publishers a reputation for being "sloppy." Others are equally as meticulous as publishers for mass market print houses. We tend to fall somewhere in the middle but leaning toward meticulous.

Please remember that corrections at the galley stage are tedious, time_consuming, and difficult to make, so this is NOT an opportunity to REWRITE YOUR BOOK. Send corrections only for typos and mistakes that absolutely MUST be changed.

We use the Chicago Manual of Style with some "house" rules that are unique to our house, as noted above—a.m. and p.m. are used instead of AM and PM, to avoid caps, and so on. We have reasons for everything we ask a writer to do. When you receive your galley in PDF some corrections will have already been made. We suggest you print the galley before looking for errors. They are far easier to see on paper than on screen. Then make us a list of corrections in the following format:

Page # The Number that shows on the bottom of the page.

Paragraph # with the first counting as Paragraph ONE, even if it is a partial.

Column # if your book is typeset in columns

Line # of the line WITHIN the paragraph, not for the whole page.

The whole line as it appears.

The whole line as it should appear.

Yes, that's right. Please type the whole line. We have good and valid reasons for asking you to do it this way. Here are some facts you may not know about the typesetting and galley process. And on to the next.

1. The PDF is a PDF because we do not want you to make corrections in order to save us work. You may know perfectly well that a character doesn't use a pear of scissors, but not every author we work with does.

2. We know you want to help, but again, the rules for typesetting are different from those for typing dissertations. In any case corrections are not made to the PDF, but to the typesetting file that is in a whole other program, and then a second and corrected PDF is regenerated from that, so your making corrections would not help us in any way.

3. Because the typesetting file changes as corrections are made, paragraph numbers and even page numbers may also change. We need enough words to be able to use "search" to find the mistake, if it isn't where you said it should be. For this reason it is important to type the error exactly as it appears—mistake and all, and the correction exactly as you wish it to appear.

4. Keep a copy of your list and e_mail us a copy in .rtf format. We will then make the corrections and you can use your copy to check behind us and make sure we didn't miss anything when you get your corrected galleys.

5. Your book is important to us. Your book is a good book, or it wouldn't have gotten this far. We take pride in our work. Please help us make our files as clean and error_free as we possibly can.