Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (649 page)

There’s a lot of confusion among new SF writers about the basics of how to submit a manuscript to a publisher. So this is a fairly general nuts-and-bolts kind of introduction. The more detailed nuances of book proposal writing, finding market reports, and such you will have to find elsewhere (and be sure to read the essay on avoiding publishing scams before you start looking). Most of what I talk about here is true for submitting both books to publishers and stories to magazines, and it’s similar to what you’ll be submitting to a prospective literary agent.

What You’re Submitting

For books, you’re generally submitting some combination of a cover letter, a proposal, an outline or plot summary, and several sample chapters. For a short story, you’re generally submitting a cover letter and the complete story. In either case, your submission should be in proper manuscript format (this may seem trivial, but it’s
very
important) and in accordance with that particular publisher’s or magazine’s guidelines.

If you don’t follow the publisher’s guidelines and submit the material in proper manuscript format, your work is likely to be rejected out of hand. At best, the editor will be annoyed and predisposed not to like it, since you’re making extra work for the editor. You’re asking someone to publish your book: Don’t expect them to change the way they do business specifically to accomodate you, unless you’re already a giant best-seller. (And if you’re going to go the prima donna route, you’re likely to get dropped by the publisher as soon as your sales drop a little bit, where they might stick with a low-maintenance writer.) The initial submission is the first hint the editor gets at how well you take direction and editing; if you don’t follow directions before you have a contract, what are the chances you’re going to afterward?

I’m not trying to sound intimidating here. Proper manuscript format is actually really easy to follow, as are most publisher’s guidelines.

Proper Manuscript Format

Manuscript format is designed to be as easy as possible to read. The theory behind it is that as editors, we only have one pair of eyes, and they have to last for a long time. Anything that taxes them unnecessarily is bad.

Do not try to impress the editor with brightly colored paper, confetti, glitter, or things that spring out of the box (or email attachment) when it’s opened. No script fonts, half-dead toner cartridges, or oddly colored ink. Your creativity should come through in your writing, not in your formatting.

While different publishers want slight variations on this, the basics of proper manuscaript format are as follows:

Text should be double-spaced, 12-point type in a text font
(preferably Courier or Times New Roman, but Bookman, Palatino, or another easily readable font is fine, too).

Use one side of the page only
(no matter how long the book is). Use standard 8 1/2 by 11 paper if you’re in the U.S., or whatever the standard is where you’re writing.

Margins should be set at one inch.
Every page after the first should have a header on the upper right-hand corner containing: your name/book or story title/page number. (If you’re working in Word, you can do this by going to File/Page Setup, and checking “different first page” or “First page special.”)

Use either italic or underlining for emphasis, but not both
. (They mean the same thing typographically. Underlining was used for italics in the days when typewriters could only use one font, and the habit stuck. Lots of practices in publishing are done a particular way because that’s the way Gutenberg happened to do them, and the habit stuck.)

Many publishers now ask for submissions by email, but others prefer traditional manuscripts. If it’s a story and it’s more than five pages long, send it flat in a large envelope. If it’s shorter you can fold it and send it in a normal envelope if you’d like.

The first page should look something like this:

Legal Name Approximate word count

Address

Phone

E-mail address

Title

by Whatever Name You’re Writing Under

Text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

Publisher’s Guidelines

Most publishers and magazines post their guidelines more-or-less prominantly (depending on how swamped they’re feeling) on their websites. Magazine guidelines are also generally listed somewhere in the magazine. Guidelines tell you the specifics of what to put in the package you’re submitting. Sometimes they’ll give you information on what the publisher is currently looking for or overstocked with.

Another important source of guidelines are several writers who put together market guides geared to working professional writers. Some of these are free and some are market based, and they can cover everything from genre fiction to airline magazines. They also tend to have guidelines for open anthologies, which otherwise you find out about mainly through industry rumor. Market guides also tend to have helpful articles, reviews, etc., but those are pretty much the equivalent of the proverbial articles in Playboy—not saying you won’t read them, but probably not the first time through, and it’s not why you bought the magazine.

Sources geared mostly to new writers, like
Writer’s Digest
, are usually much less useful; they tend to be out of date, and less geared to working writers than to newbies.

This may seem like obvious advice, but don’t submit to a magazine you’ve never read. You don’t have to subscribe, but at least leaf through a copy to get a sense of what they actually publish.

Cover Letters

Cover letters should be simple and short. Don’t go into every detail in the cover letter—that’s what the proposal and outline are for. The purpose of the cover letter is to make me want to read the proposal (the same way the proposal should make me want to read the book). It should be quick and interesting.

Longtime editor John Ordover gives an example of the perfect cover letter:

Dear [Editor’s Name]

Enclosed please find my [x] thousand word [genre] short story which I feel may be right for [name of magazine]. I enclose an SASE in case I am mistaken.

(If you have any credits, you go on to say)

I have sold x stories to [magazine names]

(and if you don’t have any you say)

This would be my first professional sale.

I look forward hearing from you.

Sincerely,

[your name]

(SASE is short for
self-addressed, stamped envelope
, so the publisher can reply to you. If you want your story or book returned, you need to include an envelope and sufficient postage. If you don’t want it returned, you need to say “the manuscript is disposable” in your letter.)

The format is similar for books and short stories. You want to be quick and to the point, but give the editor any specific information he or she needs to categorize your story.

Be sure and include credits and any special expertise. Professional credits are best, but non-paid credits count, too. If you’ve written a long, well-received series on a popular blog, say so. Ditto for a weekly column at a local newspaper, or an academic article on the same subject as the book. If it’s a thriller about neurosurgery and you’re a neurosurgeon, say so. While it’s important not to oversell yourself, it’s just as important not to undersell yourself.

A few other points that John Ordover mentioned as “newbie-markers” when I asked him for permission to quote his sample cover letter:

1) Don’t put a copyright notice on the story.

2) Don’t put a computer-generated overly precise word count on the story—ie, 3,927. Round up to the nearest hundred.

3) Address your story to the editor by name.

4) sending a hot young escort to the editor won’t get you published, but you will get read and rejected faster.

Book Proposals

A book proposal is a short (about 2–3 pages) “high concept” treatment of the book, covering things like:

What is it that makes the story special?
(A tender near-future coming of age story featuring cannibals, the Federal Reserve Board, and 11,000 gallons of whipped cream)

Where does it fit in the current market, with specific comparisons?
(It’s like Martha Stewart meets
Men in Black
)

What else is comparable to it on the current market, and why would this book be commercial?

What’s the tone of the book?

What does the book contain, and how is it organized?

Who are you?
(A short bio, focusing on why your insight on the topic is distinctive)

The purpose of the proposal isn’t just to convince an editor to buy your book, but to give the editor some tools to convince the others sitting in the editorial meeting who are competing for those same scarce publishing slots as well as the sales force. A good proposal lays the groundwork for a successful book.

It also forces you to think about what the book is. In the course of writing a proposal, you need to solve organizational and structural problems that you might not otherwise have known existed.

Outlines and Plot Summaries

These are both similar, but structured a bit differently. An outline is a step-by-step look at the book, in order. It generally isn’t structured the way you learned in middle school (I, A, a, 1, etc.), but might have a paragraph or two for each chapter of the book. A plot summary is a 3–5 page treatment of the story of the book, which may jump around to give a sense of the overall narrative.

I’m a big believer in outlining, though not all writers work that way. If nothing else, when life gets in the way and you have to put a project down for six months, it’s helpful to be able to pick it up again and know where you were trying to go with it, rather than having to start from scratch.

One important thing to remember as a writer, is that the outline works for you, not the other way around. Outlines change and evolve as you’re writing. A character who seeemd really minor will force her way, kicking and screaming, into a much bigger role in the plot. A character who seemed really interesting will turn out to be hideously boring to write, and you’ll kill him off after three chapters. Just modify the outline with each change. The outline gives you a sense of where you have to foreshadow and introduce certain elements into the story and what end you’re working toward, but it’s not something you need to follow slavishly.

Sample Chapters

These should be several consecutive chapters from the beginning of the book. Use common sense depending on the lengths of your chapters. The average chapters are 15–20 pages, meaning the publisher wants about a 50-page sample of your work if they ask for three chapters. If your chapters are 2 pages long, include more. If your chapters are 150 pages long, include fewer.

One last piece of advice, once again quoting from SFF.net’s Yog:

The only word you absolutely, positively have to spell right every single time is the editor’s name.

If you’d like more details on any aspect of how to submit manuscripts, a great place to start is the SFWA page of Articles on Writing (www.sfwa.org/writing/).

* * * *

An earlier version of this essay was published on DailyKos on July 28, 2006. The original essay, along with other publishing-related essays, is archived at www.swordsmith.com/essays.html